Remember That Time Rhett Akins and Blake Shelton Put a Live Alligator in Troy Gentry’s Bed?
In early February, country stars gathered at the Grand Ole Opry for the second annual C'Ya on the Flipside Concert, an event benefiting the Troy Gentry Foundation. The circumstances were somber: The tribute concert remembered the life of Montgomery Gentry's Troy Gentry, who died in a helicopter crash in 2017.
The evening was full of emotional moments, but that doesn't mean that sadness and grief over Gentry's death dominated the event; in fact, the performers spent time honoring their friends fun-loving -- and downright wacky -- side, too. Before the show kicked off, singer-songwriter Rhett Akins revealed to The Boot that Gentry had a pretty epic history with pranks, both as the prankster and the butt of the joke.
"We hunted together. We turkey hunted a lot," Akins recounted. "One of my best memories is Troy didn't get up one morning to go hunting, he slept in, and Blake Shelton and I caught, like, a two and a half-foot alligator that morning in the creek.
"He was like, 'You wanna go wake Troy up real quick?' So Blake and I snuck on his bus and laid a gator in his bed beside him. We tapped him on the shoulder, like, 'Wake up, man,' and there's a gator -- alive," Akins goes on to say. "We did tape the gator's mouth shut. We should've taped Troy's mouth shut! He screamed so loud."
Gentry was pretty angry about the prank, but that wasn't the only consequence Shelton and Akins had to face. "Somehow the game warden found out we had this gator, and he was waiting on us outside the bus. We had to promptly return the alligator to where we found it," he says.
As it turns out, when it came to pranks, Gentry could give as good as he got. On another occasion, Akins says he and the singer -- along with Gentry's bandmate Eddie Montgomery -- found an opportunity to play a trick on country star Daryle Singletary while he was in the middle of a show.
"[We] were standing by the side of the stage watching Daryle singing, and for some reason there was a big pile of biscuits laying by the side of the stage," Akins continues. "We said, 'You wanna throw these at Daryle, or you wanna eat these?' And we threw 'em."
Singletary was in the middle of performing his 1995 hit, "I Let Her Lie." "Daryle's out there singing his butt off and getting whopped on the side of the cowboy hat with biscuits every 30 seconds," Akins recalls. "Like, "I let her lie ..." POOF! Biscuit coming across the cheek."
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