In the background of his TikTok post, Travis added an audio clip of his song, “Angels,” which was a single off his 2004 album, Passing Through. One of country music’s classic odes to mothers everywhere, “Angels” tells the story of a group of friends who, in the midst of a conversation about all the misfortune and evil in the world, begin to doubt the existence of angels — that is, until they remember their mothers’ unconditional love.
Travis and his wife married in 2015, two years after a devastating stroke left him unable to speak or sing. At the time of his stroke, the singer had a long road to recovery ahead of him — and that’s a road that the couple continue to walk together today.
Mary has two children from a previous marriage, a daughter named Cavenaugh and a son named Raleigh. Despite growing up in a big family, Travis never had kids of his own, though that was circumstantial and not by choice, the singer and his wife told People in 2020. His often-difficult upbringing and a complicated relationship with his first wife, Lib Hatcher — who was 16 years his senior — both contributed to why Travis never ultimately became a parent, they explained.
Still, Mary says that Travis has always been a natural when it comes to entertaining kids.
“Children are very special to Randy and he’s always had a very — you know, some people are magnetic toward children and animals, and Randy was always that charismatic,” she says. “If a fan had a crying baby, he would take that crying baby and put it on his lap, and maybe it was just that honey voice of his, that the baby would just look at him and be quiet.”
As he continues to recover from his stroke, Travis hasn’t been able to spend much time onstage or in the studio, though he has been an avid country music audience member over the past couple of years, supporting up and coming superstars such as Kane Brown. He also found a brand-new way to spread joy and connect to his fans when he joined TikTok, where he’s been duetting and interacting with fans ever since.