An emotional Wyatt Flores, who has been open about his own struggles with mental health on and off the stage over the past year, performed an unreleased song on the topic Wednesday night at the Grand Ole Opry, dedicating it to his fans and acknowledging the late Aubreigh Wyatt.
Playing the Opry for the second time during his quick rise to country-music prominence, the 23-year-old Flores sang “Please Don’t Go” — his 2022 viral hit that led to nearly all the success he has had since — for the second tune in his four-song set. “Please Don’t Go” is written as a plea to a loved one not to take their life.
Flores then played a song called “Oh, Susannah,” which has not been released on any platform thus far, including Half Life, the eight-song EP he dropped in April. In the lyrics, the narrator is speaking to an unnamed person who has presumably taken their life. The refrain of the chorus ends with, “Thought I was a savior/but I was a fool on drunken behavior. Why did I believe, that I could save you, darling/Without killing me?”
Aubreigh Wyatt was a 13-year-old girl in southern Mississippi who died in the late summer of 2023. Her death — which occurred shortly after Flores’s maternal grandfather took his life while Flores was on tour — was ruled a suicide by medical examiners. One of the last posts on a TikTok account in Aubreigh Wyatt’s name featured her singing along to “Please Don’t Go.” In recent weeks, a series of viral social media posts dedicated to her have also resurfaced with Flores’s song.
Before the refrain in “Oh, Susannah,” Flores stopped playing and — fighting back tears — addressed the crowd at the Opry House.
“I’ve been getting tagged in a lot of things, and I’ve been struggling with how to bring this up,” Flores said from the stage. “I usually don’t want to bring it up, but for the amount of people that keep asking me… I’ll bring it up. Aubreigh Wyatt was a young girl who committed suicide last year. And I remember being in Colorado in October when I seen a TikTok of her mom talking about it, and they said that she liked my music. I sent my condolences. Now, there’s a whole bunch of stuff popping back up over the entire thing because she was bullied. They keep asking me to do something about it…because the last video she had posted on TikTok was her singing, ‘Please Don’t Go.’
“I had to step away from music earlier this year, because of a lot of different reasons,” he continued. “One of those was feeling the weight of the world from trying to help people but not feeling like I was. As cool as it is that I get to do this…and the music that I portray, it gets to save lives. But, there’s also the dark side of it, where you don’t know if that song just kept them on Earth just a couple of days longer.
“I did not write that song, ‘Please Don’t Go,’ for everybody out there in the world. I wrote it because of the situation that I was in with a girl that I loved. But, this song is for y’all. ‘Oh, Susannah’ is you. I wrote this for you. And I’m sorry.”
The crowd broke into applause and followed it with a standing ovation when Flores left the stage.
Flores is four months removed from a self-imposed mental health break that took him off the road and out of the studio for four weeks. In February, he broke down in tears onstage during a show in Kansas City, Missouri, telling the crowd his dreams were coming true but he felt completely numb. In the time between his grandfather’s death and his break, he often spoke from the stage about suicide and the importance of seeking help. In addition to “Please Don’t Go,” Flores released a cover of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” part of the Half Life EP.
The native Oklahoman was named to the 2024 class of Opry NextStage. His performance on Wednesday night followed a four-song set by 49 Winchester, fellow members of the Opry NextStage class whom Flores cites as one of the biggest influences of his career. On August 16, Flores and 49 Winchester will co-headline a show at Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels, Texas.