Sitting on a couch in his family’s store with a barbecue taking place in the yard, William Michael Morgan was all the way back home.

Cowboy hat on his head, boots on his feet and a polished belt buckle at his waist, Morgan was completely at ease following a whirlwind year that took him to 49 of the 50 states and launched his career in country music.

“Just being here with family, having a good time and seeing family and friends and just catching. There is just something that happens when you cross over that county line or that state line heading back home,” Morgan said of returning home. “There is just something about it.”

Morgan returned to his roots with a performance as the headliner at RiverFest in downtown Vicksburg Saturday, his first performance at the festival since 2009 and his first time as the headliner.

After signing a record deal at 19, Morgan made the move to Nashville. It would take a few years of hard work writing and finding his sound, but Morgan’s life and career changed forever with the release of his debut single “I Met a Girl,” which reached No. 1 on the country airplay charts in October 2016.

“It was unreal,” Morgan said of hearing his song on the radio for the first time. “I heard it on satellite radio for the first time. That really is where I started. They gave me my first shot Sirius XM The Highway, Stormy and them. I owe a lot of my career to them.

“It (“I Met a Girl”) is still changing my life. It seems like every day something else happens because of it. It was a big song for us. I think it was the most played song of 2016, which is crazy and blows my mind to have an opportunity like that.”

Building to that moment had been a journey for Morgan that started at 12 when he first began to play. At 14, he formed a band with a “bunch of cats that were not too far from Vicksburg” and began playing gigs.

As a minor, he wasn’t allowed to play everywhere, but anywhere they’d let them play, Morgan and his band would go.

“Any gig that would take us, any bar room that would let me in at the time,” he said of where he launched his career. “I was only 14 or 15. At that time, I started going back and forth to Nashville. I had made some good contacts up there and had my management already intact. I got lucky and blessed and was in the right place at the right time with the right people around.”

While working on his debut album “Vinyl,” which came out in late 2016, Morgan and his team found the song that would change his life and launch his career in country music. “I Met a Girl” was co-written by Sam Hunt, Shane McAnally and Trevor Rosen of Old Dominon, and Morgan said he fell in love with it as soon as he heard it.

“It was cool and Sam had his deal on it. It was completly different. I fell in love with the cadence and the lyric message and went in and made it our own,” he said. “We are doing country music and at a time when it was a lot of songs about tan legs, tailgates and bonfires, we put out a song about love and holding girls up on a higher pedastool. We got a little backlash for that, but we loved the song and we have a great team around us.”

Next came appearances on the “Today Show” and a tour opening for Justin Moore and Lee Brice that took him around the country.

“We went from nobody knowing who I was and not really caring, to a couple knowing who I was now,” Morgan said. “That is crazy still to me. I hear people tell stories about how they came to a show. The biggest thing to me is how songs touch people. They will say ‘I love that song’ or ‘that was my wedding song.’ That is the coolest thing to me, hearing people’s stories involving my music.”

With experience on the road and a No. 1 song to his credit, now comes the hard part — Act 2. Morgan and his producers are in the studio writing and working on a second album they hope will recapture the success of “Vinyl” and its two singles — “I Met a Girl” and “Missing,” which also made it into the top 30.

His last album included two songs he wrote himself, but experience with life, love and more has turned into songs and about half of the songs on his next album will be his own, he said.

“I feel like I have grown so much,” he said. “There is a lot more to talk about that I have done and seen in life and around the world and the states. We have been through some stuff the last few years. Good, bad, it has been a great rollercoaster. Anything that happens in life, whether it is someone in my family talking about a story or somebody at the bar talking about something,” Morgan said of what he writes about.

The sound will be about the same and, “just as good, just as country and just as much steel guitar,” he said, but just like with “I Met a Girl” he is looking for that perfect song to launch the next stage of his career. He said his goal is to have a new single out in the next three to four months.

“You could listen to 500, 600, 700 songs in a week and find one that is worth listening to again,” Morgan said. “All the songs we get are really great songs. It is just something that takes it to the next level. It is hard to find that magical song. That career song. The one you bet it all on. It is hard to find ‘I Met a Girl.’”