Cody Johnson and his wife, Brandi Johnson, welcomed their third child and first son in October, naming their little boy Jaycee. During a recent appearance on Audacy’s Katie & Company, Johnson revealed how he and Brandi decided on their son’s name, revealing that it actually had a lot to do with the family’s ranch.
Johnson explained that when he initially set up his limited liability company for his ranch, he decided on the name Johnson Land and Cattle. “A proper brand to go on a cow or a horse is just J Bar C,” he said, telling Katie that after he had registered the brand and branded all of his cattle and horses, the state of Texas informed them that the name was already in use.
“It hadn’t been in use since 1986,” Johnson said. “We tried to buy the rights from the family, and they wouldn’t sell it.” His business manager suggested that Johnson use his nickname, CoJo, as part of the ranch’s name, because “nobody’s going to have that,” so they chose CoJo Land and Cattle for Cody Johnson’s LLC.
“So that is our blanket LLC that owns, we just kept it the J Bar C Ranch,” he said, and it was that J Bar C that inspired Jaycee’s name. “Well, people that don’t know how to read a cattle brand just say the JC Ranch. And so when we found out we were having a boy, it was like, J-A-Y-C-E-E, like that’s little Jaycee.”
Johnson is a former bull rider and spent five years developing his property, which is a 350-acre working ranch. He has cattle and horses on the ranch and told Katie that he currently has a herd of Charolais cows bred with Wagyu bulls, whose beef will go to Johnson’s friend Chef Austin Simmons’ new Houston restaurant, Charolais.
When asked about how his son is doing, the Texas native replied that Jaycee does what most infants do and “cries and poops and sleeps a lot.”
“He’s fun, though, man. He smiles a lot. He giggles,” Johnson added, sharing that parenting his little boy is different for him than when his two daughters, Clara Mae and Cori, were young.
“It’s really different because with my girls, it was always, they were very snuggly with Dad and, ‘Oh, Daddy’s beautiful little girl,’” the “Dirt Cheap” singer recalled. “Him, the rougher I am with him, the more he laughs. I can grab him by the feet and scare him, and he giggles and smiles.”
Johnson and Brandi welcomed Clara Mae in 2015 and Cori two years later, but the country star said the eight-year break between Cori and Jaycee’s arrivals left him a little rusty on parenting a newborn.
“It was just crazy because when we had Clara in 2015, it was like, ‘That’s your first child, so you’re all in,’” he explained. “And then two years later we have Cori, and it’s like, ‘I just did all this. This was easy.’ When you skip eight years and have a baby, I was so out of practice. I told my wife, I was like, ‘Look, nothing about me comes equipped with instant maternal instincts. Help me.’”
