Darius Rucker Opens Up About Split From Ex-Wife: ‘She Was Awesome, It Was All Me’

Darius Rucker opens up about the ending of his decades-long marriage to Beth Leonard in an upcoming interview on Tamron Hall.

In an exclusive clip from the interview promoting his new memoir Life’s Too Short, Rucker discussed how Leonard convinced him to halt his hard-partying ways, but also discussed the dissolution of the couple’s marriage. Rucker and Leonard were wed in 2000 and announced their split in 2020.

“She saved my life. I have so much love and respect for her,” Rucker said during the interview. “The night she just said to me, ‘It’s time to quit,’ in her very colorful way, I realized it was time to quit. That day, I called the band, I got my own bus, I said, ‘This is over for me.’ It was over because I respected her and I respected my family. I just wanted to be a better person.”

He also said that writing about the ending of the couple’s marriage was hard, “because to realize how awful I was as a husband was hard to write. To realize she did everything she could. She’s so wonderful, she’s still an amazing human, amazing person. I love her so much. But I was just, a rockstar, and I lived that life.”

He went on to add, “I wanted to tell the truth, but sometimes the truth sucks. It sucks for me and in writing about her, I just wanted the world to know that it was all me. She was awesome. It was all me.”

In his memoir, Rucker details his childhood growing up in South Carolina and how he dealt with the deaths of his older brother and his mother early in his life. Elsewhere in the book, he wrote about his estranged relationship with his late father, chronicled the rise of Hootie & the Blowfish and detailed his journey to making country music as a solo artist.

Rucker’s Life’s Too Short: A Memoir released May 28 via Dey Street Books.

Rucker’s full interview airs on Tamron Hall Thursday, June 6, check local listings on the show’s website. Watch the clip of Rucker’s interview below: