MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — One of Milledgeville’s own has reached the pinnacle of the country music world.

For the past five years, Thomas Archer, the Milledgeville native and Georgia College graduate, has been slowly but surely making his way in country music’s mecca, otherwise known as Nashville, Tenn.

Between collaborating with other artists, singing a publishing deal with BMG-CHRYSALIS Records, and writing songs at a near-breakneck pace, Archer’s hard work and perseverance have finally paid off in a big way: “Hurricane,” the song that currently sits at No. 1 on the Mediabase County Music Chart and has helped catapult the young career of Asheville singer-songwriter Luke Combs, was co-written by Combs with Archer. The single, which is expected to lock in at No. 1 this weekend after two years on the country charts, represents the biggest commercial success to date for either artist, and has provided the Milledgeville native with a coming out party of sorts at country music’s highest peak.

“With ‘Hurricane’, I was probably one year into my first publishing deal when a buddy showed me Luke Combs,” said Archer of his friend Taylor Phillips. “I said, ‘Hey, that guy’s got a great voice, let’s get with him and try to write something’. I’d never written with the guy that showed me the stuff, but the three of us got together for the first time and that’s the day we wrote ‘Hurricane’.”

For several weeks now, ‘Hurricane’ has been inching its way up the charts in a steady climb to No. 1. As of Friday, the single held a slight edge over Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” keeping its co-writers in anticipation of the final weekly ranking on Saturday. While the song’s catchy hook and story of an unexpected meeting with a lost love might have pegged it as a hit as soon as it was written, Archer has been in Nashville long enough to know how quickly things can change. As every ‘spin’, or play on the radio, has inched Archer and his collaborators closer to widespread fame and appeal, the Milledgeville songwriter has been taken aback at his work’s success.

“Luke surprised us with gold plaques the other day for [the single] selling 500,000 copies,” said Archer. “It was supposed to be a surprise but we kind of knew it because you can look it up and do the conversions from streams to sales. I called my co-writer and said ‘Look, we’re probably near platinum right now’, so we were overdue for at least the gold plaque, but it’s still a surprise … When you’re holding that plaque for the first time, for us it was like ‘We might actually have a chance’.”

Although Archer’s talent is as apparent to Nashville insiders as it was to locals when he started playing Milledgeville more than 10 years ago (another of his co-writes, Walker Hayes’ ‘You Broke Up With Me’, made an appearance on Billboard’s Top 50 Country chart last week), ‘Hurricane’s success has been a long time coming for Archer. When the songwriter graduated from Georgia College in 2012, a trip to Nashville on the advice of a friend spurred Archer to turn his songwriting into a profession.

“I knew that I didn’t want to do accounting, but that’s what my degree was in when I graduated from Georgia College,” he said. “At the time I graduated, [my] band was rolling , and financially we were in pretty good shape, so my only other option was a cubicle job with my buddies in Atlanta or at one of the mines in Sandersville. A buddy talked me into going to visit Nashville the day after we graduated, so we went up, had a blast, and ended up signing a lease. I said ‘Ok, I’m gonna give this a couple years to try and see if it works.”

Ever since that day, Archer has stayed afloat and then some in Nashville’s fast-moving musical current. Since moving to the Music City, Archer has written songs at a rate of more than 100 every year. He describes seeing other stars like Luke Bryan, who hails from Leesburg and has performed in Milledgeville on multiple occasions, getting coffee in his company’s record studio as normally as one might run into a friend at the post office, although he admits the shock of standing next to Taylor Swift at a party hasn’t quite worn off. Although Archer can draw encouragement from his biggest chart success to date, there’s no room for complacency — in the crowded world of Nashville songwriting, the follow-up to a hit single is just as important as the hit itself. Even if Archer never again equals the success of his expected No. 1 though, the Milledgeville songwriter has reached a summit that most performers can only hope to achieve, and stands in a unique position to offer his advice to young musicians in his hometown and across the world.

“There’s a difference between being great back home and being great up here — it’s stiff competition,” said Archer. “I think the most important thing is to stick with it, move to the appropriate city [for the genre], and have skin like leather. You’re going to be told ‘No’ 200 times to one ‘yes’ … you just have to let it roll off your back like water and keep your head down and keep digging.”