Jason Eady brought his blend of Delta blues and Red Dirt country to Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack in Little Rock, Ark., on Tuesday, June 16, for his first performance in Arkansas in more than a decade, according to him.

Eady has been a singer-songwriter I’ve been paying attention to since his 2017 self-titled album, when I first heard his song “Barabbas,” about the murderer who was pardoned in place of Jesus of Nazareth. That song featured at No. 6 on this website’s list of the Best Americana and Country Music songs of 2017.

I’ve paid attention to his releases since then, finding particular favorites in terrific story songs like “French Summer Sun,” off 2021’s To the Passage of Time, which ranked No. 10 on this site’s end-of-year list.

Eady’s 2023 album, Mississippi, is where he was at his best, in my opinion, as he mingled that great Red Dirt country songwriting with the music of the Delta South, of his home state that shares the album’s name. Songs like “Once Upon a Time in New Orleans,” which ranked No. 82 on my yearly list (admittedly low), and “Burn It Down,” No. 10 on the yearly list.

Eady opened his show at Stickyz on Tuesday night with the terrific one-two punch of “Once Upon a Time in New Orleans” and “Burn It Down,” which wound up being my two favorite performances of the set. He played five of the 10 tracks from Mississippi at the show on Tuesday, with backing from the talented Midnight River Choir, including “Way Down in Mississippi” and “Wayside.”

Eady’s latest album, Tulsa Turnaround, which was released on June 5, is another terrific effort from the singer-songwriter and evident chameleon of musical sounds, as he melds the Delta sound of his previous album with the Tulsa Sound, popularized by artists such as J.J. Cale and Leon Russell in the ‘70s. The album’s title track, the first from the new album he performed on Tuesday night, is already high on my list of favorite Americana or Country music songs of the year. “Tulsa Turnaround” is a tribute to great musicians of Tulsa’s past, as well as its musical institutions, such as Cain’s Ballroom and Mercury Lounge.

Among the other great performances from Tulsa Turnaround during Eady’s set were “Angelene,” “Work No More,” “You Make It Easy,” “Mean Spirits,” a good tune for today’s world, and “Mississippi Blues Man,” a tribute to the late J.C. Cannon, an old blues picker who taught Eady how to play.

Eady performed seven of the new album’s 11 tracks on Tuesday night. It’s an album you should definitely check out and will probably wind up as one of the best of the year in the Americana and country genres.

Among the other memorable performances from Eady’s set were “Why I Left Atlanta,” from 2017’s self-titled album, “I Lost My Mind in Carolina, off 2018’s I Travel On, and “Back to Jackson,” from 2007’s Wild Eyed Serenade, the oldest song from his repertoire he performed at Stickyz.

Eady finished the night off with one more track from Tulsa Turnaround, with “Stay Up or Get Down,” a song he told the audience that he set out to write in the style of Cale. I think he succeeded.

Addison Johnson, a country singer-songwriter originally from North Carolina and based out of Nashville, opened the night at Stickyz, and he’s a performer you must look out for. He performed a handful of tracks off his upcoming album, The State I’m In, which releases on June 26, and songs like the title track and “Flames” are proof that it’s going to be a must-listen.

Jason Boland and the Stragglers at The Revolution Room in Little Rock, Ark. has become almost an annual tradition for me – I’ve seen the group many times at the venue (and a few times elsewhere). The band’s most recent Rev Room stop was Saturday, June 13, after being delayed a month following the death of Boland’s bulldog, Gary. One of the first things I noticed upon the band taking the stage on Saturday night was that Boland has Gary’s name tattooed on his knuckles.

Boland and the Stragglers opened their Saturday night show with “Take Me Back to Austin,” one of the highlights off the band’s latest album, The Last Kings of Babylon, which came out in March of 2025.

The band would play four songs from that album throughout the night, with “Drive,” “One Law at a Time,” and “Irish Goodbye,” which came during the encore, also on the setlist.

When you go to a Jason Boland and the Stragglers show, you know you’re going to get a lot of the fan-favorites you’ll always hear, but that’s A-OK because you love them so much. You honestly probably wouldn’t want to go to a Stragglers show that didn’t include songs such as “Pearl Snaps,” “Comal County Blue,” “Dark & Dirty Mile,” “Gallo del Cielo” and “Somewhere Down in Texas,” which Boland actually joked he’d recently left off a set by accident and polled the audience if it was a song they needed to hear, which was a resounding yes.  

You can always count on Boland to throw in some beloved stuff that you may have heard live before, but not always. On Saturday night, my favorite example of this was “Obsessed,” off the band’s 2011 album, Rancho Alto, which was my introduction to the group. He also performed the rocker “Pushing Luck” off that record on Saturday night.

Stragglers shows always seem to ramp up in intensity as they go on, with so many of the fan-favorites coming in the second half of the show. The band will go effortlessly from “Pearl Snaps” to “Somewhere Down in Texas” to “Gallo del Cielo” and just keep things rolling with the best of their best through the end of the show.

My favorite moment of Saturday’s show was unexpected, mostly because I could see the setlist on the stage from my vantage point in front of it, and this wasn’t on it. Following a raucous performance of “Fuck, Fight, and Rodeo,” off 2015’s excellent Squelch, Boland turned to the band and informed them he was adding a song, which turned out to be Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest,” off The Boss’s 1987 album Tunnel of Love, which is one of his greatest deep cuts. It might be my favorite cover I’ve ever seen live from any artist I’ve ever seen.

The band’s encore began with the aforementioned “Irish Goodbye,” before going into “The Bourbon Legend,” another frequent Stragglers tune, before wrapping up with “Outlaw Band,” which I have on at least one occasion in a review called the greatest set ender I’ve ever heard. It’s just one of those performances that is electric every time you hear it, with its wonderful lyrics, from Bob Childers, Randy Crouch and Layle Stagner, about a group of loners who form a band out of their mutual love of music, and its wonderful musicianship, which includes mesmerizing fiddle and mandolin numbers, currently played by Nick Gedra.  

I never tire of seeing the Stragglers live, but there was one little difference this time, and I have to assume it's on the part of The Rev Room. I haven’t been to the venue, one of my favorites, in nearly a year, but the sound on the vocals was harder to hear on Saturday night than I’ve ever experienced in more than 20 shows over the last 15 years of attending concerts there. Hopefully, it was just an off night for the sound system.