Old Crow Medicine Show brought its incredible musicianship and showmanship to The Hall in Little Rock, Ark., on Saturday, September 27, for one of the most energetic performances I’ve ever seen from any act.
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I’ve seen O.C.M.S. twice before at a makeshift outdoor stage in front of Little Rock’s Clinton Presidential Center during the sweltering summer, but this indoor show at The Hall was the group at the best I’ve seen them.

O.C.M.S. can pretty much do it all musically, and they proved that much on Saturday night with their usual brand of alternative country, which mixes traditional country sounds with folk and bluegrass music. In addition, they performed gospel numbers, old-timey blues standards, and even some soul-funk in covering Sly & the Family Stone’s 1968 hit “Everyday People.” And the band members do all of this while switching off between instruments and vocals – every single band member played took at least one song on vocals on Saturday night, and also performed multiple instruments during the show. Even the band’s stage tech, Tyler Nichols, played accordion on multiple songs, while keeping the instruments tuned and stringed for the rest of the band – he was also an incredibly entertaining baton twirler during one performance.

Ketch Secor, the band’s frontman and its last original member (though bassist Morgan Jahnig has been with the group since its first studio album in 2004), is the engine behind the band, leading the way front and center on the stage and taking lead vocals on the majority of the songs, though he’s sharing the load more these days than I remember in the past.

Jahnig got the crowd pumped with a performance of “Humdinger,” off the band’s 2008 album Tennessee Pusher, which was written and originally performed by band member Kevin Hayes. It’s nice to see that some of the tunes on which Secor isn’t the main vocalist have remained within the band when band members have left throughout the years.

Cory Younts, who’s from Little Rock, takes vocal lead on most songs of anybody in the group that isn’t Secor, and does so admirably with performances such as “Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise,” which flowed smoothly into a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s rock & roll classic “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Younts played keyboards, banjo, drums, harmonica and mandolin during the show.

Mike Harris, the band’s lead guitarist, who also dabbled on banjo during the show, took lead on the gospel number “Take ‘Em Away,” which was originally a lead vocal for former band member Critter Fuqua.

Chance McCoy returned to the band this year after a five-plus year hiatus, and entertained the crowd on acoustic guitar, fiddle and banjo. And, PJ George, the newest member of O.C.M.S. show who joined in 2023, was the band’s primary drummer, but also played accordion, fiddle and guitar throughout the show and took lead vocals on some song or another I can’t remember off the top of my head, because there was that much mix-matching on stage on Saturday night.

O.C.M.S. is so raucous that I was concerned they wouldn’t play some of my favorite songs of theirs during the show, which are slower, and hadn’t been on recent setlists, so I was incredibly surprised and gratefully so when they performed two of my favorites in “Caroline,” off Tennessee Pusher, and “Levi,” off 2012’s Carry Me Back. Secor didn’t speak a whole lot between songs but did tell the story of how “Levi” came about when he heard about a soldier, Leevi Barbard, who fought and died in Iraq and had his favorite song, the band’s “Wagon Wheel,” played at his funeral.

The group split its set between original numbers and covers that ranged from not all that surprising like Bob Wills/Willie Nelson’s “Stay A Little Longer” and Alabama’s “Dixieland Delight,” which the band had recorded for a tribute album some years back, to pretty surprising like the previously mentioned “Everyday People” and The Bellamy Brothers’ ‘80s country hit “Redneck Girl.”

Secor, who released his first solo album – Story The Crow Told Me – in July, got the chance to show off one of his solo numbers with the excellent “Old Man River,” which certainly feels at home at an O.C.M.S. show.

The band finished their set with the tune that has become the one most synonymous with them – 2004’s “Wagon Wheel,” which was a cult favorite when they recorded it and gained a new, more known life when country singer Darius Rucker took it to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart in 2013.

The band returned to the stage for an epic three-song encore that began with Younts taking the lead on “Down Home Girl,” while Secor took his turn behind the keys for the first time during the evening. Younts cracked up the crowd with his best Sabrina Carpenter impression with risqué dance moves during the performance.

Following “Down Home Girl,” the group excited everybody in attendance with a terrific sing-along of The Band’s classic “The Weight,” in which nearly every member of the band took a verse on vocals. It instantly became one of my all-time favorite live covers I’ve seen.

The band finished the evening with the old Hank Williams gospel classic, “I Saw the Light,” which also turned into a giant sing-along with the crowd.

If you’ve never had a chance to see Old Crow Medicine Show live, I implore you to find tickets when they are near your town – you simply won’t regret it.

Singer-songwriter Emily Fenton opened the show with about a 20–25-minute set featuring tunes from her 2023 album Hello, from Planet Earth, which included cute numbers like “Favorite Song” and “Sunny Saturday,” as well as an ode to Arkansas (“Down in Arkansas”) and weed smoking (“Roaches”).

by Julian Spivey
Farm Aid 40, the annual music festival benefiting America’s farmers, took place at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minn., on Saturday, Sept. 20.

​Due to my life schedule, I only got to see the primetime portion of the event, featuring the Farm Aid board members: Margo Price, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Willie Nelson (with a surprise set from Bob Dylan thrown in). That portion of the show was broadcast on CNN, which unfortunately included commercial interruptions during some of the performances.

Here were my favorite performances from Farm Aid 40 …
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10. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” by Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan’s set was pretty unintelligible, which seems to be a common criticism of his concerts over the last many years. Hiding behind his piano – he doesn’t seem to ever play guitar anymore – and wearing a black hoodie that further disguises him, it’s almost like he doesn’t want to be doing this anymore but doesn’t seem to have anything else to do but this. His final song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” one of my favorites of his career, is my choice for his best of the night with a piano-driven, jazzy version of the song – which was originally a country-folk number – giving a different take on it than what we’re used to.

9. “Small Town” by John Mellencamp
I’ve seen John Mellencamp live in concert within the last two years, and he sounded a little rougher on Saturday night at Farm Aid than he was last time I saw him in person. Typically, other than Willie Nelson, he’s the Farm Aid artist most willing to perform “the hits” at the festival, making his set one of the best and most anticipated of the evening – that was no different this year – it just didn’t sound as good as in recent years. “Small Town,” Mellencamp’s 1985 top-10 hit, is the perfect song for a benefit show for farmers, the bedrock of so many small towns across this nation.
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8. “Southern Man” by Neil Young
Neil Young, who has often given my least favorite set at Farm Aid over the last few years with sets leaning away from his hits, definitely had something to say this year with everything going on in this country. Leave it to the Canadian to be the most honest about life in the U.S.A. His pointed 1970 song “Southern Man” was one of many highlights of his set, especially with the much-needed line many today should listen to: “don’t forget what your good book said.”

7. “S.O.B.” by Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats set came before the primetime portion of the evening, so this – my favorite song of theirs – was the only one I had the pleasure of seeing. CNN aired a couple of performances from earlier in the day, while waiting for the primetime portion to get going, and this was one of them. It’s not the most raucous performance I’ve seen of “S.O.B.” by the band – I’ll never forget the awesomeness of their TV debut on “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” – but it’s always a fun song, nonetheless.

6. “Ants Marching” by Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds
I thought about going with “Grey Street” for my Dave Matthews representative on this list, as I really dug the performance of a song that’s probably well-known to loyal Matthews fans, but one I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past. But the charm of “Ants Marching,” Dave Matthews Band’s 1995 song that’s one of the biggest of his career, always captures me. Matthews and Tim Reynolds, showing off their guitar skills with great accompaniment from violinist Jake Simpson, was one of the performances during the evening that would’ve had me shaking it down had I been in person at the event.

5. “Big Crime” by Neil Young
Neil Young began his Farm Aid set on Saturday night with his newest song, “Big Crime,” a protest song about President Donald Trump and his recent “crackdown” on crime in Washington, D.C., in which he called in the National Guard against his own citizens. “Big Crime” includes such lyrics as: “Don’t need no fascist rules/don’t want no fascist schools/don’t want soldiers walking on our streets/got big crime in D.C. at the White House,” as well as “No more great again/no more great again/got big crime in D.C. at the White House.” It was nice to see somebody fighting back.  

4. “Rain on the Scarecrow” by John Mellencamp
If there was ever a theme for Farm Aid, I think it would be John Mellencamp’s 1985 song “Rain on the Scarecrow,” which takes on the farm crisis of the ‘80s that led to the initial Farm Aid, and in many ways has never relented in this country. “Rain on the scarecrow/blood on the plow” is such an evocative phrase, and “this land fed a nation, this land made me proud” is the perfect encapsulation of how important farming is and why we should care.  

3. “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” by Margo Price
Margo Price’s “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” is a great theme for anyone, including farmers, who are being brought down by those in charge in this country. She performed the song earlier in the week on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” before a bunch of bastards got together and removed him from television for speech that was idiotically deemed offensive. The key line in the song for me is: “don’t sell your heart to no businessman/he’ll sell it back next time around,” something I think both musicians and farmers can identify with.

2. “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young
There was no performance at Farm Aid 40 that energized me more on Saturday night from my couch at home than Neil Young’s 1989 anthem “Rockin’ in the Free World,” especially coming directly after his pointed protest toward President Donald Trump with “Big Crime.” The government can continue its crackdown on all sorts of things, including free speech, but I’m confident we’ll keep on rockin’ in the free world well into the future.

1. “Last Leaf” by Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson at 92 years old is still playing the headlining and longest set of any of the iconic artists at Farm Aid. There would be no Farm Aid without Nelson, and as the years go by, it’s unfortunately more and more likely each passing Farm Aid will be his last. This is why I found “Last Leaf” to be the best, and certainly the most touching performance of the evening. Nelson’s 2024 album Last Leaf on the Tree touched on mortality more than any other record in his career, and on Saturday night he performed the Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan written “Last Leaf.” The most touching line was: “I’ll be here through eternity/if you wanna know how long/if they cut down this tree/I’ll show up in a song.” It felt like Nelson acknowledging it might be his final Farm Aid. It also let us in on what we already knew … Nelson’s body of work will live on long after he’s gone.
 
If you would like to donate to a worthy cause, please visit farmaid.org.

Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder brought some good old-fashioned bluegrass music to the Pope County Fair in Russellville, Ark., on Saturday, September 13.

One of the most accomplished and award-winning musicians in the history of both bluegrass and country music, Skaggs has been a professional musician since his teenage years and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, and the Musicians Hall of Fame.

Kudos to the organizers of the Pope County Fair for getting such an esteemed musician out to their annual event. Having seen country hitmakers Shenandoah at the event two years ago, I can certainly say these organizers do the finest job of any local county fair in Arkansas when it comes to delivering entertainment.

It was mostly a bluegrass affair on Saturday night, with Skaggs and his incredibly talented band of musicians all showing off their prowess on their respective instruments. Skaggs took turns on mandolin, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and fiddle throughout the 90-minute set.

Skaggs mentioned the evening was the birthday of one of his mentors and influences, Bill Monroe, multiple times throughout the night, though the birthday of the “Father of Bluegrass” was actually four days prior. Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder performed multiple Monroe songs during the set, with Mike Rogers taking vocals on his most remembered standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and Skaggs taking lead on “Used to Be.”

Among the group’s own bluegrass numbers played for the crowd at the Pope County Fair were “Lost and I’ll Never Find”, “Blue Ridge Mountain Home”, and a few instrumentals here and there, I’m not sure of the titles for.

When it came time for Skaggs to play some of the biggest country hits of his career, the audience, which was bigger than I expected for the beginning of the show, coinciding with the end of the Arkansas Razorbacks football game, had the biggest reception.

He performed five of his 11 career No. 1 hits on Saturday night, beginning with “Heartbroke,” from 1982, about halfway through his set. This led directly into 1984’s No.1 hit “Honey (Open That Door).”
Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder got a few couples in the crowd up to two-step during his performance of “I Wouldn’t Change You If I Could,” a No. 1 from 1982’s Highways and Heartaches.

My all-time favorite Skaggs song, and the highlight of Saturday’s set for me personally, was his 1983 No. 1 hit “Highway 40 Blues,” which I believe to be one of the 100 greatest country songs ever recorded.

There was one more tribute to Monroe during the evening with Skaggs’s 1984 No. 1 “Uncle Pen,” one originally written and recorded by Monroe, that appeared on Skaggs’s Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown.
Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder ended their set with the gospel tune “Shepherd’s Voice,” off his 2010 gospel album Mosaic, and the bluegrass standard “Shady Grove,” which they recorded for 2001’s History of the Future. 

by Julian Spivey

Dwight Yoakam’s set at the First National Bank Arena in Jonesboro, Ark., on Friday, September 5, certainly wasn’t a typical show for the country music icon but wound up being a heroic effort by the singer.

Yoakam’s set was delayed by around 45 minutes from the point it was supposed to begin due to him being ill, according to a public address announcement made between Ashley McBryde’s opening set and what was supposed to be his headlining set.

When Yoakam and his fantastic band took the stage, they began with a cover of the old Carter Family standard “Keep on the Sunny Side,” which Yoakam cut on his most recent album, Brighter Days. He then performed his 1987 top-10 hit “Please, Please Baby,” and his excellent cover of Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister.” Things looked like they were going well, but following the performance of “Little Sister,” Yoakam announced to the crowd that he’d been suffering all day from food poisoning but was going to do his best to make it through the show, and then all of a sudden, he gingerly walked off the stage.

Given the news of food poisoning and his slow descent from the stage, I honestly thought that was going to be the end of the show for the night. But the nearly 69-year-old singer came back to the stage after about a 15-minute delay, with a chair to perform from for the remainder of the night.

If you’ve ever been to a Dwight Yoakam show, it could be hard to imagine Yoakam performing seated. He’s a true showman who’s known almost as much for his onstage leg wiggle and spins as he is for his legendary body of work. So, we didn’t get the typical Yoakam show due to his illness, but the fact that he performed a 20-song set despite having food poisoning is the kind of concert heroism I won't forget anytime soon. I had food poisoning in my mid-30s and didn’t want to get out of bed. I simply do not know how he managed to perform, sound pretty damn good, and even occasionally leave his chair to give us some of the usual Yoakam moves, though at a lesser level.

When he returned to the stage, he performed one of my all-time favorite Yoakam gems, “Streets of Bakersfield,” his 1988 No. 1 hit he did with Buck Owens, which was sort of a tribute to Owens and the Bakersfield Sound that Yoakam patterned his career after.

One of the surprises, pleasantly so, of the evening was how many Yoakam deep cuts he performed that I hadn’t previously seen live despite seeing him three times prior – among these were songs that went all the way back to his beginning nearly 40 years ago, like “I’ll Be Gone,” to stuff like “This Time,” the title track of his 1993 album, and “Blame the Vain,” the title track of his 2005 album.

It was nice to see these lesser-known tracks performed amidst his career’s biggest hits, like “Honky Tonk Man,” “Little Ways,” “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” “Guitars, Cadillacs,” and “Fast as You,” which all came in rapid succession toward the end of his set.

One of the show’s highlights was “I Sang Dixie,” Yoakam’s No. 1 hit from 1989, in which he recounted the story of its inspiration coming from an evening out at a L.A. restaurant with his visiting brother in which they saw two homeless men, a younger one and an older one, and how the older gentleman kept falling and badly injured himself on the sidewalk. He was placed into an ambulance, and Yoakam never saw him again, but the incident inspired him to fill in the pieces with fiction. Having seen Yoakam previously, he has never been one to speak much between songs, so it was a nice moment to hear him recount the story behind one of his most iconic and beloved songs. Maybe it was just a moment for him to catch his breath a bit and settle his stomach.

After rip-roaring performances of “Guitars, Cadillacs” and “Fast as You,” Yoakam left the stage, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when minutes later, he and his band returned for a fantastic cover of Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” This is usually the way Yoakam finishes his shows, but I absolutely didn’t expect an encore this night. 
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​Ashley McBryde’s opening set for Yoakam was quite an emotional one for the singer-songwriter from Waldron, Ark., as the venue sits on the campus of Arkansas State University, which is McBryde’s alma mater. The venue also serves as ASU’s basketball arena, and she had performed throughout her college tenure there as part of the ASU band.

McBryde always puts on a raucously good show with her mixture of country-rock music, which began on Friday night with a new track, “Rattlesnake Preacher,” one of her most rocking tunes to date. It was one of a few new songs she performed during the show, including “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs,” one of my favorite new releases of 2025. I hope this new stuff means a new album is close to being released.

McBryde performed many of her finest works over her 15-song set, including singles like “One Night Standards,” her first career single, “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega,” and “Light On in the Kitchen,” which is my favorite song of her most recent album, 2023’s The Devil I Know. That album’s title track also got one of the biggest responses of the night.

McBryde had a lot of friends and family in the audience and told the story of spending time at a local bridge during her college days before performing a new song, "Creosote, " which is currently unreleased.”

One surprise from McBryde’s set, especially given the location, was that she didn’t perform “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” which might be her best song and is one she became known to a larger crowd with after an emotional Grand Ole Opry performance. Looking at some recent setlists, I see it hasn’t appeared a lot lately. Maybe it’s one she’s tired of performing?

Walker Montgomery, an up-and-coming singer with country music in his blood, opened the show with great covers of ‘90s country hits and some originals that truly showed he’s a name to pay attention to going forward, especially if you like traditional-sounding country music.

Montgomery is the son of ‘90s country hitmaker John Michael Montgomery, the nephew of Eddie Montgomery from the hitmaking duo Montgomery Gentry, and the cousin of country singer Dillon Carmichael, who interestingly opened for Yoakam the last time I saw him live in Little Rock.

Montgomery got the crowd hyped early in the evening with a nice cover of Toby Keith’s classic “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” He would do the same a little later with a performance of Travis Tritt’s “T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”

But what truly knocked me off my feet were his originals, which showcased that he wasn’t just a covers act. Songs like “Strangers Like Us,” “It’s What I Am,” and “Never Had You Anyway” show Montgomery has a great knack for recording songs that could’ve been hits in his father’s time on the charts.

He had already won me over by the time he superbly performed two of his dad’s biggest songs in “I Love the Way You Love Me” and “Sold (The Grundy County Auction).”

 
Yes, we’re doing this again. No, this isn’t a repeat review.
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Seeing American Aquarium at the White Water Tavern in Little Rock, Ark., has become something of an annual tradition for my wife and I, to the point where I’ve jokingly (but in all seriousness) told AA’s frontman B.J. Barham that I now have more photos with him, taken post-show, than I do with my parents.

The band, with its raucous, sweat-drenched performances of hard-living songs that touch on everyday life themes, has a loyal following, and the most devoted among us pack into the small, hardwood-floored one-room tavern on the corner of West 7th St. and Thayer St. for a communal experience like no other.

The way Barham and the band switch out setlists, ensuring no two shows are going to be alike, is one of the reasons we keep coming back to see them – counting a B.J. Barham solo show earlier this year, this was the sixth time in a year and a half I’ve seen the group.

Surprisingly, there are still American Aquarium songs I’ve yet to see live in person, and two such songs were live debuts for me on Tuesday night (Sept. 2) at the WWT in “Southern Sadness” off 2015’s Wolves, and “I Gave Up The Drinking (Before She Gave Up On Me),” off 2018’s Things Change.

There are, of course, the fan-favorites the band plays at every show, that you definitely want the band to keep playing every time you see them, like the epic one-two closing punch of “I Hope He Breaks Your Heart” and “Burn.Flicker.Die,” which may have developed into my ultimate favorite AA song.

“Losing Side of Twenty-Five” leading directly into “Wolves,” another one-two punch staple of the band’s live shows, has also become one of my all-time favorite live show moments.

Barham has a great love for the White Water Tavern, the first venue outside of his home state of North Carolina that really took a chance on the band when they were first kicking around and always makes sure the audience and the owners of the establishment know his appreciation at each show – and he’ll even talk about his love for it when playing at other establishments around town. He’s even written multiple songs mentioning the White Water Tavern,” including the rapturous “Rattlesnake” and the tear-in-a-beer weeper “Bigger In Texas,” which the band played back-to-back on Tuesday night.

Shelby Stone, a singer-songwriter from Fort Worth, Texas, opened the evening with an eight-song set showcasing her powerful voice, some great selections of cover songs and an adorable chattiness on stage that probably comes from awkward anxiety, but makes her incredibly endearing.

She seemed to be really into the White Water Tavern crowd in her debut at the venue, to the point of sharing some vulnerability she admitted she doesn’t often show on stage in playing the heart-wrenching “All I Ever Wanted,” which she wrote about her suffering from an eating disorder. It certainly led to some wet eyes among the audience and one of the biggest ovations of the evening.