It was a homecoming for Ashley McBryde on Sunday, October 15 at the Robinson Center Music Hall in Little Rock, Ark. as the native from the unincorporated community of Saddle, Ark. brought the house down in front of a packed house of adoring fans, that included family and long-time friends.

McBryde just released her third solo studio album, The Devil I Know, on September 8 and her set on Sunday night was very heavy on tracks from the album, which seemed just fine with the audience – much of which already knew all the lyrics by heart and sang along. The Devil I Know is probably McBryde strongest effort from top to bottom thus far of her ACM, CMA and Grammy-award-winning career that still feels like it could skyrocket at any moment.

McBryde began her set around 9 p.m. with one of the more raucous numbers off the new album, “Blackout Betty.” She was in complete control of the stage from the very beginning of the show oozing an effortless cool about her the entire way through.

Amazingly, McBryde was able to fit the entire 11-song album into her 20-song set on Sunday night, something you rarely get from an artist. Among my favorite performances from the new release were “Whiskey and Country Music,” “Made for This,” “6th of October” and “Cool Little Bars.”

McBryde basically made the almost always in my opinion stuffy venue and crowd at Robinson Center feel like a cool little bar crowd on Sunday night for the first time making me able to focus on the terrific music on the stage completely and not some dumb nuisance that can come with a crowd forgetting concerts are supposed to be about the music. Kudos to McBryde’s fan base in her home state for that.

While fitting the entirety of The Devil I Know into her set, McBryde also found time for some fan favorites from her previous albums like the raunchy “Brenda Put Your Bra On,” off last year’s collaborative album Lindeville that she kind of over-sought. Never have I seen so many bras tossed on a stage in my life and McBryde was sure having a helluva time with it, picking one rather large one up and hanging it on the neck of guitar player Matt Helmkamp’s guitar.  

I was thrilled she performed what’s still my favorite song of hers, “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” from her 2018 slightly different titled Girl Going Nowhere debut.  I had been perusing through previous recent sets of hers and hadn’t seen it on any of them, so I was worried she might not play it on Sunday night, but if you’re going to break that particular song out anywhere it’ll be at your home state show. The massive reaction from the crowd still seems to choke her up after all this time, which is incredibly moving and you can tell isn’t just a put-on for us.

It was probably around the quarter-to-halfway mark of her set when McBryde let us into a little bit of a secret that my wife and I in attendance hadn’t noticed at all – she was a bit under the weather and losing her voice. This was quite shocking as her performances up to that point had sounded about as close to the albums they are on. As the show went on, you could tell she was indeed losing her voice as her speaking voice in between songs got coarser and coarser as the night went on but miraculously, at least to my untrained ears, it never showed once in any performance.

McBryde’s few selections from her sophomore studio release Never Will from 2020 were impeccable, as if she asked me, “Hey, Julian, what do you want to hear from that album?” Those songs included “First Thing I Reach For,” likely my favorite from the album, “Sparrow” and “One Night Standards.”

Toward the end of the set, she performed “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega,” which was the first song I’d ever heard from here toward the end of 2017 and immediately piqued my attention as both a voice and songwriter to pay attention to and six years later she’s stood out as one of the best (really one of the few) from country music who can be among the mainstream acts (though radio still doesn’t quite do her justice – “One Night Standards” is her only solo top 20 charter) and still perform by-God country music.

The final two selections on Sunday night came from the new album, including her current single (and my favorite track on the album) “Light on in the Kitchen,” which she told the Robinson Center audience was the highest trajectory of any of her singles to date – it’s currently No. 22 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart and based on what she said is hopefully still climbing.

McBryde and her supremely talented band – which incredibly includes two musicians from my hometown of Mountain Home, Ark., shout out to Quinn Hill on drums and Wes Dorethy, who mostly was on keys but also played guitar, harmonica and fiddle during the show (no, I don’t know either personally) – finished the night up with the title track “The Devil I Know,” capping off a night of truly terrific music from a home state girl who made her dreams come true.

McBryde mentioned during the show that she and her band handpicked their opening acts when they had the opportunity to play headlining shows like on Sunday night and her choice for the Little Rock show was another amazingly talented Arkansas artist – J.D. Clayton from Fort Smith.

Clayton put out his debut album, Long Way from Home, in January and it's been a highlight in my country music of 2023 playlist for sure.

Clayton performed many of the standout tracks from the album during his eight-song opening set on Sunday evening, including the title track, “Gold Mine” and “Heartaches After Heartbreak,” which has been my favorite from the album.

He also performed a couple of beautiful songs written for his wife, whom he told us he met as a senior in high school in Fort Smith, “Beauty Queen,” which opened his show, and “Brown Haired Blue Eyed Baby,” which he had released on an E.P. in 2018 and of which he and his talented bandmates mixed with Steve Miller Band’s hit “The Joker.”

While “The Joker” certainly got the crowd singing along, it was actually Clayton’s amazing cover of Tracy Chapman’s 1995 top-five hit “Give Me One Reason,” which truly showed off his voice and range. Between this cover and Luke Combs taking “Fast Car” to the top of the country airplay chart, it’s damn nice to see country dudes giving a black, queer songwriter in Chapman some love.

Clayton finished off his opening set with a performance of “Arkansas Kid,” which is a slightly reworked version of Ronnie Van Zant/Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Mississippi Kid,” which was the perfect way to send him off.

 
I had been wanting to check out the Arkansas Goat Festival in Perryville, Ark., held annually on the first Saturday of October, for some years now but my work schedule never seemed to align with it. This year I got lucky it fell on an off-Saturday and it was off to see some goats in lingerie (seriously, they have a goat lingerie show!).

I just so happened to see on the festival’s website that a band called Posey Hill, which I’d just recently become acquainted with thanks to its single “Keeping Tyler” popping up on my Spotify via the Saving Country Music Top 25 Current Playlist curated by that website’s maintainer Kyle Coroneos, would be headlining the concert stage at the event, so after seeing livestock parade around in frilly undergarments, my wife, Aprille, and I decided to stick around for some country music.

Posey Hill is a regional touring band from central Arkansas that kept it all in the family featuring sisters Kristian, Erin and Megan on vocals, while their dad Doug Burnett picks guitar and helps the harmony flow. They also had two fine instrumentalists with them on fiddle and banjo whose names I wish I had remembered to write down.

Posey Hill had a bit of a train theme going on early in its set, opening with a nice cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freight Liner Blues,” before transitioning into Alan Jackson’s “Freight Train” and then into the group’s first original song of the set, “First Train,” the opening track off the debut album No Clear Place to Fall.

Being a festival where there are a lot of comers and goers and the general population of the event might not know you from Adam it was easy to see why Posey Hill performed mostly covers on the sunny, finally feeling-like autumn Saturday afternoon, but when the originals are as good as the ones the group performed it’d be just fine by me if they’d toss a few more in the set.

The other two originals the group performed were “I’m Too Old for This,” and the aforementioned “Keeping Tyler,” a tale of a broken relationship in which the narrator only wants to keep her Tyler Childers records. If you’re a fan of Childers, I assure you that you need to check this song out. I guarantee you’ll love it, even if you might be like me and my wife and think Eric Church shouldn’t catch a stray.

Posey Hill showed it was capable of doing just about anything singer-songwriter-ish on Saturday afternoon going from bluegrass to country to folk to rock to even harmonizing pop on a stunning cover of the Bee Gee’s “To Love Somebody.”

The cover choices from the group were impeccable with some great ones I’d never been familiar with like Kasey Chambers’ “Last Hard Bible” to all-time favorites of mine in John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.”

The girls even let pops shine for a bit when Doug took the vocals on a nice performance of Vince Gill’s “Liza Jane.”

One of the many highlights of the set was the finisher “Mule Skinner Blues,” which allowed the sisters to show off their vocals on the bluegrass staple revitalized by Dolly Parton in 1971.

As I mentioned, Posey Hill bills itself on its website as a “regional touring band,” but if they keep writing and recording songs like they have on their album and showcased on Saturday afternoon to a bunch of goats and their humans they might drop that “regional” part real soon.

Y’all be sure to see them locally while you can. They’ll be at the Arkadelphia Festival of the Arts on Saturday, Oct. 14 at 3:30 p.m. 

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry brought his brand of literary Americana folk-rock music to the White Water Tavern in Little Rock, Ark. for a two-night stand on Wednesday, October 4 and Thursday, October 5.

I attended the Thursday night show and, as always seems to be the case at the White Water, it was a magical evening of terrific music in a nice communal atmosphere.

I feel like I was pretty late to the McMurtry game. He’s been recording music since the late ‘80s but I’ve come to know him over his last two albums: 2015’s Complicated Game and 2021’s The Horses and the Hounds. He’s an extraordinary storyteller, something that no doubt runs in the family as his father was famed novelist Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame, and his mother was an English professor. Prose is in his blood.

I might be a simpleton, but music has always been my favorite form of literature, so McMurtry’s brand of storytelling set to music is just perfect for me.

From the very moment I heard “Copper Canteen” and “You Got to Me,” off Complicated Game, they immediately became my favorite McMurtry songs, as I have a feeling that’s never going to change. They are perfect short stories set to music that I can see in my mind’s eye every time I listen and sing along, mentally putting myself in the shoes of the narrator. “Copper Canteen” actually has lines that remind me of my own life and relationship, though I’m younger than the narrator telling the story and I have no desire “to kill one more doe” before the end of deer season. But it’s almost as if: “Hold on to your rosary beads/leave me to my mischievous deeds like we always do” was written directly for me and my wife.

“You Go to Me” is the story of a gentleman who ends up as a guest at a wedding in a once-familiar location that instantly brings back the memory of a long-lost love. This is not a scenario I’ve ever found myself in personally, but damn if I don’t feel it in my bones as if somewhere and sometime in this universe I was again in the narrator’s shoes. That’s the kind of lived-in, true-to-life storytelling McMurtry is capable of.

Thursday night wasn’t the first time I’d heard him perform these wonderful songs. A few years ago, he opened a show for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the Robinson Center in Little Rock and performed both – but on Thursday night it was like hearing them again live for the first time. I’ll never tire of hearing “Copper Canteen” and “You Got to Me.”

What made me the most excited to see McMurtry on Thursday night, other than the hope he’d perform those two songs again and the White Water Tavern becoming my favorite live music haunt, was the fact that I hadn’t seen him live since he released The Horses and the Hounds, which was my favorite album period of 2021.

And McMurtry certainly did not disappoint when it came to performing his latest album getting to seven of the 10 tracks on it and, by God, if they weren’t probably my seven favorites on the thing.

The first one he performed on the evening was “Canola Fields,” which is one of my two favorites on the album (it’s so hard to decide between it and “Blackberry Winter”). “Canola Fields” is similar to “You Got to Me” in recalling a lost love, but unlike in the previous songs, this love eventually finds its way back to him. Speaking of “Blackberry Winter,” it was potentially the most magical performance of his entire set with his three The Heartless Bastards bandmates – Tim Holt on guitar and accordion, Darren Hess on drums and his bassist who simply went by “Cornbread – stepping away for a bit and McMurtry even walking away from the microphone to perform to a stunned, hushed crowd. He’s not the first artist I’ve seen do this at the White Water and it’s always a spine-tingly moment no matter who does it. For him to do it on one of my favorite songs of his just added to the beauty of the entire evening.

The other songs from The Horses and the Hounds performed on Thursday night were “Operation Never Mind,” “If It Don’t Bleed,” “Vaquero,” the hilarious “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call,” with the crowd singing the refrain “I keep losing my glasses” and the tragic “Jackie.”

Among the many other fantastic performances of the evening was the band rocking through a “medley of their hit” as McMurtry wryly stated – don’t worry though folks he didn’t smile! – of “Choctaw Bingo” which just about burned the place down, as well as “Childish Things,” the title track off his 2005 album, and “No More Buffalo,” from 1997’s It Had to Happen.

McMurtry and The Heartless Bastards ended their set with a rip-roaring performance of “Too Long in the Wasteland,” the title track off his debut album in 1989.

McMurtry was coaxed back onto the stage for an encore, something I honestly haven’t seen much at the White Water Tavern, for a performance of a new song he’s been working on called “Pinocchio in Vegas,” which was both humorous and touching as hell and I can’t wait to see on a future album.

Amazingly, McMurtry left the stage again and took the stairs to the second story of the small barroom venue before once again being begged back downstairs for a second encore, this time performing the beautiful “These Things I’ve Come to Know,” off Complicated Game, before finally calling it a night.

BettySoo, a singer-songwriter out of Austin, opened both nights at the White Water for McMurtry with her terrific songwriting and beautiful voice. I had never heard of BettySoo prior to Thursday night’s show but I’ll definitely be following her now. Always pay attention to the openers when you go to concerts. I promise you will find new favorites. She began her set solo with quiet, contemplative tunes before being joined on stage by Hess and Cornbread for a thoroughly rocking second half of the set.