Mitchell Willoughby swallowed 25 live crickets to win his backstage passes to the Luke Bryan concert in Fort Wayne, Ind. He bragged about the feat — a challenge from a local radio station — to Bryan’s face while the country star was making the rounds at his standard meet-and-greet before the show. Bryan looked taken aback. “You just, like, swallowed ’em whole?” he asked, visibly disgusted. “Alive?” Mitchell nodded proudly. Bryan shook his head and moved on to the next fan, a preteen girl who was already shivering and in tears.
It was a Thursday night in October, and Bryan was midway through his ninth annual Farm Tour. More than 10,000 people had trekked from all over Indiana and the rest of the Midwest to see him perform on this geographically remote patch of earth. The tour, Bryan’s lead guitarist and longtime friend, Michael Carter, told me, was an attempt to recreate the shows they played while in community college in southern Georgia, when they would enlist a friend with some land and “set up on a flatbed trailer or on a porch or in a barn.”
The scale of the operation has changed drastically in the intervening years. Bryan has been in the spotlight for a decade — a career that has included having three albums top the Billboard 200, singing the national anthem at this year’s Super Bowl and co-starring in ABC’s coming reboot of “American Idol.” The Farm Tour now employs well over a hundred crew members (including cooks and a full-time massage therapist), who construct a high-capacity concert arena from scratch every morning and then break it down each night after Bryan’s encore with a kind of supernatural efficiency, leaving the fields empty and clear as the circuslike convoy of more than 60 buses and tractor-trailers heads on to the next farming community. They go to sleep on their respective buses and wake up in a new town they’ve often never heard of. “I don’t even know where I am right now,” one roadie told me that day in Fort Wayne. “What state or nothing. It’s a blur.”
The farms change, but Bryan’s preshow ritual does not vary. Before taking the stage each night, he spends an hour riding a propped-up bicycle. Then he mixes himself a salty dog — grapefruit juice and vodka, with a generous pinch of salt. His stylist, Cheryl, presents him with the evening’s outfit, almost always some variation on a solid-color V-neck, baseball cap and jeans. She rubs his arms with moisturizer until they glisten. Finally, he throws on his cowboy boots, which he secures tightly to his ankles with tape. He needs the extra protection when, in his words, he’s “in the heat of the battle up there.”
If you haven’t seen a mainstream country concert in recent years, you might not know what he means by this, but a Luke Bryan show is a deeply athletic affair. As his band begins its opening licks, he emerges from the darkness to raucous screams from the crowd. He jogs down the catwalk, grabbing hands and beaming. Onstage, he is more Freddie Mercury than George Strait — he leaps into the air and growls sensually and is known for his unique brand of hip-shaking, which seems both earnest and self-effacingly ridiculous. He lines up tequila shots on the lid of a piano and lobs cans of Miller Lite (a sponsor) out to the audience from a cooler wheeled out for this express purpose.
Bryan’s 2015 album, “Kill the Lights,” was the first in history to have six singles reach No.1 on the Billboard Country Airplay charts, and his crowds know every word to all of them. He also makes a point to mine his earlier records for fan favorites like “Country Man” (“I can grow my own groceries and salt-cure a ham/Hey, baby, I’m a country man”) and the self-explanatory “Rain Is a Good Thing,” both of which resonate powerfully with the farm-town audiences. Generally unburdened by a guitar, Bryan caps off every song he performs in a kind of triumphant superhero pose, pumping his fists or pointing up at the sky.
Continue reading the main storyFor years now, Bryan and his generation of pop-country artists have been testing the sonic integrity of country music — a genre with a reputation for being highly inelastic — bending it to the larger demands of the marketplace by incorporating influences from the worlds of rap, R&B, EDM and arena rock. Bryan grew up listening to 2 Live Crew and Eazy-E alongside Ronnie Milsap and Reba McEntire, and his catalog bears their imprint. His new album, “What Makes You Country,” which will be released this week, acts as a statement of purpose from its opening track: “You do your kind of country,” he sings. “They doing their kind of country/I do my kind of country.”
The term most often used for the music made by artists like Bryan is “bro-country,” coined by the critic Jody Rosen in 2013. “Music by and of the tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty young American white dude,” Rosen wrote, calling Bryan the “king of the genre.” Bryan has indeed made it clear that he’s not interested in baring his soul, or in emulating earlier country aesthetics. His guiding principle is that his music should please as many people as possible — ideally stadiums full of them — and to that end, he’s willing to use whatever tools (from whatever genres) he deems helpful. If that means making what is essentially a rap song about clubbing in a cornfield (“Kick the Dust Up”) or an R&B sex jam with lyrics like “Feel my belt turn loose from these old bluejeans” (“Strip It Down”), then so be it.
But like all great country catalogs, Bryan’s music at its core evinces a careful balance of the hedonistic and the reverent — at ease in the space between the dive bar and the church, between spring break and the farm. It still came as a surprise, though, in Fort Wayne when he was able to bring the wild proceedings to a sudden halt to address the mass shooting in Las Vegas, which had occurred over the weekend. “It’s been a rough week for me personally,” he said to the crowd, wiping the sweat from his brow, “and probably the worst week in the history of country music.” The audience knew exactly what he meant, and the volume fell to a hush. Like a preacher at a tent revival, he asked us to put our arms around one another and bow our heads, to keep praying about the problems our country faced. “Let’s get to working on this, y’all,” he said. “Let’s try to learn from it and make a change.”
In the moment of silence that followed — 15 seconds that seemed much longer — it became suddenly apparent again that we were in the middle of the Indiana woods. Then the moment passed, and the crowd was chanting: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Bryan gave a shout-out to police officers and firefighters, soldiers and schoolteachers. And just like that, his swagger was restored. “Let’s do some party crashing on a Thursday night,” he shouted. The crowd roared its approval, and the band came back to life.
One afternoon several years ago, my uncle and his family took their new boat out for a test run off their dock on the Flint River in southwestern Georgia. Around the point where the Muckalee and Kinchafoonee Creeks flow into the river proper, the boat’s engine sputtered and died, and they found themselves stranded. Before long, however, an older, well-tanned woman in a bass boat called out to them and volunteered to help. My cousin insisted they were fine. “I wouldn’t be turning down help,” she replied, before pulling up alongside and asking if they’d like a beer. “I’m Luke Bryan’s mom,” she said, as if by way of explanation, before offering to tow them home.
I heard stories like this for years, as Bryan evolved from a local phenomenon — he grew up in Leesburg, just upriver from my hometown, Albany — to arguably the biggest star in Nashville. His songs are largely about trying to carve out a good time in dull, desolate places; the images you get from his lyrics are of vast, rural stretches of eerie nothingness. It’s a landscape I recognize from our corner of Georgia — the pecan trees and cotton fields punctuated by boiled-peanut stands, the occasional collection of cows and every conceivable variety of grain elevator.
Bryan is an enthusiastic ambassador for the area, and in his capricious approach to country, he is channeling the diverse mix of sounds that kids in his town, and others like it, were listening to. In many respects, country and hip-hop are sister genres, the pop styles that most reliably make room for God and work, black-market economies and regional pride. In the media, and particularly in the South, they have often found themselves pitted against each other, an opposition born of the culture wars and of the region’s catastrophic racial history. But my own experience was that most teenagers who listened to country (or jam bands or nu-metal) were just as likely to be familiar with the songs in regular rotation on rap radio. Rap was ubiquitous — it was the soundtrack at football pep rallies and, as Bryan has pointed out, at the same dive bars that hosted artists like him. He has a visceral understanding of places like this, whether Leesburg, Ga., or Fort Wayne, Ind.
So why, I asked Bryan the next afternoon aboard his tour bus, did he leave southern Georgia for the big city? I know why I left, I said — I never especially liked it there to begin with. What was his excuse?
He hesitated. We were now in Springfield, Ill., and the ground outside was unmanageably muddy. Taking pity on my tennis shoes, he had lent me a pair of his boots. He seemed oblivious to the mud himself, stretching out his own grimy pair on the black leather couch lining the wood-paneled interior of the bus. He kept running a hand through his disheveled hair, where a backward ball cap should have been, as if he were feeling for a phantom limb. “I’m interesting in that, at any point, I could have taken the slightest deviation and never moved to Nashville,” he said. “And I think I would have still been smiling through every day. I would have been fine working at my dad’s peanut mill.”
His father ran not only a peanut mill but also a fertilizer-chemical company and, along with a partner, was responsible for 3,000 acres of farmland. His mother — who had joined him for the tour, posting up in a lawn chair outside his bus and chain-smoking Salems — worked for the county utilities department. The youngest of three siblings, Bryan sang in his church choir as a teenager and led a praise band on Wednesday nights. On Fridays, he would be down the street playing at bars, often to the same crowd. “I would play a David Allan Coe song, and then I’d do a gospel medley of ‘I Saw the Light’ and ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” he said. “And people would be like, ‘Don’t you feel weird playing those songs in a honky-tonk?’ And I’d say: ‘Well, I don’t know. Would Jesus feel weird walking into a honky-tonk?’ ”
Bryan had long planned on moving to Nashville, but a year after graduating from Georgia Southern University with a business degree, he was still in his hometown, pulling peanut wagons for a living. “My dad felt like he needed to nudge me a little out of the nest,” he said, and so the elder Bryan threatened to fire his son, who finally moved to Nashville in late 2001. After a few months of waiting on tables, he was put on contract by a publishing company to write tracks for other artists.
In 2005, he met the songwriter Jeff Stevens, who had written hits for George Strait and Tim McGraw and immediately recognized Bryan’s potential as a performer. He produced Bryan’s 2007 debut, “I’ll Stay Me,” which reached No.2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, and scored a modest hit with “All My Friends Say,” sung from the perspective of a man piecing together a drunken blackout — presaging the college-bro image that would come to define his sound. But otherwise, his first release was relatively traditional, with lots of fiddle and mandolin; Bryan now calls it “country as cornbread” and says it’s slightly embarrassing for him to listen to.
What you might not guess from his music is that Bryan’s life has been marked by tragedy. His older brother, Chris, was killed in a car accident in 1996, and his older sister, Kelly, died of uncertain causes in 2007 while doing the laundry. (Her husband, Ben Lee Cheshire, died in 2014; Bryan and his wife, Caroline, took in their three children.) It occurred to me to wonder, given the contours of his life, why Bryan’s music wasn’t sadder, and so I asked him. “I’ve written some sad songs,” he said. “There are 10 or 15 songs I’ve got that will break you down, like gut-punch you.” But these more personal songs, he said, have never felt right for his albums. “I don’t know if they — if they ever show up, they show up,” he said. He has claimed that his 2013 hit “Drink a Beer” is a sort of tribute to his siblings. But Bryan didn’t write the song himself, and there’s something vaguely disheartening about his linking these very real calamities of life to such a trite premise: Faced with the loss of a loved one, a man shrugs it off and cracks open a cold one.
Sitting in the front seat of Jeff Stevens’s pickup truck one evening on the tour, I asked him what he thought of the criticism Bryan has taken over the course of his career: that he mostly sings about his truck and bluejeans and boots, that he’s shallow or opportunistic. Stevens, who has worked with Bryan on all his albums, sat back and laughed. “I love it,” he said. Whenever he sees Bryan perform, he went on, “I look over a sea of people who are forgetting everything. And that is the biggest gift that we can give to somebody — an hour and a half where they haven’t thought about their job, they haven’t thought about their troubles. They’re just here for pure fun. I personally feel that purely fun music is cathartic. It’s like being a goddamn doctor. And it’s important. I’m not saying that it’s not important to have a message — a message is great. But people love to not think in today’s world. They got enough to think about. When they go back to their cars, they’ll start thinking again.”
One afternoon, angling his head out of his tour-bus bathroom while urinating, Bryan asked me about my political beliefs. I admitted that they were somewhat to the left of his own, and had been even back in Albany. He expressed surprise but said: “That’s the beauty of getting out of where we’re from. I lean conservative, but when you truly see the world and the country in its entirety, I think if you stay so conservative, it’s almost a little ignorant.” His musical trajectory is closely tied to his personal one. “When I was a 12-year-old kid,” he said, “I was so country, I would’ve probably had to have an interpreter for this interview.” But seeing the world had changed his perspective on things. He had evolved as a person, and his views — both artistic and political — had developed accordingly.
Country singers aren’t often thought of as having the ability to change. They’re supposed to be reactionary and creatively static, to play the role that was written for them decades ago. Their continued cultural relevance can baffle observers unfamiliar with the form. In the early 1990s, when Billboard started using Nielsen SoundScan to more accurately calculate music’s commercial performance, one of the biggest surprises to industry insiders was the extraordinary popularity and reach of artists like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw. Disdain for country music is as old as the genre itself, and appropriately, mainstream critics have disliked Bryan from the beginning and have tended to treat him with some combination of amusement and animosity.
But Bryan — with his references to Drake and T-Pain and to the size of his rims, his occasional tendency to break out into rapping onstage, the smooth R&B production of his ballads — has also become an avatar of a deep fissure within country music and the object of the undying enmity of traditionalists. The commercial dominance of Bryan and his peers — artists like Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton and Florida Georgia Line — has often led Nashville’s more critically acclaimed Americana wing, which includes artists like Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves, to distance themselves from identifying with country altogether. (Musgraves has said, “My favorite compliment ever is when someone says, ‘I hate country music, but I love your music.’ ”)
Bryan defends his own approach as a fundamentally generous and populist one. “Listen, at the end of the day,” he told me, “I write, record and sing about what I see my fans reacting to. If I roll into a concert and I tell everyone I have written the world’s greatest song, and I walk out there and play it and nobody really gives a [expletive] about it, it ain’t the world’s greatest song anymore. That’s how I go about it. I am not stubborn enough.”
I asked Bryan about Sturgill Simpson, who won this year’s Grammy for best country album (Bryan has never been nominated) and has been an outspoken opponent of the Nashville establishment. Did it frustrate him that critics often focused their attentions on artists whose fans actively dislike most contemporary country? Bryan shrugged. “I’ve wanted to go have coffee with Sturgill,” he said. “I am utterly amazed at what he does.” (I asked Simpson to comment for this article, and he responded quickly by email: “I don’t know Luke, I don’t think about Luke, and I’ve honestly never heard a single note of his music.”)
Simpson’s retro purity and projection of artistic integrity may win him awards and make him palatable to country outsiders, but Bryan’s omnivorous approach to country production is arguably more ambitious and musically progressive; it’s certainly more in tune with the genre’s younger listeners. Bryan’s own epiphany in this respect arrived in his early years on the road, when he noticed D.J.s playing hip-hop immediately after his sets and noticed too that his fans were happy to hear it. That taught him, he told me, that “it’s not always all about the twangiest of the twang” and that a hybrid like “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” could be accepted. Others picked up on this as well, from Florida Georgia Line to Sam Hunt — from the lowbrow, in other words, to the ostensibly cosmopolitan — and this kind of stylistic flexibility has become one of the dominant narratives of pop-country in recent years. These days, Bryan said with a laugh, “all my nieces and nephews are listening to Future.” Kids no longer make the same hard-and-fast genre distinctions as their parents. So why should he? (Up to a point; he told me tries to keep his albums “80 percent country.”)
But Bryan remains well aware of his responsibilities to his base; country has always been primarily a white, blue-collar music. Which is why the fascinating quandary of his career has been the question of how much he can tweak the country sound — how much sonic and thematic borrowing the genre can sustain — while still remaining identifiably country. Paradoxically, in a deep-historical sense, to do so is to be more faithful to country’s roots than the nostalgists. “From its inception,” Nick Tosches wrote in “Country: The Biggest Music in America,” his classic history of the genre, “country and western was as mongrelized a style as any of earth,” describing its origins as an amalgamation of blues and jazz, minstrel comedy, yodeling, Tin Pan Alley and Hawaiian slide guitar. Bryan, along with the artists who have emerged in his wake, are proof that this is still the case, that country is still mutable, still in flux. If you’re wondering whether the results are cynical or forward-thinking, the answer is that they’re both — they’re also pretty fun. Bryan’s form of genre fluidity doesn’t, however, seem to be actually diversifying the country audience: His crowds, like the genre’s fans over all, are overwhelmingly white.
Bryan’s relationship to the rural working class is at this point more imaginative than direct. What grounds him in the country ethos is largely a set of signifiers, those almost algorithmically predictable references to the trappings of heartland American life — to the right kinds of beer and trucks, to the primacy of, as one Bryan hit has it, “Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day.” When I asked Stevens what kept Bryan tethered to country music rather than to the broader pop arena, his answer was comical in its minimalism. “Have you heard him sing?” he asked, with a confused expression. “He’s a [expletive] hillbilly.” He went on: “We feel like we can do anything, and as long as you put that hillbilly voice on top of it, it’s going to sound country.” As a barometer of country identity, Bryan’s vision is a testament to its adaptability but also to its deep-rooted insularity. Say the right things in the right accent, and Stevens is right: Country can be anything.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the middle name of a country music artist. He is David Allan Coe, not Allen.