Ashley McBryde sings about real-life struggles, and triumphs, at Mayo Performing Arts Center

KATIE KAUSS

ASHLEY McBRYDE

“I’m Ashley McBryde and these are the men I make music with,” said McBryde, introducing herself and her band after kicking off her Nov. 15 concert at The Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown with her latest single, “Rattlesnake Preacher.” That is a pretty plainspoken way to put it, but McBryde, as a singer-songwriter, has a practice of devoting herself to the unvarnished truth.

Following “Rattlesnake Preacher” in the show were “Made for This,” which deflates the glamor of the touring life (“Most days you’re stuck in a truck,” “The dressing room is a bathroom stall”); “One Night Standards,” which deflates the romance of brief love affairs (“There’s no king bed covered in roses/Just a room without a view”); and “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs,” which deflates the myth of the Wild West (“I’d love to ride into the sunset/But there’s no wild out West, no prairie to roam/Or a high enough lonesome to get far enough gone”).

As grounded in reality as McBryde’s lyrics may be, the show was ultimately uplifting and life-affirming, with songs that were passionate (“American Scandal”), playful (“Brenda Put Your Bra On”) and earnestly sentimental (“Bible and a .44,” a tribute to McBryde’s father). “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega,” which refers to a small town in Northern Georgia, was a survivor’s anthem that evoked the power of music itself. McBryde sang:

Here’s to the breakups that didn’t break us
The breakdown wrong turn that takes ya
To a little dive bar in Dahlonega
Hear a song from a band that saves ya …
It’s a hittin’-rock-bottom, smoke’-em-if-you-got-’em,
Nothing’s-going-right,
Makin’-the-best-of-the-worst-day kinda night

An Arkansas native who now lives near Nashville, McBryde released her first full-length album, Girl Going Nowhere, in 2018. In 2019, she was named New Artist of the Year by the Country Music Association Awards and New Female Artist of the Year by the Academy of Country Music Awards. The three studio albums she has released since then are all packed with gems, as well.

I reviewed her in 2023 at the smaller Newton Theatre (I missed her when she opened for Cody Johnson at The Prudential Center in Newark in January of this year). The Morristown show wasn’t hugely different from that one, in terms of its setlist or its general flavor. But McBryde showed she could connect with a crowd in a larger venue just as effectively. She didn’t talk much early in her 90-minute set, but grew chattier as the evening went on, and the show’s energy peaked with a briskly propulsive cover of “Drivin’ My Life Away,” the 1980 hit by New Jersey’s own Eddie Rabbit.

“I just feel like a kid who got a brand new play set in her backyard … because we’ve only been playing that song for like two days,” McBryde said as she caught her breath, after it.

McBryde took pride in telling the crowd that the five musicians in her band — guitarist, mandolinist and vocalist Chris Harris, guitarist Matt Helmkamp, bassist Caleb Hooper, drummer Quinn Hill and multi-instrumentalist Wes Dorethy — are the same musicians you will hear on her records. “These guys don’t learn their parts, they write them,” she said.

As the show drew near its end, she performed her defiant “The Devil I Know” (the title track of her most recent album). And then before closing with the sardonic “Tired of Being Happy,” she gave the crowd a feel-good moment to remember with the jaunty “Luckiest S.O.B.,” from her 2016 Jalopies & Expensive Guitars EP (which preceded her major label record deal).

This is a song about feeling that you are the luckiest person in the world even though you are just a struggling musician, and it became a joyous sing-along. “Raise your glass, raise your bottle, ’cause these good old days won’t last, for sure,” sang McBryde. “We may all be gone tomorrow but we can’t let these songs go unheard.”

Here is the show’s setlist.

“Rattlesnake Preacher”
“Made for This”
“One Night Standards”
“Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs”
“American Scandal”
“Brenda Put Your Bra On”
“Whiskey and Country Music”
“First Thing I Reach For”
“Creosote”
“Learned to Lie”
“Light On in the Kitchen”
“Bible and a .44”
“A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega”
“Never Will”
“Livin’ Next to Leroy”
“Sparrow”
“Drivin’ My Life Away”
“El Dorado”
“The Devil I Know”
“Luckiest S.O.B.”
“Tired of Being Happy”

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