Every spring, the University of Alabama at Birmingham hosts a concert by its gospel choir, a student group that is also an academic elective. (Participants earn an hour of class credit for each year of singing.) The 2008 concert featured a new spiritual, “Nothing Goes Unnoticed,” that paid tribute to the victims of the massacre at Virginia Tech, in 2007; audience members were given glow sticks so they could wave along. To perform it, the choir brought out an unlikely soloist: a shaggy-haired white guy in khakis and cowboy boots, who strummed an acoustic guitar and delivered the lyrics in a quavering twang. The singer was a celebrity, but not a musical one: Sam Hunt, known to the student body as the starting quarterback on the football team. And he sounded pretty good. A video recording of the concert shows him growing more self-assured as the song progresses—buoyed, no doubt, by the dozens of gospel singers behind him and by the hundreds of glow sticks before him.
After college, Hunt earned a tryout with the Kansas City Chiefs, who evidently were not looking for a singer. So he moved to Nashville, where he fared better, helping to write hits for country stars like Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban. The song he co-wrote for Urban was “Cop Car,” about a teen-age trespasser who shares a stolen moment with his co-conspirator: “I fell in love in the back of the cop car.” Last year, Urban sang it at the Grammy Awards—a triumphant moment for Hunt, you might think, but he didn’t see it that way. In a memorable breach of Nashville decorum, he responded to the performance with a doleful tweet:
Hunt didn’t explain how he lost control of “Cop Car,” but he did find a way to retaliate: by re-recording it for his début album, “Montevallo,” which was named after a town in Alabama where a former girlfriend lived, and which has established him as the fastest-rising new country star in years. The album, released last fall, is already responsible for two No. 1 hits on Billboard’s country chart, and its success has made his summer touring plans seem unreasonably modest. During a recent appearance at Jones Beach, on Long Island, booked long ago, he was the opening act for the opening act, which led to an unusual sight: an enthusiastic sing-along in a half-empty amphitheatre. Hunt wore a baseball cap and a gray T-shirt, snug enough to reassure fans that he could probably still heave a football deep into the secondary if the need arose. When he brought his wireless microphone into the crowd, he was swarmed by a throng of admirers, who were young, with few exceptions, and female, with none. He accepted the adulation with the unsheepish good cheer you might expect from a former jock—a guy whose popularity long predated his singing career.
Hunt grew up in Cedartown, Georgia, about an hour from Atlanta, and he has cited the city’s fertile R. & B. scene as an early influence. Back in his songwriter days, he released an independent album, “Between the Pines.” He called it an “acoustic mixtape,” and the casual performances—some of which seemed to have been recorded in bars, or maybe at house parties—showed off Hunt’s love of quick, syncopated vocal rhythms. Seven of those songs reappear on “Montevallo,” which is Nashville-slick, but with a light touch. “Make You Miss Me”—as in “Girl, I’m gonna”—is a breakup song with lyrics that might sound resentful if they were set to a less wistful tune, or if they were delivered by a singer less willing to play the lovestruck loser. And in “Take Your Time,” a No. 1 hit this spring, Hunt begins each verse by speaking the lyrics instead of singing them—a technique that owes as much to old-school country-music talkers like Tex Williams and Conway Twitty as it does to contemporary hip-hop stars. Hunt is the latest in a string of hunky young singers who have populated country-radio playlists in recent years. Their convivial and flirtatious songs are sometimes called “bro-country,” a description invariably wielded as an insult, and not always fairly. But if Hunt is a bro he is a sensitive one, honing an imaginative and inclusive sound that may well take him beyond the bros—and possibly beyond country, too.
At Jones Beach, Hunt was accompanied by a couple of guitarists and a drummer, as well as by a pre-recorded backing track, which nudged his songs toward traditional country music (by adding a banjo lick, say) or toward pop (whooshing keyboards). He is not a particularly strong singer, which doesn’t have to be a disadvantage, especially for a performer whose lyrics tend toward the conversational. The goal is to encourage your fans to join their voices with yours, instead of marvelling at your high notes. He started his set with “Raised on It,” which builds to some rousing oh-oh-ohs, but finds time along the way to describe small-town life in a way that is both specific and widely applicable: “Duckin’ from your ex at the four-way stop/Turn the music down when you’re passing the cops.”
The sing-along stopped only once during Hunt’s set, near the end, in a moment designed to disorient the crowd. A sinuous, hazy electronic beat came through the speakers, and a disembodied voice intoned some surprisingly gloomy words: “All the sh— I do is boring/All these record labels boring/I don’t trust these record labels, I’m touring/All these people on the planet working nine to five, just to stay alive.” Some people in the crowd might have recognized the absent singer as Beyoncé, but probably not too many, since the clip came, lightly censored, from “Ghost,” one of the more experimental songs on her self-titled 2013 album. This was Hunt’s way of introducing “Single for the Summer,” a not wholly celebratory song about a man who finds himself seasonally unable to stay faithful. “I feel it creepin’ in,” he sang. “Every day’s a weekend, and I’m drowning in the freedom.” After the second chorus, he took another detour, delivering part of the third verse of “Marvin’s Room,” by Drake, another singer (and, more often, rapper) who elegantly slips between genres and moods; modern country singers love to flaunt phrases and attitudes borrowed from hip-hop, but Hunt’s borrowings are softer and sneakier. “Having a hard time adjusting to fame,” he murmured, following Drake’s example. It was the most memorable line of the night, even though he gave the crowd no reason to believe it.
Hunt’s pop sensibility may remind some listeners of another singer who released an album on the day that “Montevallo” came out: Taylor Swift. The album, “1989,” was a preordained blockbuster that presented country radio stations with a dilemma: whether or not to play it. Swift might be the biggest star the genre has ever produced, but the songs on “1989” make no concessions to the sounds and subjects that define country music. When the first single was released, a program director from Minneapolis suggested to USA Today that Swift had abandoned the genre. “I hope she gets the country muse again soon,” he said_._ “We’ll gladly welcome her back, whenever it is.” But some country stations have been playing songs from “1989” anyway, wagering that Swift’s popularity will outweigh the disappointment of listeners who expect something twangier.
Among those stations is Nash FM, in New York, one of four hundred and sixty stations owned by Cumulus Media. John Dickey is the company’s executive vice-president of content and programming, and he says that, especially in a cosmopolitan market like New York, it didn’t make sense to send Swift’s fans elsewhere simply because her new songs were too pop. In his view, country radio can and must expand musically, while retaining its “foundational tenets,” including a commitment to “wholesome entertainment” for families. Hunt, unlike some country mavericks, has been embraced by radio stations, which remain the genre’s most important arbiters. “What would have been a very difficult business proposition five, six, seven years ago with an artist like Sam Hunt—today, he’s a poster child for what’s right with the format,” Dickey says. “He’s such a force right now, we can’t get enough Sam Hunt on the radio.”
Last month, a country-radio consultant named Keith Hill earned himself scores of enemies by telling Country Aircheck, an industry magazine, that programmers should be careful not to play too many women singers. “If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out,” he said, suggesting that records by women should make up no more than nineteen per cent of a station’s playlist. (He explained, rather cryptically, that men were “the lettuce in our salad,” and that women were the tomatoes.) “Women like male artists,” he said, adding that as many as three-quarters of listeners are women. Artists and executives alike were quick to disavow Hill’s analysis; Dickey, for instance, says that in order for country radio to thrive the number of women singers on the air must grow.
Part of the fun of a radio-driven genre like mainstream country is watching executives scramble to give audiences what they seem to want. For a few years, that meant bro-country, which could prosper only as long as listeners, especially women listeners, appeared to love it. But this past December a new duo called Maddie & Tae topped Billboard’s country-airplay chart with “Girl in a Country Song,” an acerbic response to the bros. The lyrics mocked songs about generic women in bikinis, asking, “Being the girl in a country song/How in the world did it go so wrong?” In a subtler way, Hunt’s ascendance, too, is proof that Nashville is changing again, as it always does. At Jones Beach, he ended his set with “Break Up in a Small Town,” a wounded pop song about a guy who can’t avoid his ex-girlfriend. “You gotta move or move on,” Hunt sang: advice to a character who’s stuck, from a singer who isn’t. ♦
