So how many country music fans will venture out on a Thursday night in February to the Old Rock House in St. Louis to see an up-and-coming country singer-songwriter? Plenty. The main floor was full for Hailey Whitters, the Iowa-bred gal whose song “Everything She Ain’t” had a cup of coffee on the country charts a couple of years ago. Whitters has already been on the scene for a decade, making money as a songwriter and plugging away as a singer, but she’s just now catching fire as a solo artist: She was nominated for New Artist of the Year at the CMAs last year.
The Old Rock House was staging Whitters’ first show of 2024, the kickoff to her year-long Can’t Tie’r Down tour that will see her opening for the likes of Luke Combs and Jason Aldean in vastly bigger venues. This was a chance to catch her in an intimate setting as she gets her cuts in on some new material and some choice covers.
Some rabid fans jumped at the chance to see her up close. In fact, they jumped up and down the entire show in their cowboy boots and dresses, especially a trio of superfans — HailStorms? Whit’s Ends? — in front of the stage damn near moshed with limbs-whipping enthusiasm. Can’t blame these gals for getting carried away, although the crowd was less tolerable during Meg McRee’s opening set. Conversations roared throughout McRee’s songs, part of a modern-day epidemic of discourteous concert behavior.
It was a Tony Lama crowd, comprised primarily of the kind of country fans who didn’t recognize that McRee was playing “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” until she got to the chorus. But they belted along to Whitters’ songs, and they definitely knew hot-off-the-presses covers like Tyler Childers’ “Feathered Indians,” played halfway through the night, and Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” which Whitters sang while tossing long-stem roses into the crowd.
Whitters was cute as a button, by the way, in her jumpsuit and blonde pigtails, and she worked the crowd sweetly, taking a ceremonial tequila shot early on and being careful to make eyes at the folks up in the balcony. And as pop-leaning as some of her glossy material can be, she keeps things corner-of-Tootsie’s simple on stage — drums, bass, fiddle, Telecaster — with members of the band in matching jean jackets embroidered with “Cornstar” on the back. (This Hawkeye State gal is big into corn.)
Whitters’ bright voice and bendy twang, as well as her apple-cheeked visage, draw inevitable comparisons to Miranda Lambert, but Whitters has set herself apart with her own sturdy songwriting, and she bookended the show with “Tie’r Down” and “Everything She Ain’t,” both from last year’s EP I’m in Love. The EP’s title track was another highlight, the cutest little ditty you’re likely to hear on country radio this year.
Whitters told us that “In a Field Somewhere” from 2022’s Raised had been requested earlier in the day via TikTok, and it was a rendition that deserves a permanent spot in the setlist, as does “Roulette on the Heart,” a ballad written by Conner Smith, given a lovely fiddle-abetted reading. “Mellencamp” was another new one, a naked ripoff of Eric Church’s “Springsteen” although rhyming “Hell and back” with “Mellencamp” is a good one, and the snippet of “Jack and Diane” before the song got a rise out of the crowd. If the ol’ boys in the crowd had read Mellencamp’s just-released statement calling for changes to our gun laws in the wake of the mass shooting at the Chiefs parade, would they still have been whooping for “Mellencamp”?
In any case, by the time Whitters got to “Janice at the Hotel Bar,” which she described as her most-requested song and played as an acoustic duet with her guitarist, the place was all smiles. And when she closed with a straightforward reading of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” there was more than a little recognition of Dolly’s timeless talent and charm in Hailey Whitters’ brand of crowd-pleasing country fun.
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