FLORENCE β The buzz at last year's Country Thunder festival was about a band out of Nashville called A Thousand Horses and their debut radio single "Smoke."
The song was burning up radio play and all the radio guys/gals and industry types couldn't say enough about the song and the band. Many were wishing out loud that A Thousand Horses would land on the 2016 Country Thunder lineup.
On Sunday evening, A Thousand Horses made its Country Thunder debut and lived up to all that hype in a 60-minute Southern rock-tinged show. I think I and thousands of others among the crowd that filled the muddy festival grounds found our new country music crush.
This is a band with members who wear their hair long in the Southern rock tradition and sing a love song that compares their best gal to the addiction of smoking. They rock, yet there's strong country tradition beneath the pulsating percussion and driving rock guitar riffs.
Frontman Michael Hobby, dressed in a derby style hat and sunglasses, had that laid-back swagger of a singer who knows his band is going places. He took us through the band's debut album "Southernality," including the driving cover song, and showed us how he and his and gets trailer-trash drunk on "Tennessee Whiskey." He also convinced us that "(This Ain't No) Drunk Dial" before slowing it down on "Back to Me."
A Thousand Horses kicked off the beginning of the end of the 2016 Country Thunder festival on Sunday. It was a day that was arguably the most country night of the four-day festival, with neo-traditionalist Randy Houser opening for headliner Eric Church, an artist who takes his country with a healthy dose of "don't give a damn," following in the footsteps of one of the late Merle Haggard who he credits with being an influence on his career.Β
