Small-town boy Justin Moore brings big country hits to Tucson

There’s a statue of country singer Justin Moore in the middle of tiny Poyen, Arkansas, population 263.

He’s the biggest thing to come out of his small hometown.

But last Friday night, Moore couldn’t hold a candle to the Poyen High School Indians football team.

“I’m not the biggest thing right now because the high school playoff football starts this weekend,” Moore said a few days before Poyen took on the Gurdon Panthers at home. “That’s what everybody around here is concerned with.”

It’s a safe bet Moore, his wife and their four kids would be in the stands cheering on the team that Moore played for as a teen.

Moore, who is ending his 2025 touring year with two Arizona shows — the AVA at Casino del Sol on Friday, Nov. 21, and Chandler’s Gila River Resorts & Casinos at Wild Horse Pass on Saturday, Nov. 22 — was the quarterback and among all his childhood buddies, he was the one guy who had no desire to leave home.

“All my other buddies were like ‘I can’t wait to get out of here’, but I’m like, not me,” he said in a thick Arkansas drawl. “I’m gonna stay home and eat mom’s cooking and let her make my bed every day till I’m 30, if I can.”

Turned out that Moore was the first and only one to leave.

He moved nearly 400 miles east to Nashville in 2002. He was 18 and fresh out of high school, and Music City was not the budding metropolis it is today.

Connections were a little easier back then so it wasn’t surprising that not long after he arrived, he met a young producer who introduced him to record executive Scott Borchetta, the man who in 2005 signed little known Taylor Swift to a deal on the indie label Big Machine.

“When I first moved there, I just thought, ‘Man, if I can just get a record deal, and then I can go back home and people won’t think I’m a failure’,” he said.

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It took a few years, but in 2007, Borchetta signed Moore to Valory Music Co., a Big Machine imprint.

“When I got a record deal, I thought, ‘Man, if I could just have one hit,’ “ he recalled during a phone call from home in Poyen. “And then my first song (‘Back That Thing Up’) came out and died in the 30s, and I’m like, ‘Dang.’ “

In the early 2000s, record labels gave newbies like Moore two or three chances before they dropped them; out the gate, Moore was looking at strike one.

“So we put our second single out and I didn’t agree with the song that we chose,” he said. “I didn’t choose it; the label did, and I thought I liked the song, but I wrote it about being homesick. I don’t think anybody’s gonna be able to understand it or relate to it. Thank God I was wrong.”

That song was “Small Town, USA.”

It hit No. 1.

That rush of success was like a drug.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I could just have one more.’ And then, you know, fast forward to today and it blows my mind,” he said.

Moore has racked up a dozen No. 1’s since, including “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away,” “ ‘Till My Last Day,” “Lettin’ the Night Roll,” “Point at You,” “You Look Like I Need A Drink,” “Somebody Else Will” and his most recent, “This is My Dirt.”

When Moore and his wife, Kate, had their first daughter in 2010, the family moved home to Arkansas. They spent a few years in Little Rock before making their way back to Poyen when Moore had the chance to buy land behind his PaPaw.

He now lives 1,000 yards from his parents and the house he grew up in.

As for that Friday night playoff game: The Indians squeaked past the Panthers 40-37.