Tucson country band County Line had just wrapped up its 45-minute set Saturday afternoon and Billy Shaw Jr. was in the wings when the four friends sat down at a table in the middle of the cavernous Tucson Expo Center.
They have been been big fans of country singer Shaw since hearing his songs on KIIM-FM, so when his name landed on the lineup for the inaugural Country Fest Tucson, they bought tickets.
“I just love country music, period,” Diana Escobar said as her friends — Jeannette Fair, Teri Ahumada and Angelica Jaramillo — nodded in agreement. “It’s so (uplifting) and it speaks to your heart. When I sing the songs, it puts me in a good mood.”
It didn’t matter that the friends were three, maybe four football fields away from the stage, set up in the far end of the southside venue that was once an indoor swap meet. They could hear the music and they had a seat; seats were pretty scarce close the stage, where there was a reserved seat section and about two dozen plastic chairs set up outside that fenced-off VIP area.
But there were plenty of seats and tables scattered throughout the Expo Center, which organizers of Country Fest had hoped to fill with as many as 8,000 fans. A few hours before the evening’s headliners Josh Gracin and Josh Turner were set to take the stage, the number was closer to 2,500, and only about a third of that audience had made its way to the stage when Tucson’s Caiden Brewer introduced his new band.
It was Brewer’s first show at a country festival and if he was nervous, he hid it in lively bantering with the small crowd, many of whom were wearing “Caiden Brewer” T-shirts and singing along to his original songs, including his rocker “Tequila” and his ballad “Addicted to You.”
Brewer was the last of the three Tucson acts on the lineup, which featured a pair of New Mexico artists including former Las Cruces police officer Frank Ray. Ray followed the lead of the artists who went before him, including Phoenix singer-songwriter Ashley Wineland, and mixed covers in with his originals. Ray gets props for straying outside the country lines with a cover of Justin Timberlake’s rollicking “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” which he followed up with his original ballad “Everytime You Run” — a song that landed in the Top 20 on the Texas country music charts.
Wineland was the lone female in the lineup, and she was greeted by an enthusiastic, male-heavy cheering section as she ripped through solid covers of Miranda Lambert (“Something Bad”) and Carrie Underwood (“Church Bells”) and a few originals including “No Prince Charming,” the 2016 song that landed her on Country Music Television.
Not far from where Diana Escobar and her friends were sitting, James and Mida Davis and their friends David and Gloria Barnhart were biding their time until the evening’s headliners took the stage.
They were there to see just one artist, headliner Josh Turner. He was the first country artist James Davis had ever seen in concert — he and his wife had seen Turner when he played the Pima County Fair last spring — and the one who had turned him into a country music fan.
“My wife said his music reminded her of us,” Davis said, and nodded to his wife across the table.
Davis said he thought that seeing Turner at the indoor Expo Center might be a little more intimate than the sprawling concert area at the Pima County Fairgrounds.
“I think all in all (the Expo Center) is a good venue with a great vibe,” he said. “We’ve been here before for the gun shows, so we know the layout.”
Country Fest Tucson, presented by Desert Entertainment, could expand to two days next year and will likely move to an outdoor venue, organizers have said.
