It’s been seven years since Eddie Montgomery lost his Montgomery Gentry duo partner, but the country singer still can’t help but look to his left when he’s on stage.
It’s a reflex born of sharing the spotlight for more than 20 years with Troy “T-Roy” Gentry from the time they were teens growing up in Danville, Kentucky, to the day Gentry died in a helicopter crash in September 2017.
“There’s not a night that don’t go by that we don’t talk about T-Roy,” Montgomery, 60, said during a mid-July interview from Nashville. “I’m always used to lookin’ to my left there because it’s been me and him and John Boy, or John Michael as everybody knows him as, that started a band pretty much outta high school.”
Montgomery brings Montgomery Gentry to Fox Tucson Theatre on Friday, Aug. 30, as part of the band’s 25th anniversary tour.
Montgomery, who released his first solo album with 2022’s “Ain’t No Closing Me Down,” said he promised his longtime friend and musical partner that he would keep the band going.
“We made a pact, me and T-Roy did, years ago. Of course it was over some Jim Beam, I ain’t gonna lie about it,” he recounted. “We said if either one of us go down, we want the other one to keep the MG brand going. So I made that promise and I’m gonna keep it.”
Years before Montgomery and Gentry were a duo they were a trio with Montgomery’s younger brother John Michael, a multiplatinum-selling country singer. The three played together in the 1990s before John Michael went solo.
“Me and John Boy, I always make a joke about it: mom was a drummer, dad was a guitar player, bartenders were our babysitters and T-Roy’s dad owned a bar,” Montgomery said. “We literally grew up in honky-tonks. And I mean the ones back when we were kids, you walked in and they asked if you had a gun and if you didn’t they’d give you one. That’s how rough they were.”
Montgomery and Gentry formed their band in 1999 and released their debut album “Tattoos & Scars.” The first single, “Hillbilly Shoes,” introduced the duo’s high-octane country with scorching guitars, fiddle in the backdrop and a honky-tonk attitude developed from years of playing little dive bars in their native Kentucky.
“When you come up through the honky tonks, if you don’t bring a crowd, you won’t have a job,” said Montgomery, who still wears the same stage outfit he wore in those early days: black jeans, red cowboy boots, a black wide-brimmed Charlie 1 Horse hat and black coat.
It didn’t take long for the duo to get a reputation as country music’s party boys. Their Jim Beam tour bus would pull into a festival like Country Thunder in Florence — they headlined the festival in 2009 — and everyone would watch the entourage make its way backstage.
“Here comes the honky tonk boys,” Montgomery said of the reaction from concert promoters, fellow artists and backstage festival security. “We would set up and we would have TV on outside and we would have games and we would be grilling. Hell T-Roy even had a small pool. He’d get in and out and all the other artists are like, ‘What the hell?’ And they’d end up gettin’ in it, too. It was one of them baby pools, that was what was so funny about it.”
The band released nine studio albums; Gentry and Montgomery had finished the last, “Here’s To You,” weeks before the fatal crash. The album came out in 2018 and Montgomery did 25 shows promoting it.
“We were all lost, me and the band,” he said of going on the road after taking off for seven or eight months after the tragedy. “I miss T-Roy every day, but music heals everything. I wish all these world leaders would listen to it because it will fix everything.”
“I’ll tell you what, man, it’s bittersweet. ... It’s like starting all over after T-Roy’s death and ... COVID,” he added. “And here we are. All of our guys are still together. Been together over 20-some years. That’s something you don’t hear very often at all anymore.”
If you had told the younger Montgomery that his partnership with Gentry would take him into his 60s, he would likely have laughed. Gentry himself, in a 2007 Star interview, guessed that he and Montgomery had a good five, maybe 10 years before their career would fade.
“Here’s the way we look at it: If I’m dreaming, don’t pinch me and wake me up, please,” Montgomery said. “We always said when they asked us ‘What do you want to get out of this when it’s all said and done?’ Well, I wanna walk over to the jukebox, because you know when you walk up to the jukebox you’re going to see Waylon and Willie, Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Merle Haggard, TG Shepherd, the Marshall Tucker guys and Charlie Daniels. If we see our name in between one of them guys, oh, hell, we can turn around to one another and say, ‘We done somethin.’ If you don’t make it to the jukebox in 20 years, sorry ‘bout your luck.”
Montgomery Gentry’s show Friday at the Fox, 17 W. Congress, starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20-$65 through foxtucson.com.
The Fox Tucson Theatre has been a Tucson landmark for decades. Its history has been captured in photos since the 1930s, when it opened as a vaudeville venue and movie house. Video by Pascal Albright / Arizona Daily Star
