![]() "I love the feeling of combining the best older stuff with the edginess of newer, more progressive sounds,"says the prestigious CMA Horizon Award winner. Instead, the Arizona-native grew up on a potent hybrid of honky-tonk, bluegrass, singer/songwriters, classic country and modern rock & roll, forging his own sound along the way. There are precious few new artists recording hits today about whom that can be said.īentley's kind of country has never been straight-up-the-middle. ![]() ![]() But Dierks Bentley proved that Music City's engine still runs and that as a place for education, inspiration and validation, it has no parallel. They say Nashville doesn't work like this anymore - that talented strivers with no connections don't stand a chance. Today he's among the most successful and relevant country singers in the business. Not so many years ago, he was singing for tips in Second Avenue bars and soaking up country music history at his day job working in the video tape library of the late, great Nashville Network. "The extension cord caught on fire and the lights went out for twenty minutes." "We went from one of the biggest lighting rigs you can have to a three-ring light tree," Dierks remembers with a laugh. Then, he and his band hopped on the bus, drove a couple hours to Oxford, Mississippi and set up for a raucous late-night show for 150 college students in the basement of an Ole Miss frat house. sharp, Dierks took the stage at the Memphis Pyramid and sang for 30 minutes for some 20,000 people, setting the table for veteran superstar George Strait. Dierks Bentley and his close-knit band played more shows in more places in 2004 than a body should be able to take or a mind should remember, but one night stands out as a distilled dose of the year's magic.
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