With each moment that country singer-songwriter Ashley McBryde spends onstage, she reveals she's 100 percent the real thing. From her rough-and-tumble, tatted-up image to her emotionally naked songwriting and unadorned, from-the-heart performance style, this is a lady who's not putting on any airs. Backed by a full band and letting her rocking side show through, or performing with only her own acoustic guitar for company, McBryde lays it all out in a full-throttle, no-nonsense fashion. She's a storyteller at heart, and that quality comes through whether she's singing a detail-rich tune like "A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega" or chatting up the audience in between songs and sharing select slices of her life.

Ashley McBryde Background

Ashley McBryde comes from the school of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Instead of waiting around to be discovered by a big label, she leapt into the fray and took matters into her own hands. The Arkansas singer-songwriter set about following her destiny in country music by releasing two albums under her own steam, the first arriving even before she made her 2007 move to Nashville. But after putting in plenty of hard work to get her soulful vocal style and compelling story-songs to a wide audience, McBryde eventually gained considerable traction. She released her major-label debut album, Girl Going Nowhere, in 2018, reaching the upper rungs of the country charts in the process. By the time the dust cleared, McBryde had been nominated for a pair of Grammys as well as nabbing the coveted CMA and ACM new artist awards in 2019. She rose even higher with her next album, 2020's Never Will, ascending to loftier levels on the country albums and singles charts and serving notice that her kind of country music had come to stay.