Cody Johnson and Luke Bryan pulled the biggest crowds, by far, at Country Thunder Arizona with two very different approaches to building a fan base.
Bryan is a multiplatinum five-time Entertainer of the Year with 26 No. 1 entries on the Billboard country charts. He's been a judge on "American Idol" since 2018 and he knows exactly how to get the party started.
Johnson is an independent spirit who takes great pride in doing what he feels is "real country music," a message he repeated several times at Country Thunder. Johnson sent his first chart-topping single up the country charts last year.
Both sets drew rapturous responses from the crowd.
If you want to know which artists got the best reactions of the weekend, there's your answer.
If you want to which artists had the absolute best moments of the weekend? Johnson made the grade, but so did Hailey Whitters, who played to a much smaller crowd in her 3:30 p.m. time slot.
Here's our unapologetically subjective look back at our favorite sets.
'This is what made me who I am':Dierks Bentley came home to rule Country Thunder Arizona
Dierks Bentley
There’s always a bit of a homecoming vibe in the air when the formerly local Dierks Bentley takes the stage atCountry Thunder Arizonaas a headliner.
Next year marks 30 years since Bentley and his father loaded up the family truck so the aspiring country star could try his luck in Nashville.
And we all know how that turned out. He went on to become one of the most successful country artists of his generation, sending 18 songs to No. 1 on Billboard’s country charts.
After opening the show with two songs from his recently released 10th album “Gravel & Gold,” he told one of the weekend’s largest, most enthusiastic crowds, “It’s a big deal to be closing out Country Thunder in my home state of Arizona. This is what made me who I am.”
Cody Johnson
Cody Johnson’s hype man had something he needed to know before the man could take the stage: “Are you ready for real country music?”
It’s an important distinction Johnson loves to make. He’s a hard-twanging honky-tonk man who rode bulls on the rodeo circuit before giving real country music a try.
After more than a decade, he’s worked his way up to the headlining spot at a major country festival in Arizona, having built a dedicated grass-roots following — the CoJo Nation — largely on the strength of his commitment to keeping it real. And Johnson did not disappoint, with such crowd-pleasing staples as “Let’s Build a Fire,” “Y’all People” and “Longer Than She Did," holding back on "Til You Can't," his first chart-topping for a prime spot near the end of his performance.
"I couldn't get a record deal because they said I had to take my cowboy hat off," he sneered before appealing to the CoJo Nation faithful. "How many of you would agree with me tonight that country music hasn't sounded like country music in the last 10 years?" quickly adding, "I feel the same way."
It was a masterful bit of political theater, ending with a solemn vow.
"As long as I'm alive, you will always get real country music from me."
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Randall King
The spirit of real country music was alive and well at Country Thunder Saturday, where several hours before Johnson took the stage to testify, a young man by the name of Randall King opened his set with a song that had me thinking he could be the next Dwight Yoakam. Then he told us, “I grew up on old-school country music.”
By that point, we already knew what he’d grown up on. You could feel those old-school country roots informing nearly every nuance of his performance.
He even cited Roger Miller as a role model to introduce a highlight of his latest album, "Shot Glass" — “Roger, Miller Lite and Me" — in the course of a set that included a tribute to the country music of the ‘90s, from “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” to “That Ain’t My Truck” and “Friends in Low Places."
As King explained the Garth Brooks cover: "George Strait is the King of Country Music, right? But the King of '90s country will always be Garth Brooks."
It's hard to say where that leaves Roger Miller. As for King, though, he is definitely someone we would all do well to keep an eye on.
Country Thunder as it happened:Here's a look back at all four days in real time
Hailey Whitters
A lot of country singers like to talk as though they grew up in a small Midwestern town with a population of approximately 731. But Hailey Whitters did. And it shaped the artist she became.
She opened her performance Saturday with a heartfelt ode to “rich dirt growin’ up tomatoes,” and her latest album is an introspective masterstroke inspired by her small-town roots in Shueyville, Iowa.
That album, “Raised,” supplied a number of the better songs in Whitters’ set. There was one about being a little more "Messed-up Mary than Plain Jane" and another with a chorus hook of “They ain't left, they ain't right / They’re just left right in the middle of America.”
She waxed nostalgic on the boys back home to set up "Boys Back Home," whose title characters she says will "pull you out of a ditch or a bar, and they won’t be caught dead in no electric car."
And her spirited cover of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” felt more like a celebration of the folks back home in Shueyville than a desperate attempt to get the crowd invested in her set.
She also covered Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood and John Denver’s “Country Roads," but those songs also felt like natural extensions of her music and her personality.
Her fiddle-driven sound was more legitimately country than most sets we saw this year. Much like Ashley McBryde, she came across as not just likeable but real. And she ended on a high note, singing “Everything She Ain’t,” her well-earned breakthrough single, with a joy that can’t be faked.
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Ashley McBryde
Ashley McBryde is a future country legend in the making. Luke Bryan joked about her awe-inspiring lead-in to his own headlining set on Friday night: "You can bet your sweet ass on this; I will not sound as good as her." Sure enough.
McBryde has got a great voice. And yet, her gift is more in how she uses what she has to draw you into what she's singing, whether that's the darkly comic "Brenda Put Your Bra On" to "Light on in the Kitchen," where a mother lets her daughter know she'll always be there if she needs someone to listen, or "Sparrow," a bittersweet song about wanting to fly while waiting on the wind to take you home to see the folks you left behind.
She set the tone with a raucous rendition of "Made for This," a country-rock anthem about how, if you want to make a go of it in music, you've "gotta be made for this."
McBryde is clearly made for this (and then some). You could see it in the smile that rarely left her face in a performance so infused with joy, it was beyond contagious. And her comic timing made it all the more engaging. "I started playing bars when I was 19," she revealed.
"I told my mother they weren't bars and told the bars I wasn't 19."
Jon Pardi
As Thursday's main attraction, Jon Pardi brought plenty of hits to the table, including “Up All Night” (which included a snippet of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”) and the quadruple-platinum back-to-back singles with “Boots” in the title.
But for all the charms of songs as strong as “Beer Can’t Fix” and “Heartache Medication,” there was nothing else in Pardi’s set that felt as timeless as the title track to his latest release, “Mr. Saturday Night.”
It’s just that good, a deeply soulful highlight of an album that could scarcely feel more like the turning of a clear artistic corner.
Several of the strongest songs in Pardi's set — "Raincheck" to "Smokin' a Doobie" — were pulled from that same 2022 release. And his latest hit to top the country airplay charts, "Last Night Lonely," hit harder live, if not as hard as his opening song, which was a Metallica cover that had to leave a lot of people wondering why he'd even want to start a set like that.
Midland
That Midland set was everything you could've asked a country band to be in 2023, from the opening salvo of two highlights from a new release that feels like it could be their finest hour to a triple-platinum breakthrough hit. Mark Wystrach said the latter made it possible to become professional musicians.
Wystrach is a graduate of Tucson's Salpointe Catholic High School and he could not stop making Arizona references, which added to the charm of the performance.
But they didn't need that local flavor any more than they needed Jon Pardi to join them onstage for a spirited "Longneck Way To Go," a collaboration featured on both artists' latest albums.
Even their banter was brilliant. I think it was Wystrach who told the crowd, "You all are pretty docile, though," then deadpanned, "That means quiet."
Their taste in covers was impeccable, from an awe-inspiring cover of "Wichita Lineman," one of several Jimmy Webb songs that became career-defining singles for the late Glen Campbell, to "The Boys Are Back in Town" and Jerry Reed's "East Bound and Down."
It was the best set any artist played this year at Country Thunder Arizona.
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