For the past 15 years, Luke Bryan has reserved a handful of his tour stops for places where most tours never stop: rural America. He calls it the Farm Tour, and the crowds have grown from just 2,000 to more than 20,000. We caught up with him over the weekend to find out more about his roots in farming.
It all started with some barn parties. “Before I moved to Nashville, we would play on the back of a flatbed truck and play in these fields,” Luke Bryan told Cowboys & Indians when we sat down before his show in Prairie Grove, Illinois, on September 19. “We would get our high school buddies and college buddies to come out. We’d take up money at the gate of the farm and do these shows.”
So when it came time for Bryan to leave for Nashville to launch his country music career in 2001, he decided to keep making those barn parties a priority. The first official Farm Tour stop was at the Coffee Weed Plantation in Valdosta, Georgia, in 2010. Think of it as a barn party, but one with someone who’d released five country songs and had one No. 1 hit (“Rain Is a Good Thing”).
“I think there were probably 2,500 people there that first night, and we were ecstatic about that,” he said, adding that his Farm Tour became a way for him to play in the kinds of towns that didn’t have any 5,000-seat or 10,000-seat venues. Now, 15 years later, Bryan said he’s played these shows all over the Southeast, up the eastern seaboard, the Midwest and out west in California. “It’s just been something that’s grown year after year,” he said, “and it started with truly humble beginnings.”
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What the fans see when they make their way close to the stage set up in the middle of nowhere is a country superstar who they might never see if not for these special shows. And what Bryan sees is 20,000 people in a soybean field having a good time while bringing awareness to farmers and the farming communities. “And when I say farmers, I mean cattle farmers, dairy farmers, row crop and ag farmers. That’s the environment that I grew up in, and rural America gets kind of overlooked when you’re driving down the interstate. But it’s a very important part of my life, and anytime I can tell the story of the ups and downs of farming, I cherish that.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: Aaron Shriver
Not only does he cherish it, he makes sure he’s giving back in every way he can in every one of those small towns. To date, with his sponsors, Bryan has donated ten million meals through Feeding America and 90 scholarships to students planning a future in agricultural sciences. He’s also set up a program to provide grants to the local FFA (Future Farmers of America) chapters near the towns he’s playing.
All because he has his own roots in agriculture. Bryan grew up in a small Georgia town, in a family with peanut mill, where he worked in between high school and college classes, especially during harvest season. He described that process like this: After the farmers use a peanut digger to flip the plants up out of the ground to dry in the sun, a combine collects the plants and pulls the peanuts from the vines. That’s where Bryan came in. “My job was to get peanut wagons and tow them to whichever farmer was harvesting his peanuts. He’d load the peanut wagon, and I’d drive it back down the highway. It was a lot of work, but somehow, I survived it.” he explained.
Bryan’s father is 81, he said, and is still working as hard as ever. “It becomes the fabric of who you are,” he said of that family work ethic. “Even when you’re in the music business, it really is a part of who you are. Just keeping your head down and your eye on the prize certainly translated over into the music business. And when you breathe in peanut dust for two and a half months a year, you really want to go make it in the music business.”
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That persistence paid off for Bryan — and let him shake the peanut dust off — when he signed his Nashville record deal.
“I grew up playing gigs from the time I was 15 years old. I mean, when you’re a country music band going into a college town, you’ve gotta get creative on how you capture that audience with cover songs. I played ‘em all: George Strait’s “The Firemen,” Conway Twitty’s “I'd Love To Lay You Down,” Alabama’s “Dixieland Delight,” Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Fishin’ in the Dark,” and tons of Brooks & Dunn and Alan Jackson.
“When I think about my heroes and I look back on their careers when they had 30 No. 1 songs, I think that as long as my fans come on the ride with me, they may not like every song that I’ve put out in my life. I didn’t like every song that my heroes put out, but they were still my heroes.”
That’s Bryan’s perspective now, after having just celebrated his 32nd No. 1 song, “Country Song Came On.”
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“I really try to appreciate every accolade,” he said, recalling his first official chart topper, “Rain Is a Good Thing.” He was so proud at the time, he said, that that farming anthem was pulled right out of his upbringing. “Some of those sayings I had in that song were sayings that men around my hometown said: rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey. And we were able to put that in a song. And now we’re in a soybean field in Illinois, and there are 20,000 people who have decided to spend their Friday night with me in a rural town.
“I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
