Luke Combs first set foot on the Ryman stage less than a year ago, when he played two songs on the Grand Ole Opry. Now the Asheville, N.C.-born country artist is on the cusp of headlining two sold-out shows at the hallowed, historic venue.
“To go from playing two songs on the Opry to having two headlining shows that are sold out is pretty unbelievable,” Combs tells the Scene by phone. “Obviously it’s a super-huge honor. I’m excited to have the fans coming out. A lot of those folks will probably be getting to experience [the Ryman] for the first time, too.”
Combs has only been actively pursuing a career in music since 2014, when he dropped out of Appalachian State University and released his debut EP The Way She Rides. After making a move to Nashville and building up a core audience on the road, Combs struck gold with “Hurricane,” a rough-hewn ballad about getting swept up in the moment with an old lover. The cut first appeared on his third self-funded EP, This One’s for You, but the momentum he created behind the song on his own attracted the attention of Columbia Nashville.
“Hurricane” became the anchor of his full-length debut on the major label — also called This One’s for You, the album includes five of the EP’s six tracks — and spent two weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in the summer of 2017. The single was certified platinum by the RIAA in June, while the album itself and another single, “When It Rains It Pours,” have gone gold.
“We don’t really know what it is about that song,” Combs says of “Hurricane,” which he wrote with Thomas Archer and Taylor Phillips. “I don’t think we ever thought when we wrote it that it would not only be something that almost everybody has heard, but be something that would kind of kick my career off and be our first No. 1. But songs have a way of having a life of their own, I guess. If they get out to the right people at the right time, they can really have an amazing journey. It’s taken me on an amazing journey. But I never would have thought that it would be what it is now.”
In conversation and onstage, Combs — affable and humble, bearded and baseball-capped — stands in contrast to many of country’s other leading men, like regular chart-toppers Luke Bryan, Sam Hunt and Dierks Bentley. Combs’ everyman status is precisely what he believes to be one of his biggest strengths, and is also what he believes helped build his growing, devoted fan base.
“I think people do relate to me being a regular guy,” he says. “That’s what I am now and what I was then. I came to town with a dream and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this and do whatever it takes to make it happen.’ I think people can appreciate that. And I hope that they can appreciate that, because it was a lot of work.”
Combs tapped Ashley McBryde to open his shows at the Mother Church, and in some ways the two artists are cut from the same cloth. McBryde spent years on the road honing her skills (Eric Church, one of Combs’ heroes, is a noted fan) and self-released two albums. Her single “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega” appeared on The New York Times’ “54 Best Songs of 2017” list, and she’ll release Girl Goin’ Nowhere via Atlantic/Warner in March. Combs and McBryde are among the growing contingent of country artists who manage to snag commercial-radio airtime despite making music that doesn’t follow the ultra-polished model of Bryan and Hunt.
“I think that people can feel a sense of themselves in folks like myself and Ashley,” Combs says. “That not only we can break through to the mainstream and be up there with the handsome guys, but that we can hang onstage and do the thing with anybody. I think people want to cheer for us, because they feel like if we can do it, they can do it.”
Notably, Combs was present at October’s Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire, killing 58 people and wounding more than 500. That mass shooting put Music Row’s connection to the National Rifle Association under the microscope, with reporters examining NRA Country, a program established in 2010 as a means of fostering country fans’ goodwill toward the NRA while offering visibility to up-and-coming country artists. Combs was an NRA Country Artist of the Month in November 2015, and he hasn’t been affiliated with the organization since.
Ever the everyman, Combs is not one for divisive rhetoric, whether the conversation is about politics or the much-belabored debate about what makes country music “authentic.” His attitude is very much “to each their own,” and it’s hard to argue with the philosophy of a man who’s seen so much success in so little time.
“If you’re doing what you want to do, writing the songs you want to write, and playing the shows you want to play,” he says, “then what’s more authentic than that? If somebody’s doing their own thing and people love it, then to me that’s as authentic as it gets.”
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