It’ll take more than being seven-and-a-half months pregnant to keep Hailey Whitters off the road. As she nears the end of her Corn Queen tour, Whitters, who is due to give birth to her first child in November, is still rocking cowboy boots and short dresses, and still delivering nearly 90 minutes of high-energy country rock that has made her a fan favorite over the past decade.
She brought her show to Washington’s 9:30 Club this week. As she mentioned to the crowd, this was something of a graduation after playing 9:30’s smaller adjacent room at the Atlantis last year.
With her accompanying five-piece band, the Iowa native, who is now based in Nashville, tore through 13 of the 16 songs from her acclaimed Corn Queen album released earlier this year. Though she opened her set with the album's first track, “High on the Hog,” and closed her show with the final track, “DanceMor,” it wasn’t merely a restatement of the album.
She mixed things up throughout, throwing in a few old favorites and regaling the crowd with stories from her own history, many of which formed the basis of Corn Queen.
Hailey Whitters occupies the high ground between modern country and rock & roll
The alignment of Whitters’ band on stage is a perfect metaphor for her music. To her left, an electric guitar and bass. To her right, a pedal steel and fiddle. Though her music is clearly in the country genre, there is enough rock and roll throughout to attract fans from world of harder rock.
After the rocking "High on the Hog” opener, the band launched into one of her biggest hits – “Prodigal Daughter,” initially recorded as a duet with bluegrass superstar Molly Tuttle. Whitters can lean into bluegrass as comfortably as she goes toward the country rock of “Wagon.”
In the middle of the set, she went full-on country ballad with the gorgeous “Casseroles” and “I Don’t Want You.” For those numbers, her drummer stepped out from behind his kit and picked up an acoustic guitar, while her guitar player switched to mandolin. And the bass played keys.
After those songs, the band returned to their normal alignment for a positively apocalyptic version of “White Limousine,” with the bass and drums far more prominent than they are on the relatively tame album cut.
She drank a toast with the audience before “Fillin’ My Cup,” saying “I really miss beer,” and then delivered a sinewy version of “Hearsay” featuring plenty of pedal steel accents.
Fiddler Josie Toney was featured prominently on a number of songs, especially on “Boys Back Home,” one of the few tunes from Whitters' earlier days.
She also showed off her Corn Flakes box cover photo, crowned a Corn King and Queen for the evening and offered plenty of encouragement to the crowd to follow whatever dreams they might have.
And she even delivered her own origin story in the form of the rollicking “Shotgun Wedding Baby,” which she claimed is highly autobiographical.
Whitters got strong support from Owen Riegling, a talented young country artist from Canada who, like Whitters, moves easily between the swampy rock of “Dan” and the standard small-town country homage of “Old Dirt Roads.” He served up a fine new single – “Taillight This Town” – which will be featured on his next album.
Hailey Whitters doesn’t exactly break any new ground in the world of country rock and pop. She is following firmly in the footsteps of OGs like Loretta Lynn through Gretchen Wilson right up to Kacey Musgraves. That may constitute a wide range of political belief, but the essential elements of loud, proud and outspoken country rockers are alive and well in Hailey Whitters.
Whitters has a few more dates on the current tour before taking a break to welcome, in her words, a brand new Corn Prince to the world.