Whiskey Myers performs gritty set at the Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre, with support from Whitey Morgan and the 78’s & Reid Haughton

Multi-platinum country rockers Whiskey Myers performed a gritty set at the Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre on Saturday, July 6, 2024.

Fans congregated in the parking lot hours before the Texas group took the stage at the Sterling Heights, Michigan venue.

“Michigan thanks for always treating us so good!” the band posted on social media following the performance.

Here are the SWOMP photos from their set:

Whiskey Myers

“You can tell when somebody is faking it,” says Cody Cannon, lead singer and guitarist of Whiskey Myers, “and you can tell when it’s real.”

Whiskey Myers has been steadily building a devoted following with its gritty authenticity.

Each one of the releases from Whiskey Myers has been bigger and bigger — following their break-out third album, 2014’s Early Morning Shakes, their next record, Mud, climbed to No. 4 on Billboard’s country charts in 2016.

And that was before the group was featured in the hit TV series Yellowstone in 2018 (not just on the soundtrack, but on screen, performing in a bar), which propelled the band’s entire catalogue into the Top 10 of the iTunes country chart.

“We just bring our songs to the table and make it sound like us,” says Cannon. “We never think about it. We just try to go in and write a good song, whether it’s country or rock and roll or blues.”

“There’s never a plan or the sense that we need to make a song sound a certain way,” adds guitarist John Jeffers. “A country song could end up a rocker or the other way around — it’s extremely organic, and that’s always been us as a band.”

The band’s roots stretch back decades into the red dirt of East Texas, where Cannon, Jeffers and Tate first began playing together. They earned a rabid local following on the strength of their 2008 debut album, Road Of Life, and then notched their first No. 1 on the Texas Music Charts with the 2011 follow-up Firewater.

With Early Morning Shakes, though, the rest of the world started to catch up to what Texas already knew.

Esquire called them “the real damn deal,” while USA Today wrote that their music had “shades of Led Zeppelin and David Allen Coe.”

They took their blistering live show across the U.S. and U.K. non-stop, sharing stages with the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hank Williams Jr. and Jamey Johnson and racking up more than 300 million streams of their songs.

The band draws as much inspiration from Nirvana as from Waylon Jennings, and Whiskey Myers bursts out of the gate with the raging “Die Rockin’,” followed by such bruisers as “Rolling Stone” and “Gasoline.”

For this band of renegade brothers, the goal isn’t to fit into a format or try a new direction for its own sake, it’s to be true to the music they love — and with Whiskey Myers they continue pushing in all directions and sharpening their attack, whether country, rock, blues, whatever.

Taking the stage in support of Whiskey Myers in Michigan was Whitey Morgan and the 78’s, along with Reid Haughton.

Here are the SWOMP photos from their performance: