Eric Church takes over Nashville's Country Hall of Fame for intimate set

Eric Church's first of two nights as the latest of 18 artists since 2003 to be celebrated by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Artist-in-Residence program was an intimate and theatrical Broadway-style presentation of a 19-song, two-hour concert by the "Chief"-nicknamed singer-songwriter (and a nine-piece band) soon to open a six-story honky-tonk on Lower Broadway.

Playing roughly three-quarters of the way through a 33-date run of 2023 shows with acts including outlaw-style upstart Jackson Dean, road warriors Whiskey Myers and Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association Female Artist and Vocalist of the Year Lainey Wilson put Church and crew in mid-season form.

However, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's CMA Theater is roughly one-tenth the size of Orange Beach, Alabama's Wharf Amphitheater he played just two weeks ago.

Before the performance, venerated music historian and journalist Robert K. Oermann recalled a night 17 years before Tuesday when Church's debut album "Sinners Like Me" premiered in the Hall and Museum's Ford Theater.

The Ford Theater is roughly two-thirds smaller than the CMA Theater (which was opened 14 years after the Ford).

One thing remained similar from the Ford to the stadiums and amphitheaters where Church now regularly plays and back to a crowd at the CMA Theater primarily comprised of members of his "Church Choir" fan club, friends and family.

"The crowds nail it; they [sing] along to every song," stated Oermann.

Alongside Church, the show featured 2007 Hall inductee (and 2009 Artist-in-Residence) Vince Gill, honoring Church's brother Brandon's 2018 passing after suffering back-to-back seizures with a stirring acoustic rendition of his three-decade-old classic "Go Rest High on That Mountain."

If looking for pyrotechnics, this wasn't that show.

If looking for Church, often appearing bewildered by the impact of his catalog on those he cares about deepest sitting mere feet from his face in a unique concert hall setting, getting up from his stool and humbly reflecting on a rare career moment, that's the type of event this was, instead.

The concert was a career retrospective that began as a review from an artist's perspective who, in the face of blunt, brutal criticism, had to remain self-deprecating beyond a fault to continue undaunted.

Then, his appeal became undeniable as success arrived via his handiwork and a rare-to-Nashville groundswell of support from outside of Music City's industrial machine. To reflect this, the mood of Church's Tuesday night on-stage presentation turned stubbornly self-reverential.

At that point, the performance felt more like Rocky with his beleaguered arms held high after 15 rounds against Ivan Drago than the proud celebration of shining accomplishments.

Church's pride in remaining steadfast to an iconoclastic blues, pop and Southern rock-driven perspective of the genre's mainstream yielded four standing ovations in under an hour at the CMA Theater for not just Gill's appearance but "Why Not Me" (as a reference to the Highway 91 Festival tragedy in Las Vegas), "Heart and Soul" double-album track "Through My Ray-Bans" and the song he revealed was his favorite of his career -- 2015 "Mr. Misunderstood" album track "Holdin' My Own."

Glimmers of hope and award-winning acclaim cast against an unbelievably tough life and career journey gained a new level of thunderous appreciation from those in attendance.

Songs were interspersed with a retro-style TV playing black-and-white images from Church's past.

Church -- a Western North Carolina mountain-born son of a furniture upholstery company president who cut his teeth by playing Jimmy Buffett cover songs in dive bars -- played videos with voiceovers lampooning his craft for featuring a "limited" vocal range, plus calling him a "sellout" because his style was so unwaveringly and potentially inauthentically on the nose of the space where good-time blues, party-ready rock and quiet, singer-songwriter country align.

In 2023's country music, those qualities sonically equate with something akin to Morgan Wallen streaming billions of times on Spotify or HARDY playing or writing on almost two dozen No. 1 hits in a decade.

Clearly, Church's remaining stuck to his guns yielded a continuing cycle of unprecedented country acclaim that has sustained the genre's core demographics while appealing to intrigued mainstream ears.

Five years into his work, he faced Capitol Nashville readying to drop him from the label for his caustic attitude and lack of "hit" material -- he hadn't achieved a platinum-selling album or chart-topping success yet.

Fans in the crowd laughed as a voicemail from a label executive was tentative yet forceful in demanding more easily marketable material was played on the screen.

Choruses like "drink a little drink, smoke a little smoke" have apparent entertainment value. However, as far as anthemic material that connects with fans who aren't just people who like high living, whiskey-bent life in creek-lined valleys, he had not conveyed those songs as yet.

In that context, his 2011 album "Chief"'s track "Country Music Jesus" sounds like Alabama's "Mountain Music," while "Springsteen" sounds like countrified covers of "The Boss"' Greatest Hits compilation. By the time Church launched into 2015's "Mr. Misunderstood," the supreme modern-era country hitmaker that Church evolved into appeared.

In all three songs, conscious lyrical confidence unfurls from Chief's voice, which, without context in 2023, makes his earlier catalog even more profound.

However, with the way Church's concert was presented in the CMA Theater, the context offered a phenomenal revelation:

When a "Country Music Jesus" borne of vivid songwriting that casts Church as late-era Johnny Cash by way of Moses on Mount Sinai tells you to "drink and little drink and smoke a little smoke," it's more than just a party -- it's a riveting invocation of screamin' and shoutin' on a stone-built foundation.

Church's mainstream career enters a two-decade-long run where multiple North Carolina mountain men have achieved all-genre Hot 100 chart-topping country music success.

Oliver Anthony and Luke Combs have also recently faced criticism for being artists with limited vocal range and performing material that feels inauthentic to their humanity. Like Church, though, both remain undaunted and when asked, ready to throw up a middle finger in anger and stick to their own decent and honest artistic vision.

Show-closer "Holdin' My Own" also defines the standard upon which country music's outlaw inspirations now exist as a mainstream expectation.

As Church did, set forth on an audacious journey that yields as many "big fishes" as "stitches." As long as God and family remain first and a clear head and pure heart guide that quest, it will yield hard-earned, sustainable success.