Concert Review: Strait from the heart country

Photo by Kyle Kurlick // Buy this photo

George Strait

The all-star teaming of George Strait, the Academy of Country Music’s recently crowned Artist of the Decade, with fellow Nashville superstars Reba McEntire and Lee Ann Womack did not disappoint Thursday night as the trio delivered in a marathon, four-hour-plus concert before a crowd of 15,000 at the FedEx Forum.

The pairing of Strait with two female openers offered a fascinating contrast, with the women providing a softer, more emotional counterpoint to Strait’s stoic honky-tonk.

Photo by Kyle Kurlick

George Strait

Photo by Kyle Kurlick

Lee Ann Womack

Photo by Kyle Kurlick

Reba McEntire

Performing in the round — a populist move that meant the most expensive seats on the floor had the worst view at least part of the time — McEntire and Womack strutted around the stage with their hand held microphones. But Strait, with a guitar strapped around him the entire night, would have no such fanciness. He stood straight and upright as he crooned into one of the four mikes on stands set up on each side of the square stage. Workman like, he made his way from one to the other, every two songs, like a hand on a clock.

Looking like a statue with his chiseled handsome face and crisp Wranglers, Strait and his mammoth Ace in the Hole Band delivered a similarly rock-solid performance, the only cracks appearing at the end when they played the exact same encore — “High Tone Woman,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “The Cowboy Rides Away” — that he gave three years ago in the same venue.

The possessor of a record 57 No. 1 hits, the most of any artists in any genre, he ran through a good number of them, including “Ocean Front Property,” “Check Yes Or No,” and “I Hate Everything,” in his amazing 30-song set. At heart Strait is a roadhouse country singer in the mold of heroes like Left Frizzell and Hank Williams, Sr., and he seemed most comfortable cranking out throwaway little dance numbers like “Twang,” the title-cut from his latest album, or wistful cowboy laments like Merle Haggard’s “The Seashores of Old Mexico” or “Amarillo By Morning.” But when called upon to deliver a pop number like “River of Love,” he did so gamely but without much feeling.

McEntire, on the other, had no such qualms. Her catalog is littered with nakedly emotional pop-country tales of women done wrong and picking up the pieces. “Fallin’ Out Of Love,” “Why Haven’t I Heard From You,” and the Kelly Clarkson-penned “Because Of You” were particularly well executed, and “The Greatest Man I Ever Knew,” a tribute to her father, was positively gut-wrenching

As a performer, McEntire was arguably the most successful of the three acts, a result no doubt of her many years of experience on Broadway and in film and television. She alone knew how to play to the video cameras that lined the stage projecting the 57-year-old’s lean and fit visage to the cheap seats.

She was also the only one to build a little show business flash into her performance. Closing out a medley of hits that included “For My Broken Heart,” McEntire brought out Womack to sing the Linda Davis part on her hit duet “Does He Love You.”

Later, as she introduced her performance of “I’m A Survivor,” the theme song to her former sitcom, “Reba,” her co-star Melissa Peterman came out as her Barbara Jean character for an extended comedy bit that included a joke about her auditioning for a role at a local theater that turned about to be adult club the Pony. And for her encore, McEntire was whisked back to the stage in a yellow taxicab, a reference to the video that was playing on the screens above, and exited in a dress as fiery red as her hair to perform her iconic cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy.”

For Womack, who opened the night, her duet appearance was the highlight. The Grammy-winner scarcely had time to build up much momentum in her brief 30-minute opening set, though she did deliver fine renditions of the weepers “Last Call” and “A Little Past Little Rock.” They were offset, however, by her other “duet” of the night, a performance of “Mendocino County Line” sung along — as part of a disturbing trend among pop artists — to a video of Willie Nelson sharing the vocal.

Desperate to keep the illusion alive, Womack gamely stared up at her partner, but all she got back was the cold, flat stare of the Jumbotron.

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