Ryan Bingham & The Texas Gentlemen brought the All Night Long Tour to a sold-out crowd at The Hall in Little Rock.
Cowboy hats stretched into the distance as fans lined up outside The Hall in the unseasonably chilly night. Sold out for quite some time, the anticipation was high to see Bingham and suddenly, showing-up everywhere, Texas Gentlemen. Yellowstone has undoubtedly boosted Bingham’s popularity to new heights, and there seemed to be a mix of newer fans and die-hards alike.
The All Night Long Tour jettisons an opener and instead features two sets from Bingham with an intermission in between. The tour’s tagline, “No opener. Gotta be early or gonna be late,” was on the mind of fans as the floor and mezzanine were packed when the house lights dropped promptly at 8 PM. Ryan Bingham & The Texas Gentlemen took the stage for what would be two hours of music.
The show started with three cuts from Bingham’s 2019 release, American Love Song. “Nothing Holds Me Down” opened things up, followed immediately by “Jingle and Go” and “Got Damn Blues.” The first address to the crowd let them know that Bingham had “been writing a lot of new songs on the road” and that the band would be playing those as well as older favorites. The tempo dropped as Bingham introduced one of the first songs he ever wrote, “Long Way From Georgia,” from 2007’s Mescalito.
The Texas Gentlemen took center stage as the band launched into the unreleased “I Got A Feeling.” When the energy is up, you can really feel the depth that the band brings to Bingham’s music. There’s a reason that everyone from George Strait and Kris Kristofferson to Shawn Mendes have teamed up with the Dallas-based group. Fan-favorite “Wolves” also received the Texas Gentleman treatment, veering away from the purely acoustic version that fans might have heard on Yellowstone.
Other new songs in the first set included “Blue Sky” (“for all you lovebirds out there”) and the recently released single “The Lucky Ones,” which closed set one.
After a 30-minute intermission, things got back underway with a set that leaned heavily toward older crowd favorites. “Sunrise” got an enormous crowd pop from the opening and featured the first of many outro jams that would take place throughout the set. Bingham’s longtime fiddle player (and country music legend), Richard Bowden, had multiple show-stealing solos as the night progressed.
Bingham took his time laying out his introduction to music from his mother, and how he learned the guitar in the oil fields of Laredo, TX. This story led to a searing version of the classic “La Malagueña” and “Cocaine Charlie,” which details the exploits of Bingham’s dad and his friends in those Laredo oil fields.
As the night started coming to a close, Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen brought out the songs that everybody in attendance knew the words to. “Hallelujah,” from 2010’s Junky Star, saw Bingham do the heavy lifting by himself on acoustic guitar for most of the song, with an extensive outro organ solo. Bingham stayed front and center on a stripped-down band version of Grammy-winning “The Weary Kind,” but gave way to the full band for the set two closer, “Southside of Heaven.” When Bingham implored the band to “take us home,” the top blew off The Hall as The Texas Gentlemen and Richard Bowden embarked on a solo-filled outro jam that left the crowd begging for more.
The night’s encore brought more crowd favorites, with a solo acoustic version of “Nobody Knows My Trouble” (from 2015’s Fear and Saturday Night), “Sunshine,” and “Bread and Water.”
As Bingham acknowledged a thunderous applause from the sold-out crowd, it was clear that whether it’s with new songs or old favorites, Ryan Bingham & The Texas Gentlemen are a guaranteed good time.
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