Jason Isbell, Ashley Monroe, Jamey Johnson, Bobby Bare, Jessi Colter To Play CMHoF Show

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum will present a concert, under the musical direction of Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, to mark the opening of the museum’s new major exhibition, Outlaws & Armadillos: Country’s Roaring ’70s. The concert, exhibit and additional programs will explore an era of intense cultural exchange between Nashville and Austin, Texas, in the 1970s, when country music’s Outlaw movement was on the rise.

Outlaws & Armadillos opens May 25, for a nearly three-year run, with the separately ticketed concert set for 8 p.m. that day.

The unparalleled roster of artists slated to grace the stage of the museum’s CMA Theater includes Country Music Hall of Fame member Bobby Bare and a veteran crew of renegades and iconoclasts including Jessi Colter, Joe Ely, Michael Martin Murphey, Gary P. Nunn, Willis Alan Ramsey, Kimmie Rhodes (appearing with Delbert McClinton) and Billy Joe Shaver, all of whom are represented in the exhibit.

From a new generation of torchbearers will come Jason Boland, Jack Ingram, Jason Isbell, Jamey Johnson, Ashley Monroe, Amanda Shires, and Colter Wall, ensuring that the audience will experience an unprecedented and historic evening of melody and mayhem.

This special concert is being made possible with support from sponsors Ben Milam Whiskey and Luckenbach Texas, a legendary Texas music venue.

The museum’s new exhibition, Outlaws & Armadillos, spotlights the revolution that took place when Bare, Guy Clark, Tompall Glaser, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, and others took creative control from their record labels, in order to develop new sounds that were as frank as their lyrics.

Co-curated by museum staffers Peter Cooper and Michael Gray with Austin filmmaker Eric Geadelmann, the exhibit includes items such as the still where storyteller Tom T. Hall and the “bootleg preacher” Will D. Campbell made whiskey, the Randall knife that once belonged to Guy Clark’s father, the paintings of Susanna Clark, the outfit worn by Joe Ely when he worked at a circus, the remarkable photography of Leonard Kamsler and Marshall Fallwell Jr., the Gibson guitar played by Cowboy Jack Clement, and the Armadillo art of Jim Franklin.

The concert will paint a vivid picture of the era, in Nashville and in Austin, and its lasting impact.

“We pondered how to put on a concert that would do justice to this spectacular era and to these spectacular artists,” said Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young. “The only possible answer was, ‘Call Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings.’”

Tickets for the May 25 concert are $40.95 and include museum admission. The concert will be recorded for future broadcast on satellite radio SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel. The radio presentation will include additional content related to the museum exhibit. Tickets go on sale to the public at 10 a.m. CDT on Friday, April 6, and can be purchased here.