Given that Ward Hayden hails from the seaside town of Scituate, his first record deal came from an unlikely place. In 2011, following a self-released debut album, Hayden’s band Girls, Guns and Glory signed with Lonesome Day Records, a country and bluegrass label based in tiny Boonville, Ky. — about a thousand miles and a world away from Boston’s South Shore.
In hindsight, however, it’s not the Scituate-to-Boonville pipeline that’s most surprising. It’s the fact that the label signed Hayden’s band over a young Kentucky native named Tyler Childers.
“I’m sure they regret that at this point,” says Hayden, whose roots-rock band now bills itself as Ward Hayden and the Outliers. “He was just a young kid from the area, and I think they might have overlooked him a little bit.”
Over a half-dozen album releases, that red-headed kid from the Bluegrass State has become one of the leading voices of independent country music. In a first for a country artist at Boston Calling, Childers will headline Saturday, the middle day of the 13th edition of New England’s biggest music festival, wedged between Ed Sheeran on Friday and the Killers on Sunday.
If you have a hankering for down-home music, there’ll be plenty of that on the Saturday lineup, including the Georgia sister trio the Castellows, Texas songwriter Tanner Usrey, and the fast-rising Alabama band Red Clay Strays. That group will stick around Boston to open for the Rolling Stones at Gillette Stadium on May 30.
Over the past few years, music that leans southward has been enjoying mainstream approval on a level approaching the “Urban Cowboy” craze of the early 1980s. Crossover star Kane Brown is headlining Fenway Park in July. Next month the relative newcomer Zach Bryan plays the first of two shows at Gillette Stadium. And of course one of the world’s biggest personalities, Beyoncé, has dominated this year’s pop conversation with her own brand of Lone Star State music.
Beginning with that coveted Rolling Stones gig, the Red Clay Strays are poised for a breakout summer. Their 2022 song “Wondering Why,” a throwback triple-time ballad with a soulful vocal from frontman Brandon Coleman, made the band a surprise viral sensation. This week they released “Wanna Be Loved,” the lead single from the band’s forthcoming second album, produced by music-awards mainstay Dave Cobb.
“We all agree that this album is a thousand times better than what we have out,” says cofounder Andrew Bishop, the band’s bassist. “I think it’s gonna blow some minds, hopefully.”
He credits Cobb for the band’s rapid evolution: “There’s a reason that man has so many Grammys. He just pulls the magic out of you.”
Hayden and his band are usually touring in Europe in the springtime, but this year the stars aligned. His first invitation to play his hometown festival came as he and his wife are preparing for the birth of their second child.
Having toured extensively across parts of the country where chicken and waffles are inseparable, Hayden and his band still startle some folks when they say they’re from Boston.
“Half the time they think we’re saying ‘Austin,’” he says.
Like Hayden, the Outliers’ newest member, bassist Greg Hall, grew up south of Boston loving the music of the American South. Hall is from Brockton, where his parents raised him on a steady diet of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, George Strait, and Randy Travis.
“He’s a bit of a unicorn,” says Hayden, about whom the same might be said. For Hayden, the lovesick blues of Hank Williams began to make perfect sense in his young adulthood, when he experienced a bout with heartache. A child of the ‘90s, he describes his music as “some kind of blend of Weezer and Hank.”
“When I got into old-school country music, nobody wanted to ride in my car anymore,” he recalls with a laugh. “I’d be riding around listening to Jimmie Rodgers yodeling, and my friends didn’t really understand what I was getting out of it.”
The Red Clay Strays cut their teeth in the beachfront bars of the Gulf Coast, playing crowd-pleasing cover versions of songs by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Elvis Presley, among many others.
“It was a big timeline of music,” says Bishop. “That’s something we think is beneficial to any band — that grind, learning how to work a crowd. We didn’t have a set list, and we’d play for four hours.”
Sometimes, Bishop recalls, Coleman would turn to the band and announce, “Hey, we’re doing Alabama Shakes,” or “This one’s in D.”
“And it’d be, ‘Oh, shoot, here we go again.’ That really shapes a band. It makes you tight. You have to listen.”
Though Bishop and his bandmates are big fans of Childers, they’re more excited to absorb the usual Boston Calling eclecticism of this year’s lineup at the Harvard Athletic Complex. They’re eager to catch the Killers, Hozier, and Leon Bridges, Bishop says, and his fiancee will be front and center for Megan Thee Stallion.
In fact, despite being a key booking for Boston Calling’s unofficial “country day,” the Strays don’t especially consider themselves a country band.
“We have a little joke,” says Bishop. “We call it ‘non-dom’ — non-denominational rock ‘n’ roll. It’s kind of for everyone.”
Back when Hayden’s band was signed to that Kentucky label, a friend brought them to see Childers perform in a local bar. Hayden knew right away that this was a special talent in the making.
“But would I have thought he’d be playing arenas? I didn’t think anybody playing that style would be playing arenas.”
After years of working overtime for his own music to be heard, Hayden is only too happy to embrace the surge of interest in roots music.
“I hope I’m not misreading the landscape,” he says, “but it does feel like country music is having a moment.”
BOSTON CALLING
Harvard Athletic Complex, 65 N. Harvard St., Allston. May 24-26. Gates open at 1 p.m. Tickets starting at $196. www.bostoncalling.com
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.