While Kristy Cox has certainly played for a packed audience before at Nashville’s historic Station Inn, which she called “The Grand Ole Opry of bluegrass,” she admitted to some nerves on Friday as she launched her latest album Let It Burn (Billy Blue Records). With a sell-out crowd, Cox and her band Grasstime opened with an instrumental number that showcased fiddler Ellie Hakason and then led into the title track “Let It Burn.”
Calling the new album “a work of love” she played her cover of Lee Ann Womack’s “The Wrong Girl.” Through the evening, she played songs from her earlier records as well, beginning with “Good Morning Moon” from her 2022 Shades of Blue album.
“It wouldn’t be bluegrass music if we didn’t kill somebody now and then,” Cox quipped, introducing “Sally Flatt,” a “double homicide song” for the new album with Grayson Tuttle opening on banjo.
After eleven years in the U.S. Cox claims her Southern roots–hailing from the hills of South Australia. Introducing “South to North Carolina,” she said that when she feels homesick, she likes to head to the North Carolina mountains that remind her of home. She joked that, while growing up, she listened to such bluegrass artists as Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, and AC/DC, but developed a soft spot for taking a country song and making it bluegrass.
She played “As Steady as the Rain,” from the new album, crediting Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue, one of her trilogy of bluegrass albums. Hakason provided harmony vocals for “How Lucky Am I” sung on the new album by co-writer Jimmy Fortune. Through the evening, guitarist Robbie Morris also provided harmony vocals.
After a break where the audience was invited to sample “deconstructed cupcakes,” the band performed “Front Porch of Paradise, which she said she “wrote in another life.” She also played “I Can Almost Smell the Smoke,” her first number 1 song on U.S. bluegrass radio, “Don’t the Road Look Rough and Rocky,” the first song she ever sang on stage, crediting Emmylou Harris with introducing her to the song.
Over the course of the evening, Cox and her band demonstrated their range with the lighthearted “Some Things Don’t Go Together,” instrumentals showcasing their musicianship, and ending with her first Australian release that went to #1, “That’s Where the Faith Comes In.”
