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IGNYTE EVENTS presents: DOWNLINK and DIESELBOY at The Bluestone on Saturday, March 14th.

IGNYTE EVENTS presents: BLACK TIGER SEX MACHINE, BUKU, and MIJA live at The Bluestone!

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 Black Tiger Sex Machine

With Support From –

Attak

Thunder St Clair

Get Dangerous

Burgle

French Toast

Culmination

Vexxe

Visuals By VJ Vendetta

Country Music’s Rising Star,

Tony Jackson will be performing LIVE at The Bluestone on Friday, June 23rd

Doors for the show will open at 7pm

Opening Artist: Wyatt McCubbin

Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 day of show

Tickets will go on-sale Friday, April 21st at 10am

PURCHASE HERE

RESERVED LOFT TABLE SEATING

RESERVED TABLE PURCHASE DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMISSION TICKETS TO THE SHOW.  

Admission tickets must be purchased separately.

• Loft Lower Tier: $250 (seats four people-no exceptions)
• Prime view of stage!
• Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
• Server
• Exclusive Private Bar access

• Loft Upper Tier: $200 (seats four people-no exceptions)
• Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
•  Server
• Private Bar Access
• May be Obstruction in View

*All Reserved tables located in the loft area

ALL SALES ARE FINAL

    Is it premature to see Hall of Fame material in a guy who’s just releasing his first album?

 Not if that guy is Tony Jackson. To put it plainly, Jackson is one of the most gifted singers ever to grace country music. His video “The Grand Tour” ignited an unprecedented 10 million Facebook views and 200,000 shares in just over 3 short weeks!

The respect Jackson has already earned within the music community is evident throughout Tony Jackson, as the new album is titled.  It features songs and/or performances by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members John Sebastian, Steve Cropper and Dr. John “Mac” Rebennack, Country Music Hall of Famers Vince Gill, Bill Anderson and Conway Twitty and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame luminary Norro Wilson.

But it is ease with which Jackson makes every song—even the familiar ones—distinctly his own that sets him apart.  Who else would dare to try and then succeed in bringing a fresh layer of emotional urgency to such a classic as George Jones’ “The Grand Tour” or Conway Twitty’s eternal “It’s Only Make Believe”?

On the first-time and lesser known songs, Jackson mints his own classics.  With its sweeping steel guitar flourishes and ambient barroom clatter, he transforms John Sebastian and Phil Galdston’s “Last Call” into the sweetest, most affectionate separation ballad imaginable.  With reverence and a twinkle in his eye, he enlists Sebastian and Vince Gill in revivifying (after 50 years) the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 romp, “Nashville Cats.”  “When asked if we should recut the song,” Sebastian begins, “I said absolutely but we have to get Vince Gill, Paul Franklin and today’s real Nashville Cats in on the session and fortunately it was preserved on video,” he beams.

After capturing perfectly, the excitement of new love in Bill Anderson’s “I Didn’t Wake Up This Morning,” he moves on to a memory-stirring homage to Merle Haggard, Hank Williams Jr. and Willie Nelson in “They Lived It Up,” a lyrical scrapbook from Anderson and Bobby Tomberlin.

 Jackson shines as a keen-eyed songwriter in his own right with such memorable excursions as “Drink By Drink,” “Old Porch Swing” and “She’s Taking Me Home.”

 From start to finish, Tony Jackson stands out as a “discovery” album, the kind you listen to with such delight that you have to recommend it to friends.  And hundreds of thousands have done just that.

 Jackson is currently a headliner on the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Virginia, and is almost certainly the only major bank executive ever to abandon a prominent IT job in finance at a Fortune 500 company to embark on a career in country music.  But he didn’t grow up a country fan.

The son of a Navy man, he led a base-to-base existence, at one point living with his family in Rota, Spain for three years.  His early musical background was sketchy at best.  “I sang ‘White Christmas’ in the Christmas play in the sixth grade,” he recalls.  ‘Everybody seemed to love it, but I was a wreck. My mother forced me to sing in the church choir, but I was kind of buried in the voices along with everybody else.”  This was basically his entire musical resume until ten or so years ago when a friend whose band had lost its lead singer asked Jackson to try out for the spot.  “I did,” he says, “and I was hooked after that.”

 Two weeks after graduating from high school, Jackson joined the Marines.  “I told my dad I was joining because I was sick of taking orders,” he says with a wry grin.  There was as much getting-ahead as gung-ho in Jackson’s enlistment.  “I was a computer and electronics geek as a teenager,” he says.  “When I talked to the recruiter, he told me the Marine Corps had just started a computer science school in Quantico, Virginia.  Fortunately, I scored high enough on the entrance exam to go to that school.” It was a smart move.  When he finished service, a prominent bank in Richmond snapped him up to work in its Information Technology division, initially assigning him the lowly chore of re-setting passwords.  “I was way overqualified,” he says, “so I got promoted fast.  I was a senior vice president by my early 30s.”

 It was while in the Marines that he first started paying serious attention to country music.      “My mother listened only to gospel,” he says.  “My dad was into jazz, hip hop, R&B, new jack swing—stuff like that.  But Armed Forces Radio played everything.  When I was living in Spain—when I was 10 to 13—Randy Travis came over there on a USO tour.  Some friends and I were out there early when they were setting up the stage, and we actually got to talk to him before we realized he was the guy who’d be performing later.  He was really cool to us. In the Marine Corps, when my friends and I played music for each other, we were all homesick.   So when you’d listen to these country songs that talked about family and home and heartbreak, it would really grab you.”

Joe Diffie LIVE at The Bluestone on June 29th, 2018

*Opening Artist: Dillon Carmichael and David Adam Byrnes

*Doors for the show will open at 7PM

*Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 day of show

Tickets On-Sale Now!

Joe Diffie was regarded by many of his peers as one of the better vocalists in contemporary country, and lent his traditional sensibilities to humorous, rock-tinged novelties and plaintive ballads. Diffie was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1958 and grew up in a musical family, first performing in public at age four with his aunt’s country band. He played in a rock band during high school, and later moved on to a gospel quartet and, during college, a bluegrass band called the Special Edition. He worked on his songwriting and singing over the next few years while working in a foundry, and caught a break when his “Love on the Rocks” was recorded by Hank Thompson. When Randy Travis nearly recorded another of his songs, Diffie was convinced he had a shot in the business, and moved to Nashville in 1986. He took a job at the Gibson guitar plant while continuing to write songs, and became an in-demand demo singer as well. Holly Dunn’s 1989 recording of a Diffie collaboration, “There Goes My Heart Again,” proved a major hit, and Diffie found himself a hot commodity. He signed with Epic and released his debut album, A Thousand Winding Roads, in 1990. His first single, “Home,” went all the way to number one on the country charts, and “If the Devil Danced (In Empty Pockets)” duplicated that feat; meanwhile, two more singles from the album, “If You Want Me To” and “New Way (To Light Up an Old Flame),” reached number two.

Diffie became a regular hitmaker over the rest of the ’90s, and scored again with his sophomore LP, 1992’s Regular Joe; “Is It Cold in Here” and “Ships That Don’t Come In” both made the Top Five. Known primarily for his ballads at this point in his career, Diffie switched things up with 1993’s Honky Tonk Attitude, which emphasized his rambunctious, rocking side and sense of humor, and proved to be his biggest-selling album yet. The title track, “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die),” and “John Deere Green” all went Top Five. Sticking with engaging humor as the selling point of his hugely popular follow-up, 1994’s Third Rock from the Sun, Diffie scored two number ones with the title track and “Pickup Man,” plus a Top Five hit in “So Help Me Girl.” 1995 brought a holiday album, Mr. Christmas, as well as a proper release in Life’s So Funny, which gave Diffie his fifth number one hit in “Bigger Than the Beatles.” 1997’s Twice Upon a Time saw his commercial momentum slipping a bit, and so Epic issued a Greatest Hits compilation the following year; its new song, “Texas Sized Heartache,” returned Diffie to the Top Five. 1999’s A Night to Remember was the most straight-ahead, traditional country record Diffie had yet recorded, and it gave him two Top Ten hits in the title cut and “It’s Always Somethin’.” He returned to his more established style for 2001’s In Another World, which found him transferred to Sony’s reactivated Monument subsidiary; its title track went Top Ten early the next year. Tougher Than Nails followed in 2004, then in 2010 Diffie returned to bluegrass for Homecoming: The Bluegrass Album, which was released by Rounder Records and was greeted by warm reviews.

Diffie had a bit of an unexpected revival in early 2013, when his name provided the chorus of Jason Aldean’s party-hearty hit “1994.” Later that year, Diffie set out on the road with fellow country singers Sammy Kershaw and Aaron Tippin on a tour called All in the Same Boat; the trio released an accompanying album of the same name in May. ~ Steve Huey, Rovi