Just after nine o’clock on Saturday night, a cluster of women in their early 20s, wearing Daisy Dukes and cowboy hats, jostled with a few plaid shirt-wearing guys to form loose rows on the dance floor as a free line-dancing class got into full stomp to a Florida Georgia Line tune on the bar’s well-worn hardwood floor.
Along the wood-paneled walls, deer heads stared down at the dancers who were lit from above by wagon-wheel shaped chandeliers. Beside the dance floor an as yet rider-less mechanical bull sat roped off waiting for its legion of loyal booze-enthused riders to step up.
This isn’t a scene from an Alberta saloon or even an Abbotsford pub. This is a typical weekend night at Vancouver’s only country bar, the Bourbon, in the heart of Gastown where it’s not uncommon to wait in line for an hour to get in on a Friday or Saturday night, according to Sebastian Greer, the bar’s managing partner.
Greer had very practical business reasons for turning the former run-of-the-mill watering hole into a country bar three years ago. A country music fan himself, he noticed there was nowhere in the city for country lovers to get their fix.
“There was a hole in the market, and we tried to fill it,” he said.
And he’s never looked back.
“Country music is infectious,” he said.
Like it or not urbanites, Vancouver is home to a strong and growing contingent of young, hardcore country music fans.
Vancouverite and carpenter Rebecca McQueen, 28, is one such fan.
“You can relate to it,” she said explaining she puts on country tunes while she travels from job site to job site in her truck.
McQueen grew up in the Southlands area of Vancouver riding horses, a rural activity she said may have contributed to her love of the outdoors and twangy tunes.
Over the years friends teased her for her country tendencies, but lately she’s noticed more office-dwellers downtown embracing rural culture, proudly donning western wear, such as cowboy boots, as they zip in and out of their glass towers, she said.
Fellow city slicker Nicole Freeman is an even bigger country music fan.
“It is the topics they sing about that I like,” said Freeman, who works in sport management at UBC.
“I live in the city and I don’t work on a farm with tractors, but I still identify with the values of country music — everything from being obsessed with big trucks to the type of male chivalry,” she said.
Freeman sees almost every country act that comes to the city, including taking in one of her all-time favourites Keith Urban, who performed in Vancouver in front of a packed Rogers Arena last month.
“I am a sucker for a guy who plays guitar,” she said.
In recent years, the Lower Mainland has turned out its own home-grown bona-fide country stars such as Langley’s Juno-winning Dallas Smith, who’s signed to Vancouver’s 604 Records.
Since the spring of 2012, there has been a proliferation of “bro country” with good’ol boys such as Smith making country songs cool again, according to Mark Patric, music director at Vancouver’s country station JR 93. 7 FM.
“Country is hot right now,” he said.
There used to be the idea country was sappy, old-fashioned stuff parents listened too, but that isn’t the case anymore, said Patric.
And country is also not all about the guys. In 2014, he said he expects Maple Ridge’s 19-year-old soulful country singer and songwriter Madeline Merlo to kick up some dust.
“She’s the whole package,” he said.
Wes Mack is a Vancouver country act who got a taste of success in 2013. His single “Duet” made it to number nine on the 2013 Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. His next single “Our Soundtrack” is getting lots of Canadian country radio play.
Mack, who lives in Kitsilano, a stone’s throw from the beach, grew up in Calgary listening to classic country crooner George Jones and Canadian country icon Ian Tyson.
In his teens Mack rebelled and played in a high school punk band, he said.
He was inspired to go back to country and become a solo artist while attending a crowd-pleasing Dierks Bentley concert at the Calgary Stampede.
“I remember seeing, quite definitively, this guy with a green Mohawk totally into it and a couple of younger girls totally into it. He had the entire crowd in the palm of his hand,” said Mack.
The next day he wrote what he described as his first decent country song.
He moved to Vancouver in 2005 to attend UBC.
Before coming to Vancouver he never thought much about the way he dressed or what he drove, but in the city he immediately garnered attention driving his pick-up in his cowboy boots and jeans with a big shiny belt buckle, he said, laughing at the recollection.
“My friends all just thought I was this weirdo from Alberta.”
He said it isn’t hard to be inspired to pen country songs living in an urban landscape.
“It is just finding the little pockets of nature,” he said.
When he wants to work on a song he goes down to Kits Beach, sits in the sand, looks out across the water at the city, and writes.
Over the years Mack has seen the city evolve and now country music and culture is more accepted, he said.
In fact, one of the best shows he has ever played was at the Commodore Ballroom last April, when he opened for American country stars Florida Georgia Line, whose stomp-friendly tunes are a line-dance favourite at the Bourbon.
“To this day I have never seen people so into a show,” he said. “People in Vancouver were just going crazy.”
