Read more from our conversation with Tracy Lawrence and Clay Walker below. “But let me say this,” Walker concludes, “he always had it under control.” “I was pointing the gun down,” Lawrence interjects. There were some guns involved that were discharged into the bus floor.” Tracy didn’t almost kill me, I just thought he almost killed me. “Let me correct the record here,” he begins. Walker responded between laughs, offering his side of the story.
Reflecting on the humored memory, Lawrence offers, “I really didn’t mean to scare him to death like that when he came out on the road that’s just the way we were.” CMT captured a bit of the duo’s debauchery on an episode from their Probably Shouldn’t Tell You This series.
Their highway history dates back to the ’90s when Walker, an emerging act, was invited aboard Lawrence, a rising country star’s tour bus for a few stops. And based on their road stories, her concern seems reasonable. In fact, Walker’s wife put a tracker on his iPhone before he left home for this run with his old friend. Nearly three decades in, the legendary acts show no sign of slowing. Walker’s “What’s It To You” and Lawrence’s “Time Marches On” are just two of the countless cornerstone hits that helped define an entire generation of country music. Taking it back 30 years, their sequential success coming up through the industry into the new millennium shaped the sound of modern country music. The co-headliners road experience extends beyond their infamous crowd-rousing encore sets and shared appreciation for the stage. So that told me that we were really on to something special that this was gonna be a really good tour.” I’m not talking about for a few songs, I’m talking about for the whole show. “They stayed and they were so freakin’ loud. “Whether they were in their good boots, old boots, work boots, they took the boots off and stood with bare feet in the mud up to their knees,” Lawrence says. But to his surprise, the show drew thousands of fans. It had rained all week in Oklahoma, and as he describes, the mud was “knee-deep.” After slugging equipment in, he was sure no one would turn up. Lawrence expresses similar confidence derived from a show last year on that same run. I knew at that moment, this was going to be a sought-after ticket.” Courtesy True PR Tracy and I were standing there, and each just held one hand up in the air as a natural reaction. I’m not kidding, we couldn’t hear anything else, not even my band. “And when we got to the end of the night, we did ‘This Woman, This Man,’ ‘Paint Me A Birmingham,’ ‘What’s It To You,’ and the crowd started screaming. “We were doing one hit after another, watching this crowd build into this frenzy,” Walker recalls to American Songwriter. The announcement of this joint tour brings to mind an iconic photograph of the two enduring artists taken at a 2021 show in Omaha-part of a short “test run.” Facing out at a sold-out crowd, the picture captures the artists’ humble surrender to their fanatic audience, coming undone in response to their hit-drenched encore. On March 3, the neo-traditional frontrunners Tracy Lawrence and Clay Walker will take the stage in Charlotte, North Carolina, kicking off a 12 stop tour. A pair of powerhouse performers have hit the road on what is sure to be a nostalgic run of shows down memory lane.