Before playing the most high-profile concert of his career, Josh Meloy had a routine to keep.
Outside his dressing room, the backstage halls at the Criterion, a mid-sized rock room in downtown Oklahoma City and benchmark for up-and-coming bands passing through, were nearly as crowded as the sold-out venue itself. This was in early February, and Meloy was headlining the 3,300-capacity room for the first time, with parents, wives, children, aunts, uncles, cousins — anybody considered family to Meloy and his five-piece band — all welcome. It created the type of chaos that can make an artist a nervous wreck.
But Meloy was unbothered. He’s an athlete at heart, a borderline star in high school basketball who landed honorable mention all-state honors in Oklahoma as a senior in 2012 and never shook the mindset. He cleared the green room of friends and family, and pulled his bandmates into a huddle like a coach firing up their team before tipoff.
“I love you guys,” Meloy told his bandmates. “Be great today!”
Then Meloy took the stage and kicked off his biggest show in his home state to date. He hails from Hennessey, a small town in north-central Oklahoma, and still lives there. An hour to the south is Oklahoma City, the closest major city to Meloy’s home. His last concert there happened in July 2023 at the 1,000-capacity Diamond Ballroom. The crowd was strong, but the show did not sell out. On this night at the Criterion, there was not a ticket to be found. (Meloy joined Wyatt Flores, Red Clay Strays, Sturgill Simpson, and Treaty Oak Revival in selling out the same venue in the past five months.)
“My first show here, I couldn’t get anybody to book us in Oklahoma City. Maybe rightfully so, because they didn’t know who I was. So I started playing in the suburbs at these dive bars. Thinking back to playing to four or five people, 20 miles from here, and tonight we’re playing for three thousand,” Meloy tells Rolling Stone. “It’s just unbelievable.”
The crowds are one measure of a rise, but since the Red Dirt scene that made Meloy want to play music in the first place has suddenly become the hottest subgenre in country music, crowds alone don’t tell the full story of his breakout moment. In January, Muscadine Bloodline released “Ain’t for Sale,” a hell-raising rock tune that Meloy started writing and Muscadine’s Gary Stanton and Charlie Muncaster finished, enlisting Meloy for guest vocals.
“I met Gary and Chuck, and learned that we’re all like-minded, and we just hit it off,” Meloy says of the collaboration. “I had the song idea, and some of the chorus, but Gary was just an absolute mastermind at putting it together.”
On Monday, perhaps the biggest sign of Meloy’s potential landed when Whiskey Myers announced Meloy will be joining the group’s tour in July for eight dates as opener. In the last five years, perhaps only Paramount’s Yellowstone has proven to be more of a kingmaker than a Whiskey Myers opening slot for rising stars. Ask Shane Smith and the Saints or Southall — both of whom saw their profiles skyrocket in the past two years following a run as Whiskey Myers’ direct support.
“This feels like it’s full circle,” Meloy says of the Whiskey Myers tour. “It’s really cool to play with a band who inspired you so much. I’ve been going to Whiskey Myers concerts since before I could play guitar, and I never imagined then that I’d ever be onstage playing, let alone touring, with Whiskey Myers. I’m gonna be that annoying fan who asks them to play their first album, because I grew up listening to it on repeat.”
The attention is also forcing Meloy’s hand. Along with Flores, Southall, and Kaitlin Butts, he’s on the front lines of Red Dirt’s soaring popularity. But the others are leaning into it. Southall and Butts tour relentlessly. Flores does the same and has the backing of an Island Records deal. All three write and release music consistently. By comparison, Meloy keeps a light schedule, rarely touring longer than a few days at a time. He opts to drive his band in a decked-out RV to shows rather than get a tour bus. A record deal is out of the question. His most recent album, last summer’s Where You Came From, dropped with no fanfare or promotion. This is all because Meloy barely considers himself a musician in the first place.
“For me — and this will sound cliché — music is what I do, but it’s not my identity,” Meloy says. “I’m not one of those guys who lives and breathes music. Wyatt Flores? He’s music through-and-through. He’s a phenom. But I grew up not even playing music. I don’t want to dedicate my whole life to just touring and playing music. I like doing other things. I couldn’t be somebody who’s just on the road all the time.”
His fans, and his band, disagree. In the green room before the Criterion show, guitar player Wyatt Baker is making light of Meloy’s resistance to fame and complimenting his very-much-still-an-athlete looks. “Who wouldn’t like this guy? Look at him. He’s a fucking Adonis. And then you hear him sing,” Baker says.
After high school, Meloy went to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, intending to study nursing. He lasted a couple of years, but it was long enough for a full indoctrination into Red Dirt. He had an older sister at the college, and she introduced Meloy to the music of Cross Canadian Ragweed. During his time at OSU, a pair of concerts at Stillwater’s Tumbleweed Dance Hall — one by William Clark Green and another by Southall — gave Meloy the itch to try it out himself. When he heard Read Southall’s debut record, 2015’s mostly acoustic Six String Sorrow, Meloy was struck by the raw simplicity of the recording.
“Read Southall came out with his acoustic record, and I thought, ‘Wow, this sounds like it was recorded on a phone or something.’ Meanwhile, it was blowing up,” Meloy recalls. “I didn’t know anything about music then. I had just started playing. I thought, ‘Maybe I could do that.’ Up until then, I was naive and thought you had to go to a studio in Nashville if you wanted to record a song.”
Soon after, Meloy got himself a laptop and recorded the 2018 album Washington Street, which resonated with folks in Stillwater for its titular reference, a road south of the OSU campus lined with bars and music rooms. In 2020, he released “Met the Devil in Oklahoma” and it resonated across the state, along with college campuses around the country. It also landed him a booking deal with Cody Jinks’ camp, which he credits with getting him out of dive bars and into proper clubs.
Then, in 2022, Meloy released “Porch Light” — a song written about driving home after a run of shows to his wife and their infant daughter — and it did a lot more than just resonate.
“We had started selling some tickets,” Meloy says. “Maybe about a hundred a night, which was awesome, for us. And then I dropped ‘Porch Light’ and the rest is frickin’ history.”
Meloy had a word-of-mouth hit, and the crowds exploded. This is evident at shows, where Meloy gives his gravelly baritone voice a rest during the chorus to let fans sing “I’m comin’ home honey, leave the porch light on,” as he did at the Criterion. After “Porch Light,” Meloy’s streaming numbers soared. Today, he has as many monthly Spotify listeners, 4.5 million, as Flores and Southall combined.
Last July, Meloy released Where You Came From, his third full-length album and first since 2020’s Oklahoma. The record’s 11 tracks are his strongest yet, lyrically and musically. Most of the songs, including “1,000 Miles” — which takes the same traveling weariness as “Porch Light” but turns it into an angsty lament rather than a homecoming anthem — are regulars in his setlist. The songs are often intensely personal, like “Backroads,” which Meloy says was inspired by finding Jesus during Covid and assessing his own sins while driving down dirt roads. Still, none of the songs caught on like “Porch Light,” which served to remind Meloy that he never cared much about streaming numbers in the first place.
“There wasn’t like a crazy hit on it,” Meloy says of Where You Came From. “In my head, before that, I was thinking, ‘The only way you level up is to have another hit.’ Which is not true. It’s still word-of-mouth. That’s still working. I’m proud of that album, but what it did was give us more time. It shows in the fact we’re still touring and the shows are growing.
“I wanted to make something that I could be proud of, and not just throw out a single that sounds completely different every three months,” he continues. “I wanted something cohesive and respectable. It was almost like I needed it, to know that, ‘Hey, Josh, you can do this.’ Everybody has that imposter syndrome, and this was me conquering that.”
His own music is complemented by a tight band. Meloy and Baker are joined by Zach Holliday on steel guitar, Hunter Baskett on bass, and Devon Carothers on drums. Most of his bandmates release music on their own, most notably Baker, who opened the first of Flores’ two year-end concerts at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. This is something Meloy encourages: “I love watching Wyatt play as a front man. It pisses me off when he doesn’t do stuff like that. If he says he’s going to book a show on our break, and then doesn’t, I’ll go, ‘What are you frickin’ doing, dude? Get out there!’”
Baker appreciates his boss’s encouragement, but for the moment, he’s too caught up in Meloy’s own blowup to want one for himself.
“The growth is the weirdest thing,” Baker says. “When I first joined Josh, that itself was a huge step for me. The past year, it just seems like we’re constantly taking these steps up.”
Taking all that into consideration, the Oklahoma City show itself may have been Meloy’s best performance to date. Wherever he went, the audience joined. Fans hit a fever pitch when he drank from a bottle of Tito’s during a cover of Hank Williams Jr.’s “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.” When he got serious before playing “Ups and Downs” and remarked on how he and the band are “blessed,” they responded with sustained applause, letting Meloy soak in the moment.
He saved “Porch Light” for the encore, yielding the chorus to the fans, before returning to that same crowded backstage hall to receive more well wishers. Then, he got in his truck, made the hour drive home, and put his kids to bed.
Meloy has two daughters. The oldest is two and a half; his youngest is eight months. He’s already hoping they’ll become an outlet for him to keep in touch with his true self — the basketball star, not the rock star.
“We just bought a new house in Hennessey. I’m putting in a driveway, and I’m getting a hoop, and I’m gonna teach the girls how to play,” Meloy says. “That was my first identity, and I still love it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released in December 2024 via Back Lounge Publishing.
