Margo Price at Damrosch Park Bandshell

Lukas Nelson & Margo Price

Margo Price grew up in Aledo, Illinois (pop. 3,612), where she played piano and sang in a church choir before studying dance and theater at  nearby university. She left school in 2003, however, and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. There, the 20-year-old Price waited tables, installed and removed residential siding, and taught dance to children. She soon met bass player and future husband Jeremy Ivey, and they played together in Secret Handshake, a band that played political songs only, before they started Buffalo Clover and later formed Margo and the Pricetags. Since releasing her debut solo album in 2016, Price has won prestigious music awards in the United States and the United Kingdom. Price's second and most recent album, All American Made, was released on October 20, 2017.

Margo Price provided the finale to the annual summer-long Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors season as the headliner of the final night of the two-day Americana festival at the Damrosch Park Bandshell. Price was backed by her band, the Pricetags, which consisted of Ivey on harmonica and guitar, Jamie Davis on lead guitar, Luke Schneider on pedal steel, Micah Hulscher on keyboards, Kevin Black on bass, and Dillon Napier on drums. Her support artist, Lukas Nelson, also joined for a cover duet of Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty's "Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around." Price sang songs from her two solo albums, but demonstrating how she would not be locked into one genre of music, Price's rich, homey voice did a fine interpretation of Bob Dylan's "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine," Dolly Parton’s "9 to 5," Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz," and the Grateful Dead’s "Casey Jones," the latter song sung while she was playing second drums. Price moved to the drums twice in order to allow her band members an opportunity to flex their strengths through energetic jams. In the end, her Ameripolitan New York audience came to understand that Margo Price is a prolific, skilled songwriter and a bad-ass country singer who is bucking the current by foregoing commercial pop in order to nurture honky tonk, rockabilly and cowboy-blues with her own grit and truth.

Visit Margo Price at www.margoprice.com.

Setlist:

1. Don't Say It
2. Do Right By Me
3. Tennessee Song
4. Leftovers
5. A Little Pain
6. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine (Bob Dylan cover)
7. Four Years of Chances
8. All American Made
9. Mindless Heart
10. Stop Draggin' My Heart Around (Stevie Nicks cover, with Lukas Nelson)
11. Paper Cowboy (with an extended jam)
12. 9 to 5 (Dolly Parton cover)
13. Cocaine Cowboys
14. Casey Jones (Grateful Dead cover)
15. Hurtin' (On the Bottle) / I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink (Merle Haggard cover) / Whiskey River (Johnny Bush cover)

Encore:

1. Mercedes Benz (Janis Joplin cover)