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The Shootouts, featuring GHS grad Emily Bates, to kick off tour in Indy
When I was a boy, my late Grandmother sat on the edge of her bed every Saturday night listening to the twanging warbles of the Grand Ole Opry as they cascaded out of her bedside radio. The sound was tinny, the high notes reverberating off the radio’s plastic casing, the low tones bottoming out in a heavy blob of sound. But Grandma didn’t care. For her, Saturdays were a high point — an hour of “Hee Haw” on TV, then a couple more by that radio. I didn’t appreciate the genius she listened to at the time. I was aware of the Mandrell sisters, of Ronnie Milsap and the Oak Ridge Boys, but I didn’t recognize the importance of their place in country music’s evolution.
Despite those significant cultural touchstones, however, country music had changed. In the span of a century, the genre had transformed from the snappy, relatable lyricism of Hank Sr. and Loretta Lynn to the anodyne “rinse and repeat” stuff that airs today.
For her part, Emily Bates is fine with the modern stuff. She doesn’t consume it herself, but she doesn’t begrudge anyone out there who does. Yet Bates and her fellow members of The Shootouts have taken advantage of the vacuum the evolution has created, and they have filled that space with a sound that takes an old-timer back to those Saturday nights by the radio while offering new fans the opportunity to enjoy the sound of retro-country as something new and groundbreaking.
According to Take Effect, The Shootouts are “a band who effectively blends the retro ideas of Nashville with the energy of Texas swing and the grit of Bakersfield, (they) are equal parts traditional country and modern-day friskiness.”
Hailing from Bates’ current hometown of Cleveland, the band will perform this week in the Circle City at Duke’s Indy. Once that gig is over, they hit the road for Tennessee where they will punch a ticket for a stop at country music’s Taj Mahal: The Grand Ole Opry.
After graduating from GHS in 2000, Bates attended Denison University, a half-hour east of Columbus, Ohio. While interning for a local radio station prior to her senior year, she met The Shootouts’ frontman, Ryan Humbert. At the time, Humbert had been developing his musical chops performing cover tunes, then eventually producing his own material as a singer-songwriter.
“(Ryan) said, ‘I have a band, you should come out some time.’ And I said, ‘Hey, I sing.’ I did not tell him that I was talking about singing in high school for (Geoff) Price’s choir class and (Vickie) Parker’s musicals. I went out and did a couple numbers with him, and I like to joke that I just never went away.”
“The country band was really meant to be a kind of side project,” Bates adds. “(Humbert) and our guitar player, Brian Poston, started it out of their love for classic country music. They noticed that there weren’t a lot of people doing that at the time, and they figured they would do it and have fun as well.”
Humbert hit Bates up with the idea of joining the band, but she quickly waved off the offer, explaining that she “had enough stuff going on.”
Nonetheless, when asked to sing with the band for the 85th birthday party of Humbert’s grandfather, she agreed. And Bates, now marking their 20th year working with Humbert, fondly recalls the moment when The Shootouts became something more than experimental dabbling.
“I got up there, sang the first song, and I looked at him and said, ‘I get it.’ And we never talked about it again. That was just it.”
Drawing influences from a range of sub-genres beyond swing and Bakersfield, including rockabilly and honky tonk, The Shootouts’ aesthetic certainly hearkens back to classic rhythms once intonated by the likes of everyone from Buck Owens to Bob Wills to Tammy Wynette. And while both the subject matter and the music varies from degree to degree, what unifies the band’s body of work is the harmonizing effect of Bates’ backing vocals.
Supported by Humbert on guitar and lead vocals, Poston on lead guitar and Kevin McManus on bass, some of the best songs Bates and the group have produced include the sentimental “California to Ohio,” the spirited “Everything I Know,” the irreverent “Rattlesnake Whiskey,” and the wryly written “Cleaning House.”
Then, three years into their run, COVID arrived. Like every other musical act, The Shootouts had to clear their schedules and cancel their touring plans. Unlike many bands, however, The Shootouts benefited from some good luck and timing.
“We were recording (what would become 2021’s) ‘Bullseye’ when the world shut down,” Bates says. “We had friends who put out their records (a week before the shutdown), but we were able to delay the release. Also, one of the nice things about it is that it forced everybody to think about how to do this business a little bit differently, such as how to do shows virtually and all of that. We definitely made the most of it.”
While Bates is understandably thrilled about the upcoming tour and the high-profile stops along the way, for her the joy of belonging to the band is something elemental and intrinsic.
“One of the things I love the most about country music is the storytelling aspect of it,” she explains. “In the long-standing history of country music, that is really where it came from. That’s where it’s really so special.”
“I’m such a lyrics person,” Bates adds. “Any time I get a new album the first thing I want to do is figure out the lyrics and what they mean, and that’s what I think is special about classic country music, about what we do, and about the lyrics that are written by our songwriters. It really does tell a story.”
Besides Humbert and Poston, she also credits the band’s former pedal steel player, Al Moss, for his ongoing songwriting contributions.
By late last year, the band was ready to put together another album, but those plans sped up rapidly when they landed the chance to record with members of Asleep at the Wheel. Using a five-day window between two northern Ohio gigs, Ray Benson and his famous band offered their keyboardist, saxophonist, a pair of fiddles, Eddie Rivers’ steel pedal work and Benson’s vocals. In that short amount of time, the band laid down almost 90 percent of its upcoming release: Stampede.
In the subsequent months, The Shootouts added contributions from Jim Lauderdale, Buddy Miller and the Mavericks’ Raul Malo along with traveling to Nashville to work with Marty Stuart. In the wake of that production, the band is launching the longest road trip in its history.
“This is the biggest stretch we will ever have done,” Bates says. “We’ve gone out and have done some longer tour runs. I think our longest has been something like nine or 10 days, and we’ve played a lot, for sure, especially over the last year. But this will be, by far, our longest stretch on the road that we’ve ever done as a group. We’re getting to play a lot of venues which we previously didn’t have the street-cred to get into.”
The tour begins with a Feb. 16 show at Duke’s Indy, a familiar stage for the band, one that has “been really supportive and kind” according to Bates. The Indy stop will be followed by a week in Tennessee, several stops in the South and an early spring session at Austin, Texas’s famous South by Southwest music festival. After a couple of May stops in both northern and southern Indiana, it concludes in Cleveland in early June.
Bates doesn’t get back to Greencastle as much as she would like. Her father and stepmother still live here, and when she does come back, she makes it a point to spend her time with them, but even as an Ohioan, she acknowledges her Hoosier roots.
“It’s nice to see what’s going on in Greencastle right now with the new restaurants and the expansion of the university,” Bates says. “It still feels like home. It’s still nice to come home.”
The Shootouts will perform live at Duke’s Indy on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 8 p.m.