Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

On a humid Saturday, Grammy-award-winning country music artist Sam Hunt brought his Locked Up Tour to Virginia Home Loans Amphitheater in Virginia Beach with support artists George Birge and Russell Dickerson. Despite that dense humidity, concertgoers were treated to a high-energy country music spectacular. The July 13 show was the sixth stop on the tour, which began on June 28 in Bend, Oregon. 

Hunt sent the more than 10 thousand in attendance home, buzzing with excitement. 

The parking area resembled a tailgate before a college-football game, complete with pop-up tents, wafts of food cooking on grills, drinks, and familiar tailgate games like cornhole and ladder toss, setting the stage for what turned out to be an absolute dance party, both on stage and in the seats. 

Most people will remember Saturday, July 13, as the night of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. As the news of the shooting began to filter throughout the amphitheater, fans already seated waiting for Birge to kick off the show were seen talking among themselves, sharing their phone screens with the various updates posted on the internet. None of the artists mentioned the incident, but as Hunt moved into his final song, he acknowledged the crowd trying to get a ‘USA’ chant going and welcomed them to start as they prepared for the final song, ‘

Once Birge hit the stage and the first few notes of Gavin DeGraw’s ‘I Don’t Want Be’ started playing, the news out of Pennsylvania was an afterthought. 

The Austin, Texas native expressed his appreciation and strong connection with Virginia Beach, telling the crowd it was the first market to play his song on the radio. He also told the already charged-up crowd he was playing a brand new song called ‘Missin’ Tonight.’ A teaser for the song was filmed before the show and posted on Birges’ Instagram account.

“This is the first city in America to ever play my songs on the radio,” Birge told the charged-up crowd. “ … Virginia Beach kind of feels like a second home, so it’s good to see some familiar faces out there, too,” Birge said. “And because this town’s been so good to me, I want to play y’all something brand new. We just wrote this, it’s not even out yet.” 

The short, 30-minute set was the perfect primer for the middle act, another of country music’s multiplatinum stars, Russell Dickerson, who called his stage show an R&B party and delivered. 

Donning a Brooks and Dunn T-shirt, Dickerson kicked off the party appropriately with the song he recorded with Florida Georgia Line, ‘It’s About Time,’ causing the packed pit area to raise their cups, signaling a party had officially begun. 

An already drenched Dickerson acknowledged the heat before breaking into his new single, ‘Bones.’ 

“I haven’t believed in a song like this since my very first single I ever put out,” Dickerson said. “So I’m just gonna play my brand new single that came out literally less than 24 hours ago … This song, I wrote for my beautiful wife.”

After a couple of his hit ballads and shouting out his sister-in-law in the crowd celebrating her 40th birthday, Dickerson picked the intensity back up with ‘My Girls Night Out,’ mixed with covers of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ and Whitney Houston’s 1987 smash hit ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).

Dickerson was the perfect choice to loosen the crowd for headliner Sam Hunt, who also brought incredible energy and crowd participation and even a brief run through the venue during his performance of ‘House Party.’ Jumping into the right side of the pit and running behind the 100 section and back onto the stage. 

Like Birge and Dickerson, Hunt gave the audience a reason to dance in their seats with his new song, ‘Country House,’ which he says is about getting back out into the country. 

Hunt gave his audience plenty of chances to sing along during his 21-song set, but when Hunt broke into a cover of the John Denver classic ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ the whole venue erupted.

That led Hunt into a two-song acoustic set, with his second Billboard Hot Country Songs number one song, ‘Take Your Time.’

Hunt said he tries to put truth into his music and ‘Cop Car,’ — the second acoustic version of the night — was the most truthful of any song he has written.

“I try to put some truth in all the songs that I write, but this song here, this next song, is probably the truest song that I ever wrote,” Hunt said. “It’s about an experience I had down in Birmingham, Alabama, back when I was in college.”

Hunt went on to tell a story about taking a girl to a spot near the airport where a portion of the fence was cut out to watch airplanes take off.

“Everything was going according to plan,” Hunt chuckled. “We were having a good time, but before the night was over with, we both ended up in the back of a police car. The silver lining is the officer gave us a hard time for about 20 minutes and ended up letting us go … But fast forward eight or nine years later, I ended up marrying the girl who I spent the evening in the back of a police officer car.”

Appropriately, that led into the title track from his latest EP, ‘Locked Up,’ a glimpse of Hunt’s road to redemption following his November 2019 DUI arrest and its impact on his marriage. 

Hunt kicked the energy to a maximum with six up-tempo songs to finish the hour-and-a-half set. If you can catch any of the remaining legs of the Locked Up Tour, whether you are a fan of the genre or not, this one will leave you wanting more.