Vernon Hinesley

Vernon Hinesley has fans who have always enjoyed the eclectic elements he puts in his music and songs, but his latest effort shows him evolving into an artist who defies classification. While he is composing songs that still explore traditional country. His Red Dirt country sound and Southern Rock elements have begun to eclipse a style of music that most people and/or critics have labeled “Spectacular” (or “Throwback,” as Vernon called his latest concert event) country. His dream to relocate to Nashville finds Vernon drawing from his earliest influences, rather than his record of his artistic journey.
His early memories of music that “struck a chord,” as Vernon says, recall Elvis Presley, Vince Gill, Bill Withers, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Toby Keith, Charlie Rich, Alan Jackson, along with a Hodge podge of mainstream and red dirt country artists who put forth elements of folk and blues in their songs as well.

Vernon’s live performances have taken him from the Texas and Midwest Honky Tonks where people are two-stepping and raising their bottles, to where he says he is starting to feel even more at home, where people come to listen to a storyteller at work. Audiences at the performances are compelled to listen–to go down the same road together, on the same journey, wherever the song takes them. That journey ends up above the production and sonic value of a pounding track: I want people to dance and have a good time, but there is a romantic part of me that wants to believe it is all derived from an honesty and passion in music that has substance and meaning, not just a loop or hip-hop beat and words that rhyme.1