Honky Tonk Happy Hour with Jacob Tovar
Fassler Hall
August 17, 2023
If you have, as Junior Brown sang, spent “Too Many Nights in a Roadhouse,” you can now get your fill of country music and cold drinks during daylight hours on Thursdays at Fassler Hall. Jacob Tovar has set up weekly shop with his Honky Tonk Happy Hour, a three-hour run of classic country and like-minded originals performed by Tovar, guitarist Johnny Mullenax and a rhythm section that may change depending on who’s got what gigs that day (for most shows, it’s drummer Paddy Ryan and bassist Paul Wilkes, and on this particular night, Josh Raymer on drums and Harvey Crowder on bass).
The residency is a continuation of its debut in July. Six weeks in, it was clear from the half-full hall that continued to get more crowded—and skew younger and rowdier—as the evening went on that people are showing up to this show on purpose, not just getting surprised by it when they come in for beer and pretzels.
This makes sense, because if Jacob Tovar stepped onstage without a band or even a guitar or microphone and just sang for three hours straight, people should still want to listen. If someone’s going to faithfully perform songs made famous by Ray Price and Hank Williams, it’s important to do them justice, and Tovar is one of the best singers around: strong, clear, pure country crooning. I wrote a brief review of his debut album in 2015 and called his vocal delivery “devastatingly charming.” I stand by it; it has gotten no worse with age.
His voice, especially paired with Mullenax’s pitch-perfect Telecaster solos, is so specifically good for this type of music that without a canonical knowledge of country or familiarity with Tovar’s songwriting, it’s difficult in this environment to distinguish which of the band’s tracks are originals and which are plucked from decades ago. (One notable exception from the August 17 show was a cover of George Michael’s “Faith” that came across profoundly weird but that the crowd loved anyway.)