There was an appealing symmetry to this double bill at St Mary’s Creative Space. Brennen Leigh has spent the last decade demonstrating that traditional country music can remain a living form rather than a museum exhibit, while Jackson Ward, from Lancashire, is making a similar case on a much smaller scale at the beginning of his career. One writes about the American Great Plains, the other about Chorley, but both understand that country music is at its strongest when it speaks honestly about home rather than borrowing someone else’s mythology.
Leigh arrives in Chester as an established figure in contemporary traditional country, touring selectively in the UK and drawing on a substantial catalogue that ranges across Western swing, classic country, and cowboy songs. Ward, by contrast, is still building his audience. He already has a confident second album release in Live from the Barber Shop, recorded at his family’s business, but remains at the stage where support slots such as this provide an opportunity to introduce his songwriting to new listeners. What linked them wasn’t experience or reputation, but a shared commitment to writing songs rooted in people and places they genuinely know.
St Mary’s Creative Space continues to establish itself as one of the country’s most rewarding listening venues. The former 15th-century church, decommissioned in 1972, could have easily felt cavernous, but careful staging, black drapes and an excellent sound system created an intimate atmosphere where every lyric carries. A vintage lamp beneath the stained-glass window, supplied by Roman Candle Promotions, who incidentally were also responsible for hiring the venue for the evening as well as bringing the PA system, added a subtle nod to old dancehall aesthetics, while the comfortable seating encouraged the audience to settle into an evening centred on songs rather than spectacle. The practicalities helped too, with both welcoming stewards and convenient parking nearby, but it was the deliberately curated venue atmosphere and top-notch sound quality that suited these singer-songwriters particularly well.
Leigh, accompanied throughout by her husband Kevin Skrla, approached the evening with the ease of someone entirely comfortable in both her catalogue and her audience. Skrla alternated between lap steel and his Telecaster, both guitars he had built himself, his understated accompaniment allowing Leigh’s songs to remain firmly at the centre while adding pitch-perfect support throughout.
Much of the evening’s charm lay in the way Leigh’s stories fed naturally into songs. Introducing herself as a proud North Dakotan, she described her home state with deadpan humour as America’s “50th most-visited state” and celebrated it for being “almost a perfect parallelogram”. Her kind humour was characteristically dry, understated and gently self-deprecating.
What consistently emerged was the way Leigh transforms intensely local experiences into something more universal. John Deere H, inspired by learning to drive this model of tractor with her father on the family farm, is unmistakably rooted in rural North Dakota, yet becomes a broader meditation on childhood and belonging. Likewise, Prairie Funeral, drawing on her Norwegian-American heritage, evokes family gatherings filled with four-stringed banjos, Uncle Lars’ accordion and songs from “the old country” before arriving at the quietly devastating image of someone becoming “the August wind blowing through the corn”. Rather than overly romanticising the past, Leigh treats memory as something lived rather than preserved.
The same balance appeared in songs inspired by the American West. Material from Obsessed with the West reflected a genuine affection for western landscapes without reducing them to postcard imagery. Describing the West quite sincerely as “that opus of God”, Leigh writes with obvious admiration, but also recognises that the appeal of wide-open country often sits uneasily alongside ideas of permanence and domestic life. Two new songs from an as-yet-unrecorded western-themed record in the Leigh-Skrla works explored those tensions further. No Man’s Land playfully imagined a female version of Big Rock Candy Mountain, free from household chores and expectations, while Wild Woman of the West examined whether complete freedom ultimately comes at the cost of lasting companionship, asking whether “the creeks and hills” can sit beside you in old age.
Leigh also remains one of contemporary country’s sharper humourists. Thank God You’re Gone turns an unpleasant former housemate into an Ernest Tubb-style shuffle, while Texas Tumbleweed grows out of her own unsuccessful attempt to catch a real tumbleweed, discovering they are considerably larger and pricklier than films would have you believe. Before introducing You’re Doing It Wrong, a song about travellers who never really leave home despite covering thousands of miles, she admitted the advice was “completely unsolicited”, another example of her gentle humour softening what could have otherwise become a lecture.
That self-awareness extended to her reflections on songwriting itself. “Folks, gotta break it to you… some of this stuff is fiction,” she laughed, before quickly adding that changing details does not make the emotional truth any less real. It was an introduction that gave added weight to Running Out of Hope, Arkansas, with Leigh revealing that the town itself is almost beside the point— a stand-in for the countless forgotten places where dreams have quietly faded. It’s that ability to transform the deeply personal into something strikingly universal that lies at the heart of her powerful songwriting.
Leigh’s enthusiasm for country music history also threaded naturally through the set. Discussing the Hawaiian origins of the early steel guitar before performing the playful and lilting I Want to Fly-a to Hawaii-a, or explaining why simply worshipping Bob Wills risks turning Western swing into “a museum artefact” unless new songs continue to be written, she made a persuasive case for tradition as something active rather than static. It is a philosophy evident across her own writing, where vintage forms provide a framework for contemporary songs rather than historical reconstruction.
Even seemingly throwaway observations became memorable. Comparing driving in America and Britain, she suggested that driving in the left-hand lane in the States means “putting the hammer down and driving like a psychopath” whereas in Britain it seemed largely devoted to “emotionally preparing yourself for the next roundabout”. The audience warmed readily to her conversational style, and by the encore, Leigh was taking requests before closing with spirited versions of The Red Flags You Were Waving and Steam Threshers’ Reunion, which nearly lifted the spire off this converted church.
Jackson Ward opened with Charlie Wells on double bass, the pair displaying the relaxed chemistry that comes from several years of playing together. Dressed in double denim with neatly Brylcreemed hair reflecting his day job as a barber, Ward cuts an understated figure until he starts singing. His rich baritone inevitably recalls singers such as Johnny Cash or Dale Watson, but the comparison only goes so far. His songs rarely attempt to sound American; instead, they place Lancashire firmly within the language of classic country.
That approach gives his songwriting its identity. Much of his material comes directly from life in and around Chorley, whether drawing on characters encountered in the family barber shop or familiar local landmarks. Beekeeping Joe offered an affectionate portrait of one such regular, while Homicide on Hunger Hill emerged after Ward decided Chorley deserved its own murder ballad, joking that he and a friend simply drove around looking for somewhere suitably dramatic. The result builds on country tradition without feeling like an imitation of it.
Ward’s quieter songs perhaps revealed even more. I Hope, inspired by Nick Lowe, carried a restrained melancholy in lines such as “I hope he sees your fire”, while Remember Me, recently performed at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe, showed how comfortably his writing now travels beyond its Lancashire roots. Elsewhere, self-deprecating and vulnerable lyrics including “I may not be what you consider cool” and “I may not be your cup of tea” appealed precisely because they avoided grand statements. His cover of Cale Tyson’s Travelling Man also highlighted assured guitar playing, with Wells’ buoyant double bass providing sympathetic support throughout. Ward’s set suggested an artist developing his own voice rather than rushing to establish a persona. At this stage of his career, that’s arguably the more interesting direction.
The connection between the two artists ultimately became an unexpected and welcome feature of the evening. Leigh represented what can happen when a witty and inventive artist spends years deepening their relationship with traditional country forms without becoming trapped by nostalgia. Ward, although at a much earlier point in his career, appeared to be following a similar instinct for exploring what is unmistakably his own identity through a classic sound. His songs are rooted in barber shops, Lancashire roads and local characters because those are the places he knows, just as Leigh’s songs belong to North Dakota, Texas and the wider American West.
Country music has often been reduced to surface details: accents, hats and borrowed imagery. Both performers quietly argued for something more substantial and alive, and their shared authenticity resounded at this gig. Leigh’s established career demonstrates how traditional country can continue evolving without abandoning its foundations, while Ward’s work suggests there is no reason that same tradition cannot find equally honest expression in contemporary Lancashire.
It made for a thoughtfully matched bill, not because the artists sounded alike, but because they approached the music from remarkably similar principles. The songs may have travelled a long way from the US and Chorley to be here at Chester on this Friday evening, but the ideas behind them turned out to be much closer together. I was only too delighted to have made the 2-hour journey on the not-so-open road to be there for it.
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