Riley Green Nashville Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About Riley Green

Riley Duckman Green was born October 18, 1988 in Jacksonville, Alabama — a small Calhoun County town an hour northeast of Birmingham off I-59 — and raised in the same town across multiple generations of his family. His maternal grandfather Bufford Green ran a local mechanic shop, and his paternal grandfather Lendon Green was a small-town musician and bluegrass picker who taught Riley to play the guitar before he hit double digits; both grandfathers feature heavily in the songwriting on Green's catalogue and the 2018 single "I Wish Grandpas Never Died" was written explicitly about losing them. Green played football at Jacksonville High School and walked on as a quarterback at Jacksonville State University, the same school where Combs played for the Mountain Lions before transferring out — Green's senior college season ended with him moving into the family construction business and working full-time on residential framing jobs around the Birmingham-Anniston corridor. He started playing Wednesday-night writer rounds at Mama's on Main Street and the Pig in Jacksonville on weekends through the early 2010s, posted rough demos to YouTube and Facebook through 2013 and 2014, and moved to Nashville full-time in 2016 after a self-released EP started pulling regional streams through the Alabama and Georgia bar circuit.

Big Machine Records — the Nashville label home of Taylor Swift, Florida Georgia Line, Brantley Gilbert and Tim McGraw at various points in its history — signed Green to its Nashville Harbor imprint in 2017 after CEO Scott Borchetta caught a Bluebird Cafe round where Green played "There Was This Girl" and "Bury Me in Dixie". The debut Different 'Round Here EP arrived in 2018 with "There Was This Girl" as the lead single; the song climbed to the country radio top five inside six months and made Green a CMT Listen Up artist of the year before his debut full-length had even shipped. The full-length Different 'Round Here followed in 2019 with "In Love by Now" and "I Wish Grandpas Never Died" extending the radio run; the Behind the Bar EP arrived in 2022 with the country-rock arrangements that defined Green's catalogue moving forward. The Luke Combs co-write and co-feature "Different 'Round Here" — released in June 2023 as a single off Combs's Gettin' Old album — became one of the year's biggest country radio and streaming crossovers, helped push Green into stadium-supporting slots on Combs's World Tour routing, and built the audience that made the 2024 sophomore solo album Ain't My Last Rodeo a top-five debut on Billboard Country Albums. "Worst Way" — the title track off Ain't My Last Rodeo and Green's first solo No. 1 on Billboard Country Airplay — sealed the headliner status; "Damn Good Day to Leave" followed it through the radio rotation as the second single. The ACM New Male Artist of the Year award (2020), three CMA nominations across New Artist and Music Video categories, Big Machine Records label loyalty through every contract cycle, the recurring direct-support slot on Luke Combs's World Tour, a sold-out Ain't My Last Rodeo Tour amphitheater leg and the country-rock crossover identity Green has built since the Different 'Round Here debut have put him at the front of his generation of male country-rock headliners.

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