Doors: 7 pm
About Whitey Morgan and the 78s:
Whitey Morgan spent the first decade of his career raising hell. For the last decade, he’s been raising his son. “I’ve been raising my kid,” Morgan says. “Those first few years of his life are important, and I wanted to make sure I was there for that. But I’m excited about music again.” Hell On The Highway is a return to form in more ways than one for outlaw country legend Whitey Morgan. After releasing six full-length albums and playing countless shows over the last decade, Morgan fell out of love with music. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Morgan groans in a voice that’s just as gruff in the studio as it is on stage. “Anything you’re doing that long you’re not gonna love the whole time.”
In 2026, eight years after his last full-length studio project, Whitey Morgan is back with 11 new songs. Hell On The Highway is Whitey Morgan at his best: honest, yet brash; raucous, yet sensitive. With its explosive sound and hard-lived lyricism, Hell On The Highway puts on full display the life that Morgan stepped away from to raise his son, while confronting how that world coexists with the family he’s built.
Morgan wrote the album over a period of profound personal change, as his life shifted from the road to fatherhood and back again. He recorded it at Sonic Ranch with GRAMMY Award-winning producer Justin Francis (Tyler Childers, Gary Clark Jr.). “It was honestly the first time I felt I had someone on my side who was 100% ready to dive into it as much as I always have,” Morgan says. “I backed off a lot because of having that confidence in him.” For an artist accustomed to carrying the weight of the recording process himself, Francis proved to be an unexpected but natural fit. “I talked to him on the phone and I could tell immediately that he was my kind of person,” Morgan says. “He was asking all the questions that I would normally have to ask. He was pointing out all the nuances and tones in the recording that I would normally have to fix. It was nice to take that weight off my shoulders and pass to someone else for once.”
The end result of Morgan’s collaboration with Francis has left him more excited than ever about music. “I’ve never been more excited to pick up my guitar and play it.” There were years when Morgan wouldn’t pick up a guitar at home. His seven-year-old son had never even seen the iconic Telecaster that his father played on stage night after night. “But now, the living room has two drum sets set up in it, guitars and amps, and me and that boy we play guitars and drums all day. When we’re not doing something else, we’re playing music.”
