INSIGHT Magazine September 2016 | Page 18

Music INSIGHT Scotty McCreery by Benjamin Nunnally To hear Scotty McCreery sing for the first time can be a bit of a shock. The 22-year-old American Idol winner has a boyish charm about him, but his Southernaccented baritone singing voice pours out on songs like “I Love You This Big,” “The Trouble with Girls” and “Southern Belle” in a way that calls to mind country music stars like George Strait, Garth Brooks and Conway Twitty. His voice is a wake-up call: this guy is serious about country. 18 McCreery is performing at the Oxford Performing Arts Center on Sept. 29, and we got a chance to talk to him in advance of the show about his love of sharing country music, his new book and what he’d do with a time machine: You do a lot of medleys at your shows, playing older country songs like “Mama Tried” and “Mountain Music” by Merle Haggard and Alabama, and you put these songs together in a way that really works. How do you decide what's going into the medleys? September 2016 INSIGHT