Blanco Brown wants you to hear his voice

Jan. 16—Blanco Brown's timing was good: He exploded into country music fueled by a viral dance and a country rap trend.

The singer and producer is now getting a chance to flex all his soulful country chops with 808s and hi-hats. Brown will perform Saturday at Downstream Casino, where he will lead a session of "The Git Up," as well as sing new works such as "I'll Never" and "CountryTime."

Brown grew up in Atlanta and was inspired by the OutKast and Jodeci music his mom played. But summers were spent with his aunt in rural Butler, Georgia, and the Johnny Cash and Tim McGraw she played were just as influential.

He became inspired to mesh the two musical worlds.

"Later on when I was about 23, 24, I started recording country records," he said in 2019. "And my friends would tell me, 'Man, you're Black. You know you can't do no country records.'"

Brown kept working on his combination of hip-hop and country, which he likes to call "trailer trap," while also songwriting and working as a vocal producer for Grammy-winning acts such as Fergie and Monica. He has also worked with Childish Gambino, Pitbull and Kane Brown.

His music caught the attention of BBR Music Group, a Nashville-based record label with artists such as Jason Aldean and Zac Brown Band, which put out his self-titled EP in 2019. His songs combine trap music styles such as 808 drum machines, aggressive synths and tempo with melodic strings, lap steel and guitar and lyrics about Southern culture.

He was experimenting with a different tuning on the lap steel when he came up with the twang that he looped throughout "The Git Up," which shot to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot country songs chart in just five weeks, and stayed there for 12. It also went viral on TikTok, earning billions of views across that and other social networks.

The song, which is basically a list of instructions for performing a dance, was named after a saying he heard from his childhood.

"I remember growing up in the hood and my grandmother saying, 'Y'all better git up and do y'all work," Brown said.

He recovered from a near-fatal, head-on motorcycle accident in 2020 that sent him to the hospital for a month as he recovered. His pelvis, arms, wrists and legs were broken in the crash. That recovery fueled a new surge to make more with his music.

Brown's music features much more than line dance steps, these days. "CountryTime" was featured in Netflix's "Ginny and Georgia." His covers of Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" and Chris Stapleton's "Tennessee Whiskey" gave him a chance to show a soulful range.

His latest song, "I'll Never," is his most emotional to date, enabling him to stretch his emotional and vocal ranges in a powerful ballad about everlasting love.

"It's amazing to me that people don't know that I can really sing," Brown said this month to Tricia Despres, of People. "People like Boyz II Men and Diane Warren have all talked about how my vocals cut through with feeling and stuff, but it hasn't been narrated in the country space. ... People hadn't really got a chance to experience that side of me because they were stuck on 'The Git Up.'"

Follow Digital Editor Joe Hadsall on Twitter at @JoeHadsall.