Jack Ingram

Born in Texas, country vocalist Jack Ingram built a body of work that earned both critical praise and respect from fellow artists while generating several major radio smashes. After a string of independent releases in the 1990s that drew favorable notices yet failed to register commercially, the honky-tonk performer finally broke through in 2005 when “Wherever You Are” reached the top of the Billboard country chart. Over the next half-decade he remained in the country top forty with “Love You,” “Lips of an Angel,” “Measure of a Man,” and “That’s a Man,” then scored his second top-ten country single in 2009 with “Barefoot and Crazy.” Turning independent once more, Ingram resurfaced in 2016 with the Rounder Records album Midnight Motel before returning to the summit of the country charts in 2021 via the collaborative project The Marfa Tapes, recorded with Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall.

He first established a following playing the clubs and roadhouses that stretch between Dallas and Houston. By the middle of the 1990s, after years of touring behind his Beat Up Ford Band, Ingram had issued two respected independent albums and had shared stages with Merle Haggard and Mark Chesnutt. A Warner contract arrived at the close of 1996, prompting the label to re-release his early independent efforts; the major-label debut Livin’ or Dyin’ followed in 1997. Shifting to Sony’s Lucky Dog imprint in 1999, he delivered the roots-rock album Hey You. Two years later he enlisted Lee Ann Womack’s producer Frank Liddell for Electric, while 2004 brought both the career-spanning compilation Young Man and the concert recording Live at Gruene Hall: Happy Happy.

The 2006 live set Live: Wherever You Are, which contained two new studio tracks, marked Ingram’s first release on Big Machine Records, the label founded by Scott Borchetta and Toby Keith; its title song became the artist’s and the label’s inaugural number-one country single. This Is It appeared on the same imprint the following year and yielded the hits “Love You” and “Lips of an Angel.” Big Dreams & High Hopes, his eighth studio album, surfaced in 2009, led by the modest chart entries “That’s a Man” and “Barefoot and Crazy,” the latter climbing to number ten on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs tally even as the album itself peaked at number twenty-one on the Top Country Albums chart.

After parting ways with Big Machine in 2011, Ingram devoted the next several years to crafting the folk-rock material that became Midnight Motel, issued by Rounder in 2016 and debuting at number twenty-four on the Top Country Albums chart. Two years later he returned to Rounder with his tenth studio album, the swaggering Ridin’ High…Again, which reclaimed the raw outlaw honky-tonk sound of his earliest recordings. In 2021 he joined Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall for the stripped-down, intimate collection The Marfa Tapes.