Walt Disney Television/Lorenzo Bevilaqua
Ashley McBryde is the reigning ACM New Female Vocalist, and in November, she competes for the equivalent CMA honor, New Artist of the Year.
While “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega” was her breakthrough hit, she believes another song really put her on the map.
“‘A Little Dive Bar…’ did well…” Ashley tells ABC Radio, “but… ‘Girl Goin’ Nowhere,’ it changed my life, and it has touched some others, too.”
Ashley penned the moving, ironic ballad with the hook, “not bad for a girl goin’ nowhere,” after a high school teacher predicted her dreams would never come true. When she wrote, “I look around and I can’t find an empty chair,” she hadn’t experienced that yet. But the night she did would change her life forever.
“My Opry debut,” Ashley recalls, “we wrote it in hopes that I would get to sing it at the Opry someday. And then about a year later, I did… And there was not an empty seat in the house, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. So it was cool to have that moment… in the most wonderful place to play country music.”
And “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” still gets her, as it recently did opening for George Strait in Las Vegas.
“I was singing it and… a cell phone light, all by itself came up at the very top,” she explains. “And I was like, ‘That’s the person.’ And whether they were videoing or just putting the light up to say ‘Atta girl!’, I started crying again, tearing up.”
“That song, really, it always hits me hard… to know that might be a young person — or an older person — that is gonna decide to do the things they want to do and grab it by the horns, that is a big feeling.”
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