A (not so) long way from Walmart: Mason Ramsey at Joe’s Live Rosemont.
A dramatic dual diary of Yodeling Walmart Boy’s latest Illinois homecoming performance.
collage by Jake Harvey.
Roxane:
A few weeks ago, bored in class, I decided to search the internet for upcoming concerts. I had nothing planned for the weekend and thought some live music could be fun, as it usually is. As my laptop ran its routine search, “concerts in Chicago,” a somewhat familiar name appeared: Mason Ramsey. It took a second for the name to register, but when it did, a smile spread across my face. Mason Ramsey. Walmart Yodeling Kid Mason Ramsey. How old could he be at this point? His Youtube video was probably from around five years ago and he looked like a baby back then. I went to look it up. He’s 18. Ok, surprising. Then I looked up his recent music, which was honestly… not bad. Ticket prices weren’t bad. So I set out to find someone to go with.
I made my pitch to around six of my friends. I was met with a few laughs, a few “That’s crazy!” texts, and, well, no genuine inquiries. Until I asked Sofia. Always up for a concert and, most importantly, always a great sport, Sofia was in. “If the tickets are under eighty, I’m in.” Luckily for me, they were. So I bought the tickets, marked my calendar, and looked forward to an undoubtedly strange, but probably pretty fun, Friday night.
Sofia:
In 2016, I turned 12, saw All Time Low live—an emo band from Maryland, composed of true side-swept bang warriors—and naturally developed into your quintessential, corny concert kid. I began dropping grandpa’s annual Christmas gift of a couple hundred dollars on whichever artist of interest booked my local arena. All Time Low, Panic! At The Disco, and the rest of the eyeliner-wearing, musical theatre-adjacent musicians kept me busy in my early teens. Then, I turned 15 and it was Harry Styles. At 16 and 17, it was COVID (literally) and The Smiths (in my dreams). At 18, 19, and now 20, I didn’t and don’t care who I’m seeing. It was the concert experience I craved more than anything—the visual spectacle of grumpy fathers standing slouched behind their daughters, rowdy teenagers always and forever teetering on the brink of moshing no matter the beat, and groupies clutching the barricade as mightily as they did their spot in last night’s tent line outside (they’d been camping for 47 hours and plotted a wristband scheme so they could go pee). Live music is the ultimate social gorilla glue, an indifferent piper whistling to freaks and geeks and whoever else yearns to sweat and sing for the night.
I typically cap my concert-ticket limit at eighty dollars. Any less is unrealistic, and any more sets a pit in my stomach I'm only able to soothe if the artist has made a name for themselves in my Spotify repeats. If the ticket is below eighty dollars, I’m likely to go watch anyone prance on stage. Even Dixie D’Amelio, or that one lady on Britain’s Got Talent that sang a song about apple crumble. Perhaps even that yodelling Walmart Kid.
Precisely that yodelling Walmart Kid. I’m not on a first name basis with Mason Ramsey, so I had to google who that was when Roxane texted me asking if I wanted to go to his concert. I saw the red bow tie and kitchen appliance aisle, pondered my Friday night options for a few milliseconds (AEPI? Or literally anything else?), pictured how hilariously such a concert might unfold, and sent her my ticket limit. We were well below eighty. We were going to Walmart.
Roxane:
Prior to the show, I decided to do a bit of digging on Mason. He blew up in 2018 after his grandmother posted a video of him singing Hank Williams Sr. 's “Lovesick Blues” in his hometown Walmart. Mason was just eleven years old when his yodeling video dropped, racking up over 25 million views. He’s since appeared on The Ellen Show, released an original album, and performed with Lana Del Rey (among other things). He’s come a long way from Golconda!
Given Mason’s small town-Illinois roots, Rosemont was quite a fitting place to see him perform. After an unexpectedly long Uber ride with a sweet but slightly-too-chatty older gentleman in the driver’s seat (well, too chatty for Sofia and I after a long day of classes), we made it to a stripmall. “Well, I think the entrance should be somewhere around here, girls,” the driver announced, pulling up alongside an AMC theater and a taco joint. Emerging groggily from the car, Sofia and I found our way to the spot: Joe’s Live. We stopped for a few silly photos outside the marquis, “Monster Energy Presents Mason Ramsey” inscribed against the neon. Walking into the venue, Sofia and I were greeted by a ticket checker, and a cop, gun in holster, bullet-proof vest on. Interesting vibe. We continued through the vestibule into the main performance room. The stage was set, roadies buzzing around and a huge Mason Ramsey banner (with a symbol suspiciously reminiscent of a Hunger Games mockingjay) was raised. The room was probably about a third of the way full. Small but mighty, the crowd was truly something else.
Sofia:
My dopey state from the long car ride over dissipated promptly upon encountering the cop and then the crowd. The former was so bulky and so rural and so armed that my eyes widened by instinct, and the latter was a rowdy amalgam of the most peculiar of characters, a collective yee-haw hub that lassoed me and Roxane in. We did not resist the pull, both eager to mingle and yodel amidst whoever else decided to drop eighty dollars on Mason Ramsey (we were also intrigued by the VIP crowd enclosed behind a roped perimeter, but they were surprisingly stand-offish for fifty year-olds at the Walmart kid concert).
We established ourselves in the middle of the sparse crowd and took a good look at our GA neighbors. Quickly, we realized that different breeds of concert goers emerged with every slight turn of the head. Left of the barricade was a blonde batch of tweenage girls sporting cowboy hats and grins—the groupies, presumably. Behind them stood their mothers—this time, the fathers stayed home. These mothers were easily distinguishable from the troops of middle-aged drunk women that were right of barricade, tiaras on, beers in hand, screams on lock—were these the rowdy moshers? Perhaps it was the few bearded men at the back that really came to dance, but as the lights began to dim, they remained stock-still, already overheating in their flannels and trucker hats. Were Roxane and I, the two of maybe seven young adults present, the raving teenagers for that night? Naturally, the ardor in me roiled; having realized that this may be my peak what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here concert yet, I was determined to transform my uncertainty into fact: Roxane and I were gonna rule that crowd.
Roxane:
In the days leading up to the concert, I had listened to almost exclusively Mason in hopes of avoiding the classic concert vibe-kill of not being able to sing along to the lyrics. To be frank, though, the songs were far from the most memorable thing about the concert. I recognized a few hits from his latest album, I’ll See You in My Dreams. Mason’s voice, much more mature and full-bodied than it was in his yodeling days, rang out in “Prettiest Girl at the Dance” and title track “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” which were easily crowd favorites. His energy was incredible, dancing across the stage and interacting with each segment of the crowd. He was grabbing hands, winking, blowing kisses, grabbing fans’ phones for selfies. The attention was awesome. And Sofia and I wanted some for ourselves. At one point, Mason played “The Woman From Havana,” and Sofia lit up. She grabbed me and picked me up, screaming, “She’s Latina!! She’s Latina!” (For context, I’m half Cuban). The looks we got were genuinely hilarious. We swear Mason clocked us and stayed away from our section for a while. Sofia and I decided that if we were going to get Mason to notice us for real, we needed to move to his favorite section of the crowd: The front right corner of tweens. We gravitated that way and continued our obnoxious campaign. Once Mason pulled out “Blue Over You,” we knew we had him. As we jumped up and down and made absurdly intense eye contact, Mason winked at us! He really did! We burst into laughter. We’d done it. A few songs later, he pulled out “They Love Me For My Twang,” and I decided to push my luck. I blew him a kiss. And, Sofia can attest to this, he caught it. We laughed even harder.
Sofia:
Maybe I should have prepared more for the concert. In the past, I always made sure to skim Setlist.fm for an idea of what was to come, or peruse Spotify for a ready-made playlist. But, in the days leading up to Ramsey’s show, pressing matters—math PSETS, SOSC readings, snagging a washer in the Woodlawn laundry room—eclipsed any preliminary routine; amidst the quotidian chaos, all I could really aurally stomach was white noise or Italian drill.
In hindsight, my lack of musical forethought was a blessing in disguise. Clad in a crimson collared shirt and a huge Western belt buckle (so huge the metallic sparkle basically reflected off the foreheads of the sweaty men in the back), Ramsey strutted onto the stage and the crowd went formulaically wild. His stage presence was immediately mighty, unwavering throughout the entire set, and I felt what I can only describe as a jumble of nostalgia and pride; I was witnessing, in a sense, a character of my youth grow into a real-life musician. As he transitioned from song to song, a clumsy medley of country riffs and soft rock ballads echoed throughout the room, but I didn’t care to stop and think about the musical intricacies, the soulfulness of this or that lyric. Right there on stage, he stood in himself entirely, believing in his performance, so I certainly believed him, too.
I didn’t know any of his hits, naturally; with every starting strum of a new song, I turned to Roxane, she mouthed the title (when her memory allowed), and I let myself sway to “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and “Before I Knew It” and “The Woman From Havana,” the latter a country tune with a strong Latin-inspired flair so ridiculously wonderful I started dancing the rumba. I picked up Roxane—the woman from Havana next to me—and eagerly told Ramsey that, tonight, the song was for her. He heard, hesitated, and continued, but the night was still ours and I knew it. I put Roxane down and we shuffled to the front as “Blue Over You” played. The heartfelt ballad on unrequited love—“If I could get that close, oh, heaven only knows/I wouldn’t be blue over you”—rang poignantly as we tried fiercely to catch his attention, oh-so blue when the tweens would capture it, instead. But, then the wink came. And we howled so hard the snoozers at the back woke up. “Twang” clinched the concert with some signature yodelling and Roxane’s caught kiss.
“Lovesick Blues” never came, but rightly so; Mason isn’t that little boy singing in a Golconda Walmart anymore, and Roxane and I certainly aren’t his grandmothers. We were the raving teenagers at a country concert that called for as much. And, while the uber ride home was just as long as our first, a cathartic energy hung brightly in the air. We no longer loved Mason for the meme—we loved him, truly and entirely, for his twang.
edited by Madison Esrey.
collage by Jake Harvey.