Jordan Rager

Mixing up mainstream country sounds with a young man's lyrical perspective, Jordan Rager is a singer and songwriter from Loganville, Georgia. Rager's dad, a pastor at a local church, had two big passions, baseball and country music, and Jordan was very much his father's son, playing ball throughout junior high and high school, and sharing his love of Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Kenny Rogers, and John Michael Montgomery (though young Jordan also had a taste for classic rock, in particular AC/DC and Lynyrd Skynyrd). Rager began teaching himself to play guitar when he was 15, and struck a deal with his father that as long as he practiced his guitar every day, he got a break on doing household chores. Rager's first gig found him playing a handful of covers at a county fair, and he was soon doing sets at local bars, with his mother escorting the singer, who was too young to be a paying customer. In 2012, Rager stepped into the national spotlight as a contestant on the music competition show The Voice; his performance of "Chicken Fried" impressed judge Blake Shelton, but Rager lost to Naia Kete in a Battle Round on March 29. Undaunted, Rager released his first album in the fall of 2012, an independent release titled Burning Gasoline, as well as a pair of singles, "The Last Song" and "Small Town Skyscrapers," and he ramped up his touring schedule, opening for such stars as Justin Moore, Gretchen Wilson, Love & Theft, and David Allen Coe. After signing a management deal with Barry Williams and Peter Hartung (the former is the father of country star Jason Aldean), Rager landed a recording contract with Broken Bow Records, and in December 2015, he released his first single for the label, "Feels Like One of Them." ~ Mark Deming