PALESTINE — Southern rock band Whiskey Myers already has a strong fan base in Palestine due to the roots of its members, but with its sophomore album “Firewater,” the band’s becoming well known not only in the Texas music circuit but as an up-and-coming band to watch as their tour dates have taken them around the country — on tour overseas and even playing on a special rock legend cruise with classic rock bands such as ZZ Top, The Marshall Tucker Band, Molly Hatchet and others.

In fact, their newest song “Anna Marie” went No. 1 on the Texas music charts recently. As of Friday, “Anna Marie” is No. 3.

Cody Cannon (lead vocals and guitar) and Cody Tate (lead guitar) first began hanging out, playing together and writing songs while living in Elkhart a few years ago, enlisting their friend John Jeffers (guitarist) to join in.

“Then we moved to Tyler and that’s where the band actually formed,” Cannon said during a phone interview with the Herald-Press this week. “We were suppose to be going to college there, but we ended up not doing that.

“We just hung out, kicking around with acoustics, then we got Jeff (Jeff Hogg, drums) and Gary (Gary Brown, bass guitarist who had grown up in Neches) to join us and that’s when Whiskey Myers formed.”

Ranging in age now from 26 to 30, the band’s first gig was in the spring of 2007 at Gator’s Bar and Grill in Gun Barrel City. The club owner was so impressed by their performance and the crowd that had come to the stage that he asked them to come back the next weekend to open for The Eli Young Band.

From then on, popularity for the band began to swell. Suddenly, it seemed that the whole region knew who Whiskey Myers was.

“We started getting a fan base and it grew from there. We played around East Texas a lot for a little bit then eventually branched out,” Cannon said.

Whiskey Myers is now booked out of Nashville with William Morris Agency.

While Whiskey Myers definitely has a Lynyrd Skynyrd/Led Zeppelin  sound, that doesn’t mean that Whiskey Myers fits just in a “southern rock” one-size-fits-all mold.

“We have a lot of different influences that make up our sound — rock ‘n’ roll, southern rock, country, blues — really a mixture of everything,” Cannon said during the interview.



Music Videos

Two songs from Whiskey Myers’ second album “Firewater” have now been made into videos which have played on Country Music Television (CMT) and YouTube.

The first video the band released was for the song “Ballad of a Southern Man.”

“That was the first music video that we ever shot. We worked with producer Mason Dixon out of Nashville — and yes, that’s his real name,” Cannon said. “We shot it in an old abandoned house right outside of Nashville in the summer with temperatures 105 to 110 degrees. It was a pretty unique experience.”

The video for “Ballad of a Southern Man” tells the story of a Southern man who is being evicted from his home that is being torn down to build a golf course.

“They were doing casting calls for the part of the Southern man, but we knew a buddy of ours, Marty Penny from Nacogdoches, was the right person for the job,” Cannon said. “CMT still plays the video on its ‘Pure Country’ show and we have gotten a lot of good responses from it.”

Their newest video for new song “Anna Marie” has been getting a good response as well.

“That is the first time we had a No. 1 on the Texas music charts (with their song ‘Anna Marie’), so we are pretty excited about that,” Cannon said. “For that video, we had to act, which was kinda cool.

“None of us have had any acting experience, so it was a little different. We wanted the video to be a really old, period piece from the prohibition and we tried to accomplish that with the guns and the car with a bootlegger versus highway robbery kind of story.”

Both videos are available to watch online at www.cmt.com and www.youtube.com

Their official YouTube video for “Ballad of a Southern Man” has more than 170,000 views. Their new video for “Anna Marie” already has more than 95,000 hits on YouTube.



Music Awards

Whiskey Myers was nominated for several awards from the 2012 LoneStarMusic Awards — including winning one — Emerging Artist of the Year for their album “Firewater” during the awards ceremony April 1 in San Marcos.

The band was nominated for the following awards: Album of the Year (Firewater); Album of the Year (“Firewater”) — Americana-Roots; Song of the Year (“Ballad of a Southern Man”); Live Act of the Year; Musician of the Year (Cody Tate); and Album Artwork of the Year (“Firewater”).

“It was our first time to be nominated or win anything, so we were very happy,” Cannon said.



New Album

When Whiskey Myers’ second album “Firewater” came out April 2011, it debuted No. 2 on iTunes.

So far, the band has released three singles, with the band planning to release one or two more from the album in the future.

“We are working on our third album right now,” Cannon said.

Their music has evolved with each album.

“Music comes from life experiences. Making that second album, our music was progressing more than with the first album, as we were growing and changing artistically. Because of that, the music we played came out a little different than the first album,” Cannon said during the interview.

With the new album on the horizon, Cannon expects to see even more changes.

“The music you write when you are younger is different from the music you write when you get older because you are going through different things. The music comes from your life experiences and the world you are living in — from a lot of different influences,” Cannon said.



Touring

Whiskey Myers’ tour schedule has been all over the place lately.

“We were just in Colorado this week and now headed back to San Marcos,” Cannon said during the phone interview Thursday.

The band is performing at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth on Sunday and will be in Austin on Wednesday. In September, they will be all over, mostly in Texas, but in Nebraska, Minnesota and Kansas during the week of Sept. 10. The closest Whiskey Myers will get to performing near Palestine this year will be Oct. 13 during the Festival on the Square in Tyler.

“We always love performing in Palestine and seeing our fans, but we don’t get to play back there as much as we used to,” Cannon said during the interview. “We use to play at the Iron Horse (in Palestine) all the time. It was one of the first places we performed.”

In July, Whiskey Myers had the opportunity to perform overseas in France and Italy for the Rendezvous Festival.

“It was cool the amount of fans who knew who we were. We got to see all of France, Italy and Venice and drank lots of really good wine,” Cannon joked. “That was our first European tour and our second time out of the country.”

Technically, their first time out of the country as a band was with the Rock Legends cruise in the winter of 2011 that went to the Bahamas. This was the event that allowed them to perform with some of the top musicians in the rock ‘n’ roll business.

“There were some really big names on the cruise. When ZZ Top walked in, we were in awe. It was great,” Cannon said. “There were a lot of bands and people there that we grew up listening to like The Marshall Tucker Band, Foghat, Dickey Betts that used to play with The Allman Brothers Band and Artimus Pyle, who used to play with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“We listened, learned a lot of stuff and met fans. We made a lot of friends and we look forward to seeing them again.”

Whiskey Myers is tapped to participate in the Rock Legends II cruise Jan. 10-13, 2013 aboard Royal Caribbean International’s Liberty at Sea.



Looking Forward

Right now, Whiskey Myers is touring, working on its third album and connecting with its fans.

“It’s great to perform. We get to do what we love for a living while seeing the world and hanging out with our buddies — that’s our job, which is awesome,” Cannon said during the interview.

Performing live for an audience makes their “jobs” worthwhile, Cannon said.

“I don’t necessarily get butterflies anymore when we are out on stage, but our adrenaline’s going to get hyped up especially if you have big crowd — you always feed off the energy of the crowd,” Cannon said. “If the crowd rocks n’ rolls then we have more fun and they do too.”



Online: www.whiskeymyers.com