G. T. Hurley

The great cowboy state of Montana is home for G.T. Hurley. His music has been described as a blend of Waylon Jennings and Billy Joe Shaver, with a little Tex Ritter tossed in for good measure. GT himself calls his music “Outlaw Western Country.”

G.T. has been playing music since he was twelve years old, and started writing songs not long after that. But he says he really didn’t get “professional” about it until an experience at the conclusion of a festival performance not long ago. “A fairly renowned artist in the western circuit complimented me at the end of my show, which is something he didn’t do very often. And it really gave me a shot in the arm, and the motivation to move forward and keep doing what I was doing.”

G.T. started out on the five string banjo, but moved pretty quickly to the guitar as his main instrument. The military took a front seat to any sort of music career when he enlisted at age 17. The resulting 20 year career and repeated deployments proved a little too difficult to tote around a guitar, so he put it on hold.

“When I got out I found myself a good Gibson guitar,” he said. But in 2009 he almost lost his right leg in an industrial accident, and nearly lost his life. The rehab took three years, but gave G.T. the opportunity to start playing and writing again. “It was a very transformational thing for me.”

He recorded his first CD in 2012, featuring a cowboy theme, and it gained him quite a bit of attention; enough so to encourage him to continue the path. “When I discovered the Americana sound, I said, ‘these guys get it.’ That’s where my music fits,” he said.

His latest studio CD is titled War Horse, and the first single, “Boots On The Ground,” reached number one on the Roots Music Rock Chart three weeks in a row in late June and early July, 2015.