MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

On June 8 of this year, Grammy-nominated Country superstar Jo Dee Messina gets to add “Playing in a cave” to her list of firsts as she takes the Caverns’ subterranean concert stage in Pelham, Tennessee for the first time.

“We’re excited! I’ve never been there,” said Messina. “I’ve seen pictures and heard about it from other people, and I’m excited to get the chance to be there and do a show.”

The Caverns houses over 8,000 linear feet of cave passages. Underground shows are held in a section that locals refer to as Big Mouth Cave due to its archway entrance.

Messina says she hopes people will stop by the Caverns for the show on their way home from CMA Fest.

For those in attendance, she says they can expect a lot of fun at her concert.

“We really enjoy each other, and we have a great time on stage,” she explained. “We try to put something in the show for everybody whether they know the music or not but definitely the hits. We have a Spotify playlist that we made of like set staples, songs that you definitely know that you’ll hear and then other songs that just interchange out depending on the day really.”

Messina’s hits include “I’m Alright,” “Bye Bye,” “Lesson in Leavin’,” “My Give a Damn’s Busted,” and “Bring On the Rain,” featuring Tim McGraw on background vocals. She says she still enjoys playing the songs for audiences.

“I love ‘em. The audience brings a whole new energy to them, so it gives them a whole new life,” said Messina.

Streaming, she explains, has also helped expand her fanbase which adds energy to her performances.

“You’ve got to understand, with music streaming the way that it does, the fanbase is from four-years-old to eighty-years-old, you know what I mean?” explained Messina. “So it’s like you get kids there that are so excited to see what’s going on and so excited to be at a show and a lot of people are like ‘Oh this is my first concert!’ you know, so it adds a lot of energy to the performances.”

Messina’s first hit “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” released in 1996, was referenced both lyrically and melodically in Cole Swindell’s “She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” which Messina says she wasn’t aware of beforehand.

“I didn’t find out about it until after he recorded it,” she recalled. “Then when they decided to make it a single, that’s when his label reached out and said, ‘Hey would you be a part of this video?’”

The music video for the song features a cameo by Messina as a bartender at the bar where the song is set. She notably joined Swindell on stage at the 2023 CMA Awards and says she was “excited” to do so.

“Years ago, I had done the CMAs and I was scared to death,” remembered Messina. “Not at all this time. I was just really excited to be there and honored to be a part of it.”

Their performance was the most watched on YouTube from the awards ceremony. Messina says she doesn’t know exactly if the success of Swindell’s song and their performance led fans to her music, or specifically, her song “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” but that it definitely could have.

“If you look at the streaming of the song, it’s the number three streamed song of mine,” she said. “‘Bye, Bye” and ‘I’m Alright’ come ahead of it, so they found it somehow.”

Messina came into the spotlight alongside other prominent female Country artists in the latter half of the 1990s such as The Chicks, Deana Carter and Leann Rimes, among others. She remembers it as an interesting time.

“I remember when I was trying to get a record deal the whole thing was ‘We already have a female on the label’ like they would only have one female on the label, and so fast forward a few years to now where it’s all like mostly women, it’s like ‘Hold on a minute,’” said Messina. “It ebbs and flows, you know, because at that point in time women were all over the radio. So it was great. It gave us all a chance to… have amazing careers and great opportunities.”

Growing up in Holliston, Massachusetts, Messina says she remembers listening to Country greats like Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, though she also got what she calls a “mish mosh” of different musical genres.

She moved to Nashville when she was nineteen to get started in the music business. Though she experienced some hesitancy from people back home, no one in Nashville seemed to care about her Northern roots.

“I remember when I was gonna move to Nashville people were like ‘Good luck.  See you in six months. They don’t want anything to do with people from the North,’” Messina recalled. “Nobody ever asked me. They didn’t ask where I was from until I had to write my bio for my first album. It’s not like it was a prerequisite that you had to be from the South.”

Her latest single 2023’s “Just To Be Loved” addresses the importance of not changing yourself to impress others, an issue that has become even more prevalent in the age of social media.

“It came out of a conversation about how… guys are trying to act wilder and girls are trying to act sexier and all this just to get likes on social media, and somebody said they knew somebody who had taken their life, a sixteen-year-old girl, because of the pressure of social media,” explained Messina. “She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t like add up to what she thought she was supposed to be.”

 The song was written by Messina, Jess Cates, Jordan Mohilowski and Tim Nichols as they tried to find the right message to convey to address the issue.

“So I’m like how do we take that and say, you know, God created you and He created you with meaning and purpose,” she recalled. “You are already loved beyond anything you could ever imagine, so you don’t have to go change everything about yourself because God already loves you just the way you are.”

“It has a much deeper meaning than the song, but, you know, you can only put so much in three minutes,” she added.

When asked if she had ever been asked to change herself in her career, Messina’s initial response was “Oh my gosh, yeah. I’m in the music business, dude.”

She then recounted a time when a change in outfit style from one album cover to the next garnered some interesting comments from people.

“I remember, it’s funny too, if you look at the “Burn” album and then we went to ‘Give A Damn’s Busted’ or something like that and I remember people being like ‘Oh my gosh, you reinvented yourself,” explained Messina. “I was like ‘No, I just went back to being me’, you know, because ‘My Give A Damn’s Busted’ that song was like I’m wearing a tank top and jeans as opposed to the ‘Burn’ record, it’s glamorous gowns and I was like ‘I don’t know who that is.’”

“So I mean people will try to catch what’s hot, and I think what’s hot is things that are not the same as everything else,” she added.

As far as any firsts that Messina still wants to experience or anything else she would like to give a try in her career, she says she’ll take the opportunities as they come.

“There’s always more to be done. Writing, writing with people, maybe more collaborations, I don’t know,” said Messina. “I never knew playing the Caverns would be one of them, you know what I mean?”