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Longtime country singer John Berry will bring his annual Christmas tour to McMinnville’s historic Park Theater for an evening of traditional holiday favorites and some of Berry’s biggest country hits.

Berry’s 27th Annual Christmas Tour is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday Nov. 28. Berry said it will be his first time performing at The Park Theater.

“Twenty-seven years have passed, and I could never have foreseen the incredible blessing of sharing my music and commemorating the birth of Christ throughout this journey,” Berry said.

Berry said audiences will enjoy a two-part show during the evening, with the first part being some of his hit songs from his earliest albums such as Standing on the Edge of Goodbye, Your Love Amazes Me, You and Only You and Kiss Me in the Car.

“We also do a couple album cuts, my debut album is 30 years old this past summer so we are doing a few songs off it that I have always loved and nobody has really ever heard and then we do songs off of whatever my most recent project is,” he said.

That most recent project is a faith-based album released in 2022 titled “Find My Joy.”

“We are going to do a couple songs off that album and after a brief intermission we will come back and do Christmas songs,” Berry said.

Berry said he and his band, which includes piano, bass, drums, guitar  along with his wife Robin who sings with him, will perform many of the most iconic and beloved Christmas songs during the show accompanied by a light and video show.

“Those older traditional songs, we do them the way (many people) remember them having being done,” he said. “I am now 64, I am not a kid, my audience is a little older and we do songs they are going to appreciate and we do them the way all remember the way they were always done.”

While Berry typically plays between 15 and 20 dates for his Christmas Tour each year, he said it all goes back to the late 1980s.

“It all started at our church in Athens, Georgia back in 1988,” he said. “My wife and I got married that summer, and the pastor, Fred Rowell, who became a dear friend, asked me if we would do a Christmas program at the church that year.”

The Christmas show was a success, and when Berry got a record deal in the early 1990s, it was decided that he should record a few Christmas songs to be released on a CD for industry professionals.

“In June 1994 we went in and recorded O Holy Night and O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” Berry said. “The crazy thing about it is 30 days before that I had to have emergency brain surgery.”

“The day Your Love Amazes Me was my first Number 1 record, I had brain surgery and then 30 days later we recorded O Holy Night and O Come Emmanuel and we just captured something really special,” he added.

While the CDs were intended to be distributed to Country radio professionals for their support over the past year, they ended up getting airplay.

“We weren’t expecting airplay, but people felt it and they got it and it just took off and the Christmas of 1995 we put the record (O Holy Night) out and we did a 10 city run of shows and it just kind of kept growing from there,” Berry said.

Berry said he is hoping as many people as possible will come out to enjoy the show Nov. 28 at The Park Theater.

“It is a real family oriented thing,” he said. “Parents can bring their kids, the kids love the light show… bring your mom and dad and your grandparents…”

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit https://www.mcminnvilleparktheater.com/.