Break Bread, Sing Songs
/Musician Jed Harrelson tours the country with his soulful songs
By Jesse Warren
photos by shane darby.
Music is sometimes aimed to challenge its listeners—to test them with an idea, style, or subject matter. Other times, music aims to unite its listeners—to be skillful in delivery and undeniable in its intent to bring people together. While both approaches are valid, Texarkana-raised musician Jed Harrelson aspires to unite.
Sonically, Jed and his band have created a sound that takes pages from the books of many beloved genres—primarily blues, jazz, funk, country, and rock—while drawing lyrically from Jed’s life experience. The cocktail that is a Jed Harrelson track goes down smooth and leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy. There is an undeniable charm of the funk-inspired bass groove on a track like “Dem Glasses” or “Bad Habitz” accompanied by Jed’s soulful voice, with its smoky timbre that wouldn’t feel out-of-place in a ‘70s rock track.
Sound aside, Jed has managed to accomplish something that, in the age of the internet, has become simultaneously more accessible and more difficult than ever before: making a career out of playing music.
As a young person, Jed began playing music with his grandfather at family events and community functions, taking the stage for the first time at age 12 at Sterling House of Texarkana, a local assisted living facility. Jed carried his love of performing with him to college in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he formed a band with classmates, all of whom planned to move to Nashville, Tennessee, after graduation—though Jed was the only one who followed through. Finding his footing in Nashville proved to be a humbling experience, but, over time, Jed managed to become a full-time performer in the Nashville music scene.
“His music pulls from so many different areas that you have people who would never sit at a table together in these rooms, shoulder-to-shoulder, finding a common ground, and that’s humanity in its simplest form.”
Recently, he has been taking his original music on the road, cultivating a growing fanbase across the country. (He currently has just shy of 60,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.) When he first played a particular venue in Kansas City, he sold seven tickets. On his second visit, about 40 tickets were sold. On his third: 300. This is undoubtedly an exciting prospect for Jed, who, above all, seems to value filling seats with new listeners and is committed to finding them.
“It’s a cool feeling [to see a crowd of strangers], because I think it shows that this is kind of working,” he said.
While Jed makes it back to his hometown on occasion, his current priority is connecting unfamiliar masses through his music alone. “[A show in Texarkana] ends up being more of a social gathering and less about the music,” he said. He expressed gratitude for the support of Texarkana listeners: “I think that’s really cool because [there is no other city where] we can sell 500 tickets. In Texarkana, we can sell 500 hundred tickets, to people who might not even know a song but just want to support what’s happening here.” Though performing as a hometown hero is fun, Jed and the band have decided to take some time off of playing in Texarkana to focus on growing their fanbase in other places—but Jed says they hope to return in November 2026 to play the Perot Theatre.
When touring, Jed, wife Jordyn, and the band spend most of their time in a gold van nicknamed The Loaf. They spent October on the Break Bread Tour, which began in Dallas on the 10th. They played 11 cities in 20 days, traveling from Texas to Arizona and then up the California coast before stopping in Portland and Seattle. Next, they played Boise, Salt Lake City, and Denver. They performed their final show of the tour in Tulsa.
Jed and Jordyn tour the country in their beloved van, The Loaf. photo by shane darby.
While this tour was not the band’s first time on the road, it was certainly their longest. Though Jed has seen lots of this country, when asked if any one city is his favorite, he simply said, “My favorite city to go play in is the city that people show up at.
“We’re new to the concept of fans,” he explained. “Over the last five years, we’ve been like, ‘Bring your friends, bring your family,’ but now, we’re having rooms of people where nobody knows each other—where I don’t know anybody in the crowd. Those are the cities we like.”
“His music pulls from so many different areas,” Jordyn elaborated on the sentiment, “that you have people who would never sit at a table together in these rooms, shoulder-to-shoulder, finding a common ground, and that’s humanity in its simplest form.”
To see evidence of his music creating positive ripples through the world is a deeply meaningful experience, and it’s one that Jed did not achieve overnight: this success has been years of hard work in the making.
Jed moved to Nashville in January of 2020, a year that was hard on any industry involving groups of people sharing intimate, indoor spaces. Nashville is also a highly competitive and challenging music scene for newcomers, as Jed discovered. He shared stories of his early days in Nashville: sleeping on his cousin’s couch, playing his first paid gig to “basically nobody” at a Taco Bell Cantina. Through networking and persistent efforts, however, Jed was able to go from playing covers in Nashville to creating a catalogue of original music and performing it around the country. He currently has upcoming shows scheduled for December, February, March, and June, in Michigan, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Illinois. (Find more information on his website, jedharrelson.com.)
Jed performed at Little Rock’s Revolution Music Room, also known as The Rev Room, last May. submitted photo.
Jed’s story is a testament to the power of persistence. When asked what he would say to people trying to pursue their own dreams of a music career, he shared some advice he’d been given. “If you want to do it, you’ve just got to do it every day,” he said. “Even when you don’t want to, do it. I think it can be as simple as that.”