Ghost of Gray County has been making its rounds, performing, for over three years now. The band started out as a duo between Taylor Patterson and Jerred Tibbets. The two started out just coming together to ‘jam out’. Patterson is the lead vocals, but the band credits him as being the frontman.
“Taylor is the frontman because that’s how it works,” Braden Barrow said. “It works out, he’s good at it. I really just act as the hype man at the shows, getting everyone up and jamming out with us.”
For the last year, the band has been full of members of the band. Taylor Patterson still serving as lead vocalist and front-man. The rest of the band in composed of Jerred Tibbets on guitar, Drake Fisher on bass, Grant Fithen on lead guitar, and Braden Barrow on drums and monitoring the social aspects of the band and bookings.
“Me and Jerred have been at this for two years now as a full band,” Patterson said. “But for the past year, we’ve had a full band. After Jerred and I started to form something, we brought Braden in on drums.”
“I wasn’t even expecting to become part of a band,” Barrow joked. “They asked me to come to hang out and jam a little, and we didn’t even have a drum kit, all I had was some sticks. I was beating on the fireplace, or wherever just making a sound. Then the next thing I know, they’re telling me I’m in the band if I want it. Not my intention when I came over, but it works and we’ve been going ever since.”
For the rest of 2023, the band has 20 shows booked as of now but will hit around 50 shows. The band is already established with a loyal fan base, after being cut from an event in Pampa, the band took to our local bar, The Hideaway.
“We asked, hey can we do a show here tonight, and the owner was like oh yeah, come on out,” Barrow said. “We had 400 plus people in there on a last-minute show. We ran into the manager of the bar a few days after and he was like, you guys sold my bar out completely, I had a hefty bill to restock everything. But that just goes to show how loyal our fan base is.”
The band will be performing and opening for Cody Canada and The Departed at a music festival in New Mexico in August.
“That will be one of the cooler things we’ve got to do,” Barrow said. “Getting to open for Cody and his band who are already well known and have made it. It’s a big step to get us where we want to be.”
The band won ‘Best Local Band’ for the 2022 ‘Best Of’ competition for The Pampa News.
“We didn’t even know we were mentioned in that,” Barrow said. “We just found out after it was said and done that we won. It was cool to see the support of our fan base here going out and doing that work for us.”
In the three years as a band, over 300 shows are under their belt. The majority of the events the band does are local to the Texas Panhandle at events or private events. But they are also booking spots at festivals or other venues, in over four states. In their time, they’ve gone out to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas, with shows booked in Lubbock for this year and then the festival in New Mexico that they’ve already been booked for.
“We have a show in Lubbock, which will be cool. But we also just entered into a battle of the bands down in Lubbock,” Barrow said. “So winning it gets us studio time and some other things, but it’s just about getting our name out there and building our fan base further than Pampa or the Panhandle of Texas.”
With the beginning stride of the band to play shows as much as possible to get their name out there, they are collectively changing what all their doing.
“This year we want to slow down a bit, we’ve been going and going getting show after show,” Barrow said. “Which has been amazing to be able to do, but now we want to find our fan bases and focus on those. Not being the bar noise, but instead having people come to where we are specifically to see us. We also want to put out more music. We have that in the works, with songs getting prepared to be released, but we can’t do it all at once. We work, and do this, so we’re balancing both parts of our lives.”
For now, the band does a mix of original songs and cover songs at their shows. In the vault right now, GOGC has 22 songs planned to be released or put out at some point. Four of those songs are out right now, with 11 songs they play at shows. In September the band has a project planned.
“For right now we’re just calling it a project because we don’t know if it’s going to be an EP or a full album,” Barrow said. “The single we’re ready to release now, “Run”, and that is the promotion of the single release that will also be on the project.”
For now, the release of ‘Run’ is still not set in stone as the band is promoting it as much as possible before setting a date. But the band works together on all original music, mostly with Tibbets or Patterson working on lyrics before bringing everyone else in.
“It’s a collective of work,” Patterson said. “I could write something by myself and then show them one day. A lot of times we’ll get together at one of our houses and hang out and spend hours working on songs and ideas. A lot of the time, Jerred will just have an idea and then it goes from there. There’s a lot of times when we leave a show and then go straight into writing a new song.”
“More times than not, it’s something Jerred has come up with,” Barrow said. “Then he’ll get the lyrics down and bring the rest of us in to find what works for each of us and the song. Then we’ll go back and forth and work it into something we all like the sound of. But it’s really all of us going into it with ideas and opinions and we work it out until we get it right.”
The band is one of many in Pampa that are active in doing shows and putting out music. But it’s not an easy road to go down.
“I love our area, the Texas Panhandle as a whole,” Barrow said. “But it’s not easy for a band to start out in our area. We have the ability to have a really good music scene right here, it’s just never been done before. So it takes a lot of work to build something. We love where we are as of now, and we’ll keep doing the work to grow more. We have fans in Oklahoma, in the Guymon area, and then as far as Kansas, but further than that.”
“Run”, the next single to be put on from the band is a song that has been in the works for many months. The process started back months ago.
“This process started as a lot of the other ones do. Jerred came home from work and had some lyrics in mind and just started writing them out,” Patterson said. “He called me over and we spent the night working out the lyrics and getting the baseline done. The way it turned out is so different from the first edition we had of it. The song was just like a ball of clay that after going back over and over on things, we turned the song into what it is now.”
The song started from nothing and went over and over with changes and adjustments. After the first night, the band was brought in to start filling out the sound.
“We had a couple of verses and the main hook and that was it,” Patterson said. “We didn’t really finish it completely until the day we got into the studio and were recording the song.”
Patterson, the lead singer, is in charge of laying down the vocal tracks, but also the harmonies and background vocals.
“I go in and lay down the main track,” Patterson said. “Then I go back and do the harmony parts to go in the background. When we record the vocal tracks we’re all in the same room standing around watching. Then we send it out to be mastered. Everything we do and put out is a home recording and personal to each of us. We keep that authentic feel in our songs, that each of these songs is a story we wrote into a song.”
The band will be performing at the ‘Burning on the Bricks’ in Pampa on June 10th, sooner than that the band will be playing at Hoot’s Pub in Amarillo on May 26th. To keep up with what the band has going on, stay tuned in to their Facebook and Instagram, both are the band name, Ghost of Gray County.
Keep an eye out for “Run” when it’s released, and the project coming in September on Spotify or Apple Music, and where ever else you listen to music.
