WDBJ7
Morgan Wade reflects on her Floyd County roots
Morgan Wade rocked the Dogtown Roadhouse on the Saturday before Christmas, entertaining a hometown crowd of about 200 on a stage where it all started.
“It’s nice to be back,” Wade told the audience. “Obviously Dogtown is the first place I ever played a live show ever.”
Wade has been building a national audience since her first major label release Reckless in 2021. But she hasn’t put her hometown in the rear-view mirror.
“It’s cool to come back and be able to see everything, and get to see some of those friends that I haven’t seen since high school,” Wade told WDBJ7.
In a brief walk-around, and in an interview above the Floyd Country Store, she reflected on a childhood that included listening to bluegrass with her grandfather.
“And I would come up here, we would get something to eat and I would sit and fall asleep on his lap, listening to bluegrass music,” Wade said. “And that was my first introduction to any live music. And so obviously I don’t play bluegrass music, but I learned a lot about songwriting from that, because it sounds like a happy banjo beat, but there’s some dark lyrics in there.”
With her bus parked outside of Dogtown Roadhouse, the sign welcomed her home.
And fans Leticia Prevette and Becca Vanmeter explained why they traveled from Oklahoma and Texas to attend Wade’s Virginia shows.
“Some artists tend to impact you in a way that their music is not just music, it’s therapy. She talks about mental health. She addresses it, and that’s something this country needs a lot more of,” Prevette said. “We don’t have enough help for that and a lot of people shy away from it. She doesn’t.”
“She’s just a very special artist and special person,” Vanmeter told us.
Wade mines her own personal struggles and tackles challenging subjects in her songwriting.
“Is that difficult or is it liberating,” we asked.
“I think a little bit of both,” Wade said. “And I think for me, I’m not really living if I’m not a little bit scared to do something.”
Her latest full-length album includes songs that were written early in her music career, when Wade was studying at the College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, and playing at Martin’s, Fork in the Market and other local clubs.
Now eight years sober, she says it’s a window on a different time in her life.
“I was going through a rough time figuring my life out. And so for a long time, I think I was more like, I don’t want to say ashamed of those times, but I didn’t look back on it fondly. And now I look back at that and I’m like, I’d go through all that to get where I’m at. And you know I’m still proud of that version of me too,” she said.
The pop-up show in Floyd is her last for a while.
After three years of relentless touring and 500 shows, she says she’s taking a break from the road in 2026.
And Wade says it was nice to end this current chapter in her own hometown.
“I’m really blessed to have grown up here in like a safe, loving place,” Wade said. “I like the simplistic things here and everybody knows everybody and it’s just really nice to come back.”