In Boston, country star Tyler Childers stands out for all the right reasons

When country music makes headlines, it’s often for unfortunate reasons. A few of Nashville’s biggest stars have scored major chart successes of late with reactionary lyrics or on the back of personal controversy.

But there’s presently a huge appetite for sturdy songwriting and singers with a twang. Resale tickets for Tyler Childers’s show Saturday at the Leader Bank Pavilion were going for $500, and the enthusiastic crowd that sold the place out made clear just why, singing along in full-throated unison to several of his songs.

Don’t feel left out if you’re not familiar with his name. Though this Kentucky native — his father was a coal miner, just like Loretta Lynn’s — is one of the truest country singers of this moment, commercial country radio plays him not at all. He’s too country for country. When he won the emerging artist honor at the Americana Awards show in 2018, he took the opportunity to lament the very idea of “Americana” music.

“It kind of feels like purgatory,” he said.

Sin and salvation are often top of mind for Childers. His latest album, a sprawling three-record set that features three different versions of each of eight songs, is called “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?” He dubbed the three versions Hallelujah, Joyful Noise, and Jubilee.

But while his bandmates, known as the Food Stamps, are a big part of Childers’s appeal, he took the stage solo, opening with “Nose on the Grindstone,” a tribute to his daddy, and “Lady May,” a love song for his wife that sounds like a letter home from the Civil War.

On a picture-perfect summer night along Boston Harbor, Childers wore a puffy cardigan fit for a ski lodge. His piercing eyes surveyed his audience from beneath a ginger spit curl. The stage was dressed like an oversized diorama, the view out from a mountain home, through the trees to the valley below. An old console TV flickered behind the bandleader.

His band is full of ringers, including lead guitarist CJ Cain, the multi-instrumentalist Jesse Wells (whose fiddle playing was a highlight throughout), and Chase Lewis on, as Childers said, the “pianer.” Lewis added some Clavinet, the electric piano sound that unfailingly brings to mind Stevie Wonder, to “House Fire.”

The lovers in the house got cozy during “All Your’n,” a gorgeous sway of a song from his 2019 album “Country Squire”: “I’ll love you ‘til my lungs give out/I ain’t lyin’.”

Even more heartwarming, however, was the rousing reception a few songs later for “In Your Love,” a brand new song from a forthcoming album. The song was just released with a video that depicts a gay couple from the rural South in the 1950s. Childers has said he commissioned the video to honor his gay cousin, who hasn’t seen enough representation in the music he grew up with.

The band wrapped up its 100-minute set with an extended romp, from the cosmic “Universal Sound” and a high-spirits cover of Charlie Daniels’s “Trudy” to Childers’s “Whitehouse Road,” which sings the praises of throwing your worries to the wind.

Opener Margo Price and her band, the Price Tags, surely made some new fans with their psychedelic brand of country. They closed with a medley of “Whiskey River,” Willie Nelson’s concert staple, mashed up with Price’s own “Hurtin’ (on the Bottle),” an instant honky-tonk classic when she released it in 2015. They headline the Music Hall in Portsmouth on Monday.

James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.

TYLER CHILDERS

With Margo Price. At Leader Bank Pavilion, Saturday