Darius Rucker/Luke Combs
Enmore Theatre, March 21
★★★
Only the second African-American after Charley Pride to make it big in Nashville, Darius Rucker's sonorous, soulful tone stands out in the hidebound country-music industry, even when his songs don't.

Ditties such as When Was the Last Time (You Did Something for the First Time?) – in the finest country tradition of starting with the title and working backwards – connected thanks to his singing and his session-veteran band's faultless playing, more than any profundity in the lyrics' simple to-do list.

Hootie & The Blowfish's former frontman owas best when he embraced all his influences, as in the country-funk Get Back Song and the Bob Dylan cast-off he has made his own, Wagon Wheel.

The ever-smiling South Carolinian provided one bracing moment in this otherwise genial affair. There has to be a thesis in what's going on when Rucker, a black man leading an all-white band and dominating a white world, covers a song of dispossession such as Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning.

Or maybe it was just another chance to get this adoring sold-out crowd singing all the words, as they did for the three from Hootie's Cracked Rear View, the global monster album that ate 1995.