Rapper and Louisville native Jack Harlow, brought his “No Place Like Home” tour to Bowling Green on Saturday, performing in Diddle Arena.

This performance was his fifth out of six stops on the tour, which was held exclusively within Kentucky. Other stops included Owensboro, Pikeville, Covington, Murray and Lexington. 

The tour was announced Aug. 17 and is Harlow’s third annual tour throughout Kentucky.

Many individuals traveled to be present in Bowling Green for the concert. While the doors for the concert opened at 6:30 p.m., concertgoers were lined up outside of Diddle at 2:30 p.m., with hopes to be alongside the barricade on the floor of the arena. 

Pacie Bulle, WKU junior psychology major, alongside Bree Smith, who traveled from Tyler, Texas, were two of the few lined up early in anticipation for the show. The two met online, and became friends, where they then bought concert tickets together to attend the show.

Smith explained she had never been to Kentucky, nor had she met Bulle in person until she came to Kentucky for the show. 

“Traveling here for this, I was really excited,” Smith said.

Kentucky has become somewhere interesting to come to, Smith explained, when people asked her why she was looking forward to traveling to Kentucky. The main draw was being able to see Harlow in concert.

“I just appreciate Jack because he loves Kentucky so much, and I don’t know really many other rappers, even artists, that fight for their own state like he does,” Smith said. 

At each stop on the tour, there were designated areas set up for donations to go to the local area. The Jack Harlow Foundation made its debut at the “No Place Like Home” tour to help “celebrate each concert’s home town,” according to the Jack Harlow Foundation Facebook. 

Each location was requesting different donations for Bowling Green, including four packs of toilet paper and individual paper towel rolls. Donations were collected for local nonprofits in the areas around the concert, paired with the help of Metro United Way, the Jack Harlow Foundation Facebook said. 

Rich Crowe was one of the many individuals who brought donations with him to the concert, after seeing an article posted by the Courier Journal. Donations for other show locations included deodorant and body wash, non-perishable foods and children’s pajamas. 

The concert drew a very diverse crowd, consisting of many age ranges. Myra Gregory and her daughter Lexie Gregorie, alongside Amie Chaney and her daughter Chloe Chaney, made an outing out of the evening.

The group traveled from Franklin, Kentucky to attend the concert together. 

“It’s kind of cool that someone who’s so big is [performing] only 30 minutes away,” Lexie Gregorie said. 

Chloe Chaney agreed with this, saying “I think it’s super cool and he represents the state; he’s so proud of the state that he’s from.”

In the mix of attendees were many WKU students, like Emily Damron, freshman marketing major, and Maddie Dequattro, sophomore business management major with a focus in global business.

Damron was one of a select group of students who won their tickets through a giveaway at a WKU basketball game. 

“I checked in the Red Wave app at the basketball game and they did a drawing, and me and my roommate were one of the 10-15 people that got to go,” Damron said. Because her roommate already had tickets to the show, she brought Dequattro with her to attend. 

Damron attended the Pikeville show as well, as she had already had the tickets before winning the drawing. She explained that even if she had not won tickets, she planned on buying tickets the morning of the concert anyway. 

Harlow is from Louisville and often references Kentucky, Louisville and surrounding areas, like Bardstown and Shelby County, within his music. In one of his songs, “SUNDOWN,” released in 2018, Big Red is mentioned, followed by Harlow singing the line “I’m a Kentucky boy ‘til the death.”

During the show, Harlow explained that it was his first time ever having a concert in Bowling Green. 

“I started uploading music to Facebook when I was in the seventh grade, and the only people who knew about my music were my classmates, really,” Harlow said. 

After graduating high school and releasing more music, Harlow signed a record deal in Atlanta, Georgia, in which he drove through Bowling Green many times. 

“Things just started to get realer and realer,” Harlow said.

Before playing one of his top hits, “What’s Poppin,” Harlow explained that “at the very beginning of this decade that we’re in right now, January of 2020 I put out a song that changed my life forever.” 

Harlow played both new music of his as well as some of his earlier hits, to appeal to the wide audience range that was in attendance at the show. 

Harlow currently holds Billboard Hot 100’s number one spot for his new single “Lovin On Me”, with it being on the chart for the second week in a row, only having been released Nov. 10 of this year.

The “No Place Like Home” tour wrapped up in Lexington on Sunday, Dec. 3 in Rupp Arena. 

Content Editor Molly Dobberstein can be reached at [email protected]