Madison Ryann Ward remembers the first audiences she ever had. They were not sitting in theater seats or standing beneath stage lights. They were girls on her sports teams, lying in sleeping bags after a long day at camp, waiting for the room to go dark.
“I distinctly remember being at a basketball camp,” Ward says. “It’s just dark, and then being like, ‘Madison, can you sing?’”
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She would sing. Not because she was trying to launch a career, and certainly not because she thought of herself as a performer. Ward grew up in southwest Oklahoma and was far more consumed by sports than music, eventually playing Division I volleyball at the University of Oklahoma. “I wasn’t doing choir or anything like that,” she says. “I did the talent show every once in a while, but I was more sports heavy as a kid.” Still, those teammates apparently knew something before she did. They wanted to hear that voice.
Years later, that voice would carry Ward far beyond those sleeping bags. A viral video helped introduce her to a much larger audience, eventually catching the attention of producer Rick Rubin and leading to a deal with American Recordings. But the road that followed was not the clean, upward trajectory that usually gets squeezed into an artist biography. There was Los Angeles. There was the major label. Then there was stepping away from music entirely. Ward had to figure out who she was before figuring out what kind of artist she wanted to be.
Now she is back, fully independent, living in Nashville and coming to Savannah for the first time on her Still Standing Tall Tour.
And in some ways, the Madison Ryann Ward arriving here can be traced back to another childhood performance, one that did not go nearly as well.
“I used to have really bad stage fright,” she says. “I would just get so nervous to sing.
I didn’t want to mess it up.” Then, while still young, she was asked to sing the national anthem. “I messed it up. I actually sang the wrong words twice.”
That could have become the sort of childhood humiliation that sends a kid running for cover. Ward certainly wanted to disappear. Her father had another idea.
“My dad and my brother were there, and instead of me going and hiding somewhere and crying about it, my dad had said, ‘Go out and shake hands and say hello to everybody that’s here at the game.’ So I didn’t really get the chance to go and feel sorry for myself.”
Instead, she had to walk directly toward the people who had just watched her mess up. Laugh about it. Apologize. Say hello.
“I think that was a pivotal moment,” Ward says, “for just getting it away from so much focus on myself with singing and sharing my gift. That was a really helpful thing to go through as a young girl.”
That idea, taking the attention off herself and putting it onto what the music might give someone else, runs through the way Ward talks about performing today. The stage fright did not disappear because she suddenly became fearless. The purpose changed.
Her clearest confirmation came in 2023. After leaving Los Angeles and the major label world, Ward had spent a few years away from music. She returned independently with A New Thing, an album that represented not simply another release, but a different version of herself.
“My very first show that I did when I began touring back in 2023, I did my very first show in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Vinyl,” she says. “It was the first album I released independently, and it was after I left L.A. and a major label and took a couple years off.”
The show sold out quickly. More important was what Ward saw when she walked onto the stage.
“To see that many people that were supporting this version of me, it just was very redemptive,” she says. “Kind of affirming that this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. Like, okay, this feels like the beginning, even though I’ve already had some years behind me of trying to figure out what I want to do.”
There is something powerful about an artist describing a comeback as a beginning. Ward’s story is not really about getting back to where she was. It is about becoming comfortable with where she is now.
That includes faith. It is not tucked into the corner of her music or disguised when she talks about it. It is central to what she is doing, including a new song called “Floodgates” that she has been introducing from the stage.
“I’m excited about that one,” she says. “Basically kind of encouraging people to be okay with crying out to God. It’s okay. God can hold all our emotions instead of walling up and being so tough and thinking we got it all on our own.”
Then Ward puts it even more simply.
“God collects all of our tears. Nothing is in vain.”
That message could easily feel confined to a church. Ward is intentionally taking it somewhere else.
Her tour is playing bars, clubs and theaters, the kinds of rooms where people arrive with wildly different beliefs and expectations. Ward likes it that way. In fact, it may be one of her favorite parts of what she does.
“I like that a lot of them are in bars and clubs and theaters and things, you know, with an open bar,” she says. “I think that draws a lot of people that may not even want to have anything to do with going to church or God in general.”
For Ward, that is not a problem to solve. It is the point.
“It’s just a blessing to be able to bring that to those places and meet people where they’re at,” she says. “I just want to bring the joy and the hope of Christ to that place.”
Sometimes, she says, people arrive expecting nothing more than a concert and leave reconsidering something much larger. “It can be like a gotcha sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “People show up, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I think I want to get back. I need to get back with God,’ or ‘I want to go try church again.’”
Savannah will be new territory for Ward. She has never performed here before, and the city falls almost exactly in the middle of this stretch of her tour. She is hoping her parents might make the trip, too. When she mentioned Savannah to them, their reaction was immediate: “Oh my gosh, Savannah. That’ll be beautiful.”
They are right, of course. But Ward is also arriving in a city whose live music culture is still finding out what it can become. Every touring artist who chooses Savannah adds something to that growth, especially an artist whose music does not fit neatly into one box. Ward moves through R&B, soul, gospel and contemporary Christian music without seeming particularly concerned about where one category stops and another begins.
Maybe that is because the invitation matters more to her than the label.
“Everybody’s welcome to the show,” Ward says. “I just like the doors open. Come on in.”
For a singer who once stood terrified after forgetting the national anthem, there is a beautiful bit of symmetry in that. Her father taught her to walk back toward the crowd. Years later, she is still doing it, except now she is the one holding the door open.
“Come stand tall with us,” she says.
Madison Ryann Ward: The Standing Tall Tour
September 18, 2026 at 8 p.m.
Victory North Savannah
