What exactly makes Lady Antebellum a country band?
Yes, they're from Nashville, and all their singles get heavy play on 96.1 FM The Wolf, and their crowds are filled with cowboy boots and denim.
But there's also a lot of electric guitar, harmonies with more pop than twang and lyrics not exactly bursting with rural themes.
Why is the band's warm-up act, Sam Hunt, wearing a T-shirt that says "San Fran" and sampling from Dr. Dre?
"What should it say on his shirt?" the woman next to me asked.
Fair point, it just doesn't seem like the most "country" of cities.
"Maybe, he's just saying country is universal, wherever you are," she said.
Touché.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter that much. Lady Antebellum played a high-energy 22-song, one-and-a-half hour set at the Charleston Civic Center on Thursday night that had the raucous crowd singing along, dancing in their seats and taking cellphone videos with abandon. More than country, rock or pop, it was a happy show.
Technically a three-member band, Lady Antebellum also boasts a five-piece backup ensemble, featuring two guitars, bass, drums and piano. The three principals are Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott on vocals and Dave Haywood, who sings and plays a variety of instruments.
Haywood switches instruments nearly every song of the show, from mandolin, to electric guitar, to piano, to smaller mandolin, to bejeweled electric guitar, to acoustic guitar and back again.
But the vocals of Kelley and Scott are what have made the group multi-platinum and one of the country's biggest country draws.
They stalked the Civic Center stage, singing mega-hits like "Hey Bartender," "Need You Now" and "I Run to You" while high-fiving lucky fans in the front row and snapping selfies with an even luckier few.
While there was a sophisticated light show, with lasers and projections, the music carried the night. There were no pyrotechnics and Kelley and Scott's strutting and dancing never outpaced their voices.
It was upbeat and full of energy and good cheer.
About halfway through, after the band's first ever single, "Love Don't Live Here," from 2007, the three stars walked through the crowd, to a smaller stage in the middle of the arena.
The backup band took a break and Lady Antebellum performed four songs close to a capella, with only Haywood on acoustic guitar for accompaniment.
But even the low-key ballads, while mournful in tune, were positive in message.
The one great mystery of "One Great Mystery," from "747," the band's newest album, is about as happy a mystery as you can imagine, one that doesn't really need solving. "What did I ever do to make you fall for me?" the band asks repeatedly and rhetorically.
A cover of Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" boasts "we found love right where we are." The closest it came to a somber note was when, in introducing the song, Scott said, "I wish we wrote it."
The band members' personal lives may help explain the upbeat show. All three have gotten married within the last several years. Scott and Haywood both have new babies with their spouses and Kelley is expecting his first child with his wife.
After the current tour wraps up on Sept. 19, the band will go on a break, of undetermined length.
Two other covers, played back to back near the end of the show, showed the conundrum of trying to slot the band into a genre.
A rocking version of Shania Twain's "Any Man of Mine" was as country as any song the band played all night. It was followed by Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," which was as un-country as any song all night.
"We wanted to combine our love for tradition with something that is now," the band said in a cheerful, prerecorded video that played several times before they performed. That seemed as good an explanation as any for the band's style. Unfortunately, the video was an advertisement -- an explanation for why the band shops at Bed Bath & Beyond, and why their fans should too. Oh well, at least they looked happy.
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.