At 7:30 tonight, Luke Pruitt will take the stage at South on Main for the Oxford American’s Local Live free concert series . Call ahead at (501) 244-9660 to reserve your seat at a table for this popular series. Local Live is made possible by the generous support of Ben and Jane Hunt Meade.

Although Luke Pruitt spent several years honing his songwriting craft in Nashville, Tennessee, it was moving back to his hometown of Fort Smith that gave the songwriter the inspiration for his Songs of Home album series, which Pruitt describes as “a sort of op-ed about the American Dream in a post 9/11 world.”

In Pruitt’s debut EP Songs of Home, pt. 1, released in 2014, we hear the story of a young millennial kid playing for tips and dreaming of a future in music success, as well as a hometown story about Vietnamese immigrants in Fort Smith who were forced to adapt to a new home after the fall of Saigon, and have built their own American Dream as restaurant owners. Part 1 gives good insight into Pruitt’s influences not only in songwriting, but in classic American literature, as his stories have both poetic and prosaic tendencies.

Songs of Home, pt. 2 will be Pruitt’s first full length release, due out in 2015, and will finish the story of the American Dream that the writer started in part 1.