Two of the album's tracks were previously recorded by other artists: "Homecoming Queen" previously appeared on Feels Like Home, the 2013 studio album by Sheryl Crow, and "Three Kids No Husband" previously appeared on the 2014 album Numbered Doors, by its co-writer Lori McKenna.
The track "Daughter" features Clark's close friend and collaborator Kacey Musgraves on harmony vocals.
Big Day in a Small Town received highly positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 84 out of 100, which indicates "universal acclaim" based on 5 reviews.[3]Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic states: "Songs rarely come much better than these."[4]Rolling Stone's Will Hermes calls it "music tooled alternately for stadiums and songwriting circles, commercial and public radio, line-dance bars and coffee shops."[6] Additionally, it was the Spin "album of the week" and called "fantastic; often a superb piece of recorded music" by reviewer Alfred Soto.[7]The Boston Globe's Stuart Munro wrote: "If you're looking for alternatives to mainstream country, Clark is still providing one... you just have to keep listening beyond the first two tracks to find it."[10]
Big Day in a Small Town debuted at number eighty-two on the US Billboard 200 chart[20] with 8,100 equivalent album units; it sold 7,400 copies in its first week, with the remainder of its unit total reflecting the album's streaming activity and track sales.[21] As of August 2016 the album has sold 15,500 copies in the US.[22]
