On the Sunday night before Memorial Day, I stood among a sea of throbbing electricity in Cumberland, Maryland (population 19,495). Nestled against the North Branch Potomac River, which separates the Old Line State’s panhandle from West Virginia, the Allegany County Fairgrounds would host a platinum-selling artist for one night.
Tyler Childers, a slender redhead donning a Canadian tuxedo, strode unassumingly to center stage, greeted with the distinct clamor of a crowd sporting Grateful Dead tour shirts and camouflage in equal measure. The roar reverberating from rolling green hills across the river didn’t appear to reach the artist - or, he just didn’t care.
He could have been playing anywhere. Last year, Childers filled the legendary 10,000-seat Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado, and is performing there again on September 28th and 29th (tickets currently start at $270). Yet, here he was in Cumberland, a former industrial town that lost more than half of its pre-World War 2 population after closures to major steel, munitions, and tire plants.
The occasion was DelFest, a bluegrass festival put on by 83-year-old picker Del McCoury and his family band, the Travelin’ McCourys. Over the past few years, Childers has toured sparingly, choosing instead to headline smaller festivals where his appearance makes an undeniable economic impact on struggling communities near his Eastern Kentucky home.
As he reached the microphone, Childers spoke softly, offering a “how y’all doing” with a downward inflection. It was clear this was a rhetorical question, though he’d accept the ravenous cheers that ensued. One might expect the fairground’s energy to be greeted with a raucous redneck anthem, chock full of references to Bud Light and trucks. Instead, the artist lowered his head and belted out a string of chilling stanzas, backed by nothing but his own guitar and thousands of amateur vocalists around me in the audience.
Daddy worked like a mule mining Pike County coal
'Til he fucked up his back and couldn't work anymore
He said one of these days you'll get out of these hills
Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills
The song, “Nose On the Grindstone,” will never be broadcasted on FM frequencies, interspersed between Luke Bryan and Morgan Wallen hits. In fact, a proper studio version has never been released. Yet, a live-recorded rendition, shot by the independent production company OurVinyl, has received over 30 million views on YouTube and more than 107 million streams on Spotify. It is an unflinching acoustic ballad about a part of the country that is simultaneously ignored and objectified, ridiculed and used for cultural capital by politicians, authors, and author-politicians. And while Childers may be the most prominent Appalachian country artist of the modern age, he is among an ever-growing lineup of singer-songwriters contributing to an independent music movement not matched in substance or organic growth since the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ‘60s.
From Northern Alabama, to the hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky, and up through Western Pennsylvania along the Allegheny River, a 2,200 mile trail bearing the region’s name causes eager outdoorsmen to reconsider their hobbies, albeit amidst a landscape resembling Eden.
The land and the resources extracted from it play a starring role in the Appalachian country canon. Notably, however, coal mining is no longer a major industry in the region, and hasn’t been for many decades. Even over the past 15 years, Appalachian coal production dropped by 65 percent. As such, rather than cosplaying as representatives of hardhat-wearing masculinity, the scene’s best artists utilize a generational lens, framing the labor of their ancestors against a modern context, where the industry’s disappearance has created unemployment and innumerable deaths of despair. In 2017, the opioid overdose rate was 72 percent higher in Appalachian counties than the rest of the country.
Perhaps nobody articulates this dynamic better than Morgantown, West Virginia-based storyteller Charles Wesley Godwin. “Coal Country,” from his 2019 debut album Seneca, describes the sedimentary rock’s journey from hero to villain, and the carnage it left behind in his home state.
It put a roof over my head And the armor on the tanks in Normandy The lights shone bright in the hands of its care From the western skies to Washington D.C Now it lies broken, high, and cold In its grave of Appalachian stone Coal Country
Godwin’s synopsis is both succinct and sweeping. Much of his songwriting covers decades, if not centuries of Appalachian history. Some of it, like “Coal Country,” captures the heartbeat of an entire region. Other songs use individual lives or moments in time as motifs for broader Appalachian life. “Seneca Creek,” a winding tale about Godwin’s grandparents, is an apt example of this narrower, equally powerful technique.
And sure enough, the hard times came
You loved yours, I did the same
But we made it through the winter's cold
And many summers young and old
In '85 the creek did rise
But it only took the other side
Took Gandee, North Fork and South Branch too
The house still stood that I built for you
The scope and maturity of Godwin’s voice belies his 30-ish years of age. He may be, however, on the older side of the movement. Take Logan Halstead, who at 18 years old somehow possesses a comparable understanding of place and lineage. To date, Halstead has only released four songs on streaming services (like Childers, through OurVinyl). One of these is a cover of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” which was originally written and performed by British songwriter Richard Thompson in 1991, and was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 all-time greatest songs. It was adapted to a bluegrass medley in 2001 by none other than McCoury, who changed the narrative’s location from Box Hill (in Surrey, England) to Knoxville, Tennessee.
Halstead’s gut-wrenching “Dark Black Coal” is his most viral, with 5 million views on YouTube. It is almost unsettling to watch a teenager wail the line “just don’t let my children become the victims of the mountain’s evil ways.” Nonetheless, the performance leaves no questions as to why this musical moment inspires awe.
I grew up 2,500 miles from Appalachia, though the tech industry-dominated Seattle suburbs might as well be on another continent. Earlier this year, however, my parents left the Pacific Northwest for Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, into a house with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from their front porch. Northern Virginia, where I currently reside, is similarly contrasting to Appalachia as is my hometown, but much closer, and I make the three hour drive as often as I can. This is to say that I am much more appreciator than qualified expert on the sonic particularities of the region, and it would be malpractice to pretend otherwise.
Disclaimer aside, the fortunate evolution of my geographic proximity gives me plenty of chances to experience the genre in a live setting, complementing my prior habit of scouring blogs like Savingcountrymusic.com and Whiskey Riff. The Fourth of July festival in my parents’ town of 7,000 was headlined by 49 Winchester, a five-piece crew from Russell County, Virginia that was recently praised by mainstream country’s biggest star Luke Combs in a Rolling Stone interview. The night before, I chatted with John R. Miller, whose work has been covered by Childers, among other prominent vocalists.
Lyrically and physically, place is the most crucial ingredient in the Appalachian country recipe, as it comes of age in an environment that has never been more saturated, accessible, or nationalized. There are countless examples of local music scenes throughout the decades, from Dylan and Company in Greenwich Village, to hip-hop in the Bronx, to grunge in my home state. We wouldn’t have Willie and Waylon without an outlaw country scene in Texas (which is loosely carried on today by artists like Cody Jinks, Flatland Cavalry, and Whiskey Myers). Yet, to deliberately localize oneself in an age of streaming feels revelatory. In the search for an esoteric “cool,” exclusivity is coveted - and what’s more exclusive than creating something largely inaccessible to carless yuppies?
There is, I think, one individual who defies my attempt to outline a theory of regionalism as the crux of mountain music intrigue. Sturgill Simpson is an Eastern Kentucky man through and through, but he is nothing if not well-traveled. The son of a State Trooper, Simpson enlisted in the Navy after high school, and was stationed in Japan and Seattle(!), where he developed a worldly palate and the ability to cross both state line and genre.
Simpson’s early releases contain traditional elements, though “You Can Have the Crown,” his most enduring track off the 2013 debut album High Top Mountain, reveals a weathered cynicism that could only feel authentic through the lens of a War on Terror-era veteran.
I guess it could be worse, it ain't that bad At least I ain't sittin' in old Baghdad In the middle of the hot damn desert sittin' in a tank
Simpson’s grasp of more familiar socio-political themes (and, of course, his immense talent) led him to be recognized as something of a visionary by national media outlets. His second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was listed among both Rolling Stone’s and NPR’s Top 50 Albums of 2014. He even did a Tiny Desk Concert, where he performed “Turtles All The Way Down."
I've seen Jesus play with flames In a lake of fire that I was standing in Met the devil in Seattle And spent nine months inside the lions den
In 2019, Simpson released Sound and Fury, which is heavier on psychedelic rock than Faulknerian southern gothic themes. Evidently inspired by his time overseas, a few songs are accompanied by the visual creations of Japanese anime director Junpei Misuzaki.
Simpson’s increasingly globalized portfolio betrayed a sense of dislocation. Ironically, as the world shared a fleeting moment of isolated solidarity during the early days of the pandemic, Simpson found himself stateside and yearning for his roots. He released a two-volume, 22-song concept called Cuttin’ Grass, in which his own music is remastered into traditional bluegrass arrangements. Songs like Brace for Impact (Live a Little), which were once outfitted with horns and a pulsing drum, were radically altered to include the frantic banjo and fiddle medley invented by Kentucky native and bluegrass founder Bill Monroe.
Of the shift, Simpson was humorously poignant while performing in front of an empty, covid-era Ryman Auditorium. “I decided that after climbing the ropes of country music stardom and then completely destroying that career to make a rock ‘n’ record, now I have great ambitions of a life of gravel parking lots and Porta Potties.”
Tyler Childers will release his sixth album, Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? on September 30th. The weekend before, he will characteristically headline Healing Appalachia, a music festival at the West Virginia State Fair that will donate proceeds to “a wide variety of boots-on-the-ground non profits working throughout the recovery ecosystem from youth and prevention to recovery houses and recovery to work initiatives.” The two-day event in Lewisburg is an hour from my parents house, and I will gratefully attend.
I can imagine the Appalachian country scene featuring in a number of election-themed think pieces as 2024 approaches. The region generated outsized coverage in the wake of 2016, as a bewildered intellectual class sought to understand the dynamics underpinning a turbulent shift of political consensus. While I understand the urge to use culture as a convenient tool for broad diagnoses of the nation’s condition, I will humbly offer my advice as a mere urbanite observer. Sometimes, it’s best to let creative minds flourish, unmarred by preconception, and free to voice highland truth.