WATCH: Ben Sollee, “Only Love” (John Prine Cover)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Ben Sollee
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Song: “Only Love”
Release Date: February 13, 2023

In Their Words: “John Prine had a knack for folding mantras in to his songs. This song has a message that resonates deeply with my journey as a creative, father, and husband [and] that is so needed in this fitful world. ‘When love comes your way, you learn to say, I love you!'” – Ben Sollee

Photo Credit: Jessica Ebelhar
Video Credit: Created by Josh Ford, FordFoto.
Recorded at Mahonia Studios, Louisville, Kentucky.

Yes, That Is Rhiannon Giddens Playing Banjo on Beyoncé’s New Track

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

During a series of high profile Verizon ads during yesterday’s Super Bowl, Beyoncé announced that her upcoming Act II following 2022’s incredibly popular dance album, Renaissance, will find the globe-crossing singer/creative powerhouse returning to country. As music journalist Marissa Moss points out in a brand new post for the country newsletter she co-founded, Don’t Rock the Inbox, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s relationship to the genre is nothing new – as far back as 2007 the Texas born-and-raised artist rode a horse as she entered the iconic Houston Rodeo, an internationally known, marquis event in her hometown. Across the decades, Knowles-Carter has constantly utilized her music to remind her audience of her Americana roots, with songs, tracks, and production values that regularly reference country and roots music idioms. At the Grammy Awards on February 4, she wore a modernist couture cowgirl get up – a motif that has been peppered throughout the visuals for Renaissance and its world tour. As Lana Del Rey had just announced her next album, Lasso, would be country, the world wondered – why is Beyoncé wearing a cowboy hat?

But Beyoncé’s relationship to country goes deeper, still. In 2016, as Moss and many other journalists and industry insiders pointed out in reaction to last night’s announcement, Knowles-Carter appeared with The Chicks (at that time still referred to as The Dixie Chicks) in a fiery medley performance during the CMA Awards. The trio joined Beyoncé on her countryfied Lemonade track, “Daddy Lessons,” before morphing into a barn burning all-skate on the Chicks’ Darrell Scott-written hit, “Long Time Gone.”

These new songs, which were initially unveiled exclusively on the streaming service Tidal, are built on the “Texas Bama” terroir that all of Knowles-Carter’s music is intentionally rooted within. “Texas Hold ‘Em” begins with a full, warm, fretless old-time banjo, playing a looped, intricate melodic hook. If your ears perked up during Act II‘s teaser video upon hearing the five-string, you are correct – the banjo and viola on the track were performed by the one and only Rhiannon Giddens and were tracked with Demeanor, Giddens’ nephew, another roots music innovator and genre blender, acting as engineer.

It is beyond apropos for Beyoncé and her team to tap Giddens here, someone who has also built a career and prolific musical output on holding together seemingly disparate influences, textures, tones, and styles. It speaks to Knowles-Carter’s aptitude for not only trying on and exploring new or relatively unfamiliar idioms, but also inhabiting them wholly, intricately, and intuitively. It seems obvious to state, but Beyoncé is no roots music carpet-bagger or opportunist putting on “poverty tour” cosplay just to bolster her bottom line.

Though the production style and arrangements here are decidedly interconnected with Renaissance, the beats and underscoring beneath and around the clawhammer banjo and finger-picked acoustic guitar don’t feel entirely like Avicii’s “Hey Brother” or similar, more heavy-handed attempts to intermingle string band music with house, disco, and dance. Ultimately, these two tracks feel less like a “stomp & holler” money-grab/chart-grab and more like post-modernist line dancing music, carrying forward the placemaking and space-holding of her 2022 album. This is music about gathering, moving, and polishing the floorboards with a pair of cowboy boots.

As MacArthur “Genius” and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom points out in a NYT blog entry on the new tracks, the most country-sounding aspects here don’t originally stem from “country” at all: “‘Texas Hold ’Em’ sounds like a Maren Morris-style bop, with many of country-pop’s current themes,” says Cottom. “There is a good reason for that. Those themes are very R&B and hip-hop coded: harmonies, danceable hooks, trap percussion and call-and-response.”

In the mind of this writer, though, “16 Carriages,” the proverbial B-side to the more glitzy and grabby “Texas Hold ‘Em,” is the most remarkable of the two singles currently available from Act II. It’s a Beyoncé train song, one that straddles the divide between urban and rural, city folk and country folk, hillbilly music and rhythm and blues. This is a deft balancing act, one that collectives like the Black Opry and artists like Mickey Guyton, Brittney Spencer, Black Pumas, Buffalo Nichols, Julie Williams, and yes, Giddens, have been demonstrating to the roots music industry and its fans for years and years, now. Such a balance can easily go awry, but as we know, Beyoncé so rarely goes awry – even in a would-be treacherous foray into this well-guarded and gatekept genre.

@black_was_genius Replying to @🌚 you asked, i responded. #beyhaw #blonde #takeover ♬ original sound – Tressie McMillan Cottom

These two songs, but “16 Carriages” especially, illustrate how important it is to view music such as this not as aberrations from a country music norm, but as distillations and representations of what has always been possible in country. Especially if we let arbitrary, moralistic, and bigoted “rules” and expectations fall away and we let artists – whether the most famous in the world or the busker on the street corner – be who they are, unencumbered and empowered by their identities, in all of their idiosyncrasies and complications. Beyoncé’s Act II will showcase that we really do all belong in country, whether your hat and boots are literal shit kickers or are overlaid in hundreds of disco ball mirrors.

Photo courtesy of Tidal.

Banjo Player Kyle Tuttle Reflects on Personal Growth and ‘Labor of Lust’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

One of the most talented and sought after banjo players in bluegrass, Kyle Tuttle’s life has been full of the highest of highs and lowest of lows in recent years, from a marriage and divorce to the surprise death of close friend and bandmate Jeff Austin to the loss of his job due to COVID and finally hitting the road as a member of Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway.

All of that and more are documented on Labor of Lust (out February 16), an 11-song expedition taking listeners on a deeply personal and sonically diverse journey of tragedy and triumph. Recorded across three separate sessions in Nashville dating back to 2018, the record also documents a significant chunk of Tuttle’s life that, despite the length of time and changes that come with it, aren’t lacking a central theme. This led him to describing the project as “a long work-in-progress,” due to how its focus shifted throughout the more than five years of bringing it to life.

“By the time it was all said and done, this was a pretty eclectic group of songs,” Tuttle tells BGS. “There’s some stuff with an electric band that includes drums and me on electric banjo, others with traditional string band arrangements and some that meet in the middle for a more jamgrass sound.”

One of the songs that bridge the gap between these two worlds of bluegrass is “Hard to Say,” a song that sees Tuttle grieving the loss of Austin, his marriage, and his job all at the same time. It’s anchored by his blistering banjo backbone with introspective lyrics like, “Knowing that it’s gone and gone for good, makes you wonder what the hell you’re waiting on?” that serve as a message to himself and anybody listening to ask the questions you need to ask, then play another one.

“Even though the music and lyrics were written over a handful of years, loss and learning to deal with it on a personal level is central to this record,” indicates Tuttle. “That being said, there’s a lot of joy within these songs too. I don’t want to make it seem like I wrote music for five years and all I experienced was misery. Loss is something we all have to deal with at one time or another, and my way of dealing with it was to write some of this music.”

Speaking by phone from his snowed-in Nashville home following a mid-January winter storm, Tuttle opened up about how he approaches being a bandleader compared to his current gig with Golden Highway, being stuck in a Bob Ross painting, choosing to work doing something you love, and more.

You’re notorious for staying extremely busy in your musical endeavors, from sitting in with folks on stage and in the studio to your stints with the Jeff Austin band, (your current gig with) Molly Tuttle, and your own compositions and projects, like Labor of Lust. With that in mind, how do you approach your own music versus being a member of someone else’s band?

Kyle Tuttle: It’s a bit different, because with my own show I’m the bandleader, along with other variables. With my shows, I play with lots of different members, I don’t have one set group of people that know my body of material super well, but rather lots of friends I can call on who all have different strengths. For that reason, when fronting my own band I’m more in the headspace of trying to wrangle all these people and variables together for a cohesive show, whereas with Molly we all have our roles that are specifically defined. One role isn’t more comfortable to me than the other, they just both require different things from me.

Is that comfort what had you leaning on friends like Travis Book, Dominick Leslie, and Lindsay Lou in the studio instead of session players?

It speaks very similarly to what we were just talking about with putting together a version of the Kyle Tuttle Band for shows. I wouldn’t use the term session player though, because even though all of these people are my friends they can also be called “session players” for their work on other’s records, because they’re all so good at what they do. I pick them very specifically based on their strengths and what they’ll bring to the music. I’ve been lucky through my years in the business to build personal connections with an awesome group of people that I can call when I’m looking to create something.

Although not an original, I really enjoy your cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Turn On The Radio” that closes the album. What drew you to that song of his in particular instead of “Coconut” or another of Nilsson’s gems?

I’m gonna have to work on a “Coconut” cover next, because that song is awesome! In all seriousness, [“Turn On The Radio”] felt like a thematically appropriate way to close this album. At the end of the day, I’m just a jamgrass stoner that plays banjo wanting to make a record that people can enjoy and have fun with. This record has some heavy undertones, so I felt like it deserved a nice ribbon on top to end it. It speaks to me big time, [about] remembering those near and dear who you’ve lost, especially if they’re an artist doing something you can hear. That sentiment of “turn on your record player, listen to my song, turn on your night light baby, I’m gone” felt like the right words to capture that feeling even though I didn’t say them, Harry did! I’ve loved the song for a while, so when I began putting this record together it immediately made sense to close it with this.

In terms of your own songs, I understand that “Trailer In Boulder Canyon” came together at two different times, similar to the recording process for all of Labor of Lust?

That’s a funny one, because as I said previously, I’m just a jamgrass stoner banjo player. First and foremost it’s a fun, feel good song about a magical place — a shitty little trailer on the side of a mountain up in Nederland, Colorado, where you don’t have to worry about any of your troubles or cares and just get to play fiddles and banjos and have fun all day. There’s a great jamgrass scene up there due to Vince Herman and Drew Emmitt basically starting Leftover Salmon up there. Years later some of The String Cheese Incident guys moved there followed by Jeff Austin, leading to the eventual forming of Yonder Mountain String Band there as well. There’s such a rich history of the music I love so much in that goofy little mountain town.

I initially wrote the chorus and first verse for the song as a goofy little ditty after it bounced around in my head for a while. I went up there when Vince put together a memorial concert for Jeff to help raise money for his family and so people could grieve together and ended up writing the second half of the song driving up the canyon road to get there. So like a lot of things on this record, part of it came to me at one point before finishing it off much later.

You’ve got three instrumentals on this record and another mostly instrumental tune in “Two Big Hearts.” What variations do songs like those have compared to ones with lyrics in the creation process?

The process is relatively the same, because no matter if I write with lyrics or melody I’m starting with some short idea and building around that nugget of information piece by piece. If it’s a melody, it’ll probably come out as an instrumental, but if it’s with lyrics it’s probably going to come out as a song with vocals. Even though it’s one track, “Two Big Hearts” is really two songs. The lyrics in it don’t come in until the second song, nearly four minutes in, but I felt that both were similar enough that they should be together and presented as one idea. I don’t think I’ll ever play one part of it without playing the other.

On “Not Quite Spring,” you’re singing about being stuck inside a Bob Ross painting. How’d that idea come about?

That’s a COVID song. I was sitting around on the couch watching a lot of Bob Ross’s The Joy Of Painting, just killing time like we all were back then. All of his paintings were titled and each episode of his show is titled after the painting he does in it. [“Not Quite Spring” is season 25, episode 3]. It’s of this spooky, huge mountain that’s covered in snow and frozen. A lot of his paintings are happy sunsets and warm things like a pond reflecting the trees around it, a stark contrast to this one that’s cold, dark and lonely, which is exactly how I felt at the time trapped inside my house.

In the album’s liner notes you allude to a life in music often being painted in glamor, when in reality it’s a consistent grind where persistence pays off. Is that message of sticking to it what you’re singing about on “Saddle Up?”

“Saddle Up” is the term I have for getting up every day and doing it again. It’s the idea that you may not have succeeded today or done everything you wanted to do the way you wanted to do it, which is what I’m touching on with the lyric, “The past can’t be where my best is.”

I feel like persistence defines my own life and career. Anyone who works in pursuit of a skill or art is always striving to get better. Even outside of that, we’re all working on our personal relationships and doing better by the people around us. Hopefully our best work, whether it be art or personal growth, is ahead of us and it’s not all downhill from here. It’s also a message I wish to impart on any listener or friend going through a rough patch to remind them that brighter days are on the horizon.

With Labor of Lust’s themes of personal growth in mind, what’s one resolution you have for yourself, music or otherwise, in 2024?

I’m actually trying to play the banjo even more, not from the standpoint of traveling and playing more shows, but just tinkering with it more in my downtime. It’s an interesting duality, tying your work to something you love. It’s a tricky thing to do because the lines between work and play are instantly blurred and made one. If it’s all work and no play it makes Jack a dull boy, so my resolution is to just keep the banjo in my hands for fun and to work smarter, not harder, which comes back to the idea that the past is not where my best work is.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

BGS 5+5: Abby Hamilton

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Abby Hamilton
Hometown: Nicholasville, Kentucky
Latest Album: #1 Zookeeper (of the San Diego Zoo)

Which artist has influenced you the most?

It’s always been Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. My mom used to have us stop before a Myrtle Beach or Gatlinburg vacation growing up to have us pick out a book. At 12 years old I resented this greatly. But, as luck would have it, I landed on a June Carter Cash biography, Anchored in Love. Realizing I had known this music my whole life, I saw so much of myself in her story and it led me down one of the richest love affairs of discographies I’ve ever experienced. The music and life stories of Johnny Cash and June Carter have always been a north star for my writing, performing, and presence as a person and a writer. I adore them. It also opened the doors to the world of country and folk music.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

Speaking of Johnny Cash, I remember being in college and discovering that Kris Kristofferson had written “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” not Johnny. I had no idea people could be songwriters and not the artist. It was like this huge “aha!” moment in my life. I never really felt like I was good at anything growing up. Not very high achieving in school and not super passionate about anything. Until that moment. I thought to myself, “If I can write songs, I will be happy. No matter who sings them.” And that’s what happened!

When I started writing here in Kentucky, I quickly realized everyone who made music here wrote their songs. A beautiful legacy from these parts, but it made me shift my attention to performing them. Thinking maybe, “If I sing these songs, someone might want to sing them, too.” This lead to a beautiful and unexpected journey with performing and falling in love with singing and my band. Don’t know how I got here really, but that’s the most I know.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Man, I think I’d take a bowl of Vodka Pasta and Bruce Springsteen. Those two always hit. And make it spicy.

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

There’s so many things. I’m lucky to be surrounded by so many friends, family, and influences who know me and tell me the truth. The biggest thing has always been staying true to myself. Protect my tribe and be honest with those closest to me. CLICHES I know. But, it’s true.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

Anytime I’m in Eastern Kentucky on a dewey spring morning, I’m writing like a fiend. TRULY. If I can catch a sunrise and see the spiders making webs in the grass in the morning, I’ve always finished a song. Something that feels like a retreat from the real world always inspires me. No matter the season.

Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Same Twang, Different Tune

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)

Few words stir up conflict in country music circles the way “authenticity” does. While debates over authenticity rage within every corner of the arts, the tension is especially potent in country, whose unofficial tagline is, after all, a commitment to honest simplicity: “Three chords and the truth.” While “truth” can be a broad umbrella to work under, within country music it tends to encompass a longstanding commitment to sharing the stories and experiences of everyday people, in particular those of the rural working class.

Accordingly, an adherence to and celebration of the very concept of authenticity – nebulous as it may be – is as baked into country music culture as an anti-establishment sentiment is inherent to punk music. Listen to country radio, though, and you might have a hard time finding it, particularly as the bro country of the mid-teens, though finally waning in popularity, still dominates the majority of terrestrial country airwaves.

It’s 2024, though, and it’s way past time to declare that country radio is irrelevant. Glance at Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, which includes sales and streaming data alongside airplay, and you’ll see the top spot isn’t occupied by one of the usual radio favorites like Luke Bryan, Morgan Wallen, or even Luke Combs, the latter of whom has notably found a way to straddle the line between commercial success and critical acclaim.

Rather, at the time of this writing the number one country song in America is “I Remember Everything,” a duet between the relatively new artist Zach Bryan and one of the genre’s more adventurous stars, Kacey Musgraves. As a song, “I Remember Everything” isn’t necessarily groundbreaking. Bryan’s and Musgraves’ voices play nicely off one another, with his achy grit contrasting sweetly with her smooth twang. The production is simple, underdone even, and lyrically the track travels well-trod territory: romantic heartbreak.

So, what, then, has kept “I Remember Everything” firmly situated in that top spot for 14 straight weeks (and counting)?

If you’ve paid even the least bit of attention to country music in the last couple of years, you’ve no doubt encountered Zach Bryan and his genuinely singular approach to the genre. With his raw sound, confessional lyrics, and decidedly DIY approach to business, Bryan radiates the kind of authenticity that fans crave. He joins a host of other recently established and emerging artists – including but not limited to Tyler Childers, Lainey Wilson, Colter Wall, and Billy Strings – who found success by foregoing the traditional route to country stardom, one that typically involves following an out-of-date formula honed over time by profit-driven record labels.

Zach Bryan debuted with DeAnn in 2019, finding an audience online thanks to the viral success of “Heading South” on DeAnn’s follow-up Elisabeth. He quickly built a fanbase on TikTok and YouTube before releasing his 2022 breakout LP, American Heartbreak, which had more opening week streams than any other country album that year. In the lead-up to American Heartbreak, Bryan, who served as an active-duty member of the U.S. Navy for eight years, was honorably discharged in 2021 so he could pursue music in earnest.

In addition to topping charts, American Heartbreak set itself apart from the rest of the year’s crop with its unadorned production, heavily narrative songwriting, and sheer ambition – the record clocks in at a lofty 34 tracks, with less filler than one would anticipate. The album’s biggest single, “Something in the Orange,” earned Bryan a Grammy nomination for Best Country Solo Performance and, for a time, landed him atop Billboard’s Top Songwriters chart.

That record, along with a handful of EPs and loosies released in between, teed Bryan up for his 2023 self-titled LP, a much more focused effort (a mere 16 tracks!) that found Bryan firmly situated as a real-deal country star, one who can tap the likes of Musgraves, the War and Treaty, Sierra Ferrell, and the Lumineers to come join the proceedings. While it no doubt shows the depth of his rolodex, that guest roster also points at the breadth of Bryan’s influence, as each artist comes from a different part of the broader country/Americana ecosystem.

And while he considers himself a country artist, Bryan’s roots are more indebted to the folk-rock revival of the late-aughts and early teens, when acoustic acts like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers grew so big as to cross over into Top 40, eventually helping spur an explosion in popularity for Americana and roots-adjacent music. It’s fitting, then, that the Lumineers feature on Zach Bryan, joining on the track “Spotless” so seamlessly it isn’t always easy to tell who is singing: Bryan or Lumineers frontman Jeremiah Fraites.

It’s on these collaborations, in particular, that you can hear Bryan’s joy at being able to do what he loves. His vocals are raw, but never phoned in; in fact, sometimes he seems to be straining so hard to communicate a particular emotion that you worry his voice will give out. It never does.

In other words, Bryan is a fan’s musician, one who geeks out about his favorite artists the way his own fans do about him. In a post about the duo the War and Treaty, who joined Bryan on the standout Zach Bryan cut “Hey Driver,” he writes, “I can tell you the first time I heard War and Treaty live and I looked to the person next to me and said, ‘Are you hearing this?’ I talked to them later that night and they were the kindest couple I’d ever met.” In the same post, he says of the Lumineers, “I can tell you about how when my Mom went on home I got the Lumineers tattoo on my tricep after hearing ‘Long Way From Home’ for the first time and how Wes [Schultz] and Jeremiah are some of the most welcoming humans I’ve ever met.”

This post points to a major piece of both Bryan’s appeal and the air of authenticity that surrounds him: His direct line of communication with his fans. He manages his social media accounts himself and is no stranger to getting vulnerable in his messaging, often posting progress updates on new songs he’s working on or taking a moment to express gratitude for his success. For fans, it’s almost like there are no barriers between them and Bryan, which reinforces the relatability at the core of his music.

The beating heart of Zach Bryan, for me, is “East Side of Sorrow,” a song that grapples with hope and religious faith by connecting the grief Bryan felt after losing his mother to his time being shipped overseas while serving in the Navy. Despite – or perhaps because of – these vivid references to specific experiences, like being “shipped… off in a motorcade” and losing his mother “in a waiting room after sleeping there for a week or two,” the song is deeply emotional and relatable, a wrenching but empowering anthem encouraging the hopeless to try to keep it moving. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who couldn’t use such a message, this writer included – Apple Music tells me it was my most-played song of 2023.

It would be – and for a lot of folks, already is – easy to accept Bryan’s every word, to believe that his hardscrabble songs about “rot-gut whiskey” and manual labor are honest reflections of the life he’s lived and the person he is. Then there’s the cynical interpretation, that Bryan’s anti-marketing is, actually, still marketing, that a young musician could only know so much of the realities of the struggle of the working class, that it’s the same twang to a different tune. Bryan has, after all, had a few bumps along his road to fame, including some less than flattering encounters with police that negate his humble personal.

But the truth, as it so often is, is likely somewhere in the middle. With such personal material, it’s easy to trace one of Bryan’s songs to its point of inspiration – “East Side of Sorrow,” for example, is undoubtedly ripped right out of his lived experience. And Bryan isn’t afraid to admit the gaps in his experience, like when on “Tradesman” he sings, “The only callous I’ve grown is in my mind.” Compare that to, say, the sheer tone deafness of a song like Blake Shelton’s “Minimum Wage” and Bryan’s instances of stretching the truth feel trivial.

Bryan is only the latest in a long line of country artists for whom authenticity is both a blessing and a curse. Genre giants like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings are often held up as unimpeachably authentic pillars of the genre, despite weathering their own brushes with the authenticity police earlier in their careers. And these debates, which tend to center white, straight, cisgender men, aren’t nearly as hostile in their scrutiny as they are for marginalized artists, against whom the idea of authenticity is typically wielded as a gatekeeping weapon.

Wherever you fall on Zach Bryan, it’s hard to deny that the gravel-voiced, baby-faced boy from Oklahoma has changed the very fabric of contemporary country music. What he does with that power moving forward could break the genre open for good, making space for artists with unusual paths, atypical backgrounds and a disregard for the flavor of the week. If Zach Bryan is who he says he is, he may very well do it.

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Photo Credit: Louis Nice

Three Chords and… Authenticity?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)

In country and roots music, authenticity is treated like the most valuable currency of all. Maybe that’s because the genre has always been caught between the fiction that this music is frozen in amber and the reality that it has always borrowed liberally from current musical trends in order to have commercial value. The earliest popular country music was an amalgamation of regional music from rural white artists, music stolen wholesale from Black and Indigenous artists, and plenty of nods to prevailing pop (i.e., urban or non-rural) trends – looking back at the places young laborers and listeners that had been drawn to cities came from, and the exciting present and future they found themselves in once they arrived.

Can anyone or anything truly be considered “authentic” in America, a country whose identity is built on masking fundamental historical truths?

While artists like Zach Bryan are hailed for their “authenticity,” the vast majority of the current class of mainstream country and Americana artists grew up in suburbs, in postmodern America, in the internet age, and are graduates of major colleges – like Nashville’s Belmont University or Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Their experiences are also authentic, of course, to each individual artist – just as Bryan’s initial motel room demos are electrifying for the soul he brought to them. But these origins bring up questions around how country and Americana construct “authentic” narratives, especially to market roots music.

Still, it’s noticeable that certain types of creators are automatically considered “authentic” country artists – and they often match the complexion of the first generations of country singers, when “race records” and “hillbilly music” were originally split and whose most famous individuals wore cowboy cosplay on stage.

We want to tip you off to some real Good Country music: Music that portrays life in its complexity and a deep appreciation for one’s roots, whether they lie in the Bronx, rural Arkansas, or anywhere else on this rich blue marble we live on. Because authenticity in country doesn’t necessarily equate to rurality, to back roads and red dirt and farm trucks; real country music is real not because it’s built to be “authentic,” but because it’s honest.

Hurray For the Riff Raff

Hurray For the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra is from a little bit of everywhere, but the Bronx is where they grew up and the punk houses of the Lower East Side raised them. Between their jazz artist father and picking up a guitar as they rode the rails, Segarra’s approach to folk music began with a traditional bent and has since exhaled into an expansive approach, as with their astonishing 2022 album Life on Earth. Their upcoming album The Past Is Still Alive finds Segarra focusing more on twang, but their philosophical core has always remained the same: breathing life into unspoken pain and empowering people that society would like us to forget.

Amythyst Kiah

Amythyst Kiah’s music is a powerful force. Inspired by the blues and old time music, Kiah uses her art to prop the furnace doors open to make way for blasts of grief and abandonment. Kiah grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and picked up the guitar while attending an arts magnet school. She fell in love with old time music at East Tennessee State University and never looked back.

I first saw Kiah in 2016 at Karen Pittelman’s Queer Country Quarterly, her first show in NYC. Karen introduced her by remarking, “trust me, she’s going to be famous.” When Kiah belted her powerful alto, we all knew we were in the midst of greatness. Kiah’s most recent work on Wary + Strange (2021) takes us in a more experimental direction, but her exploration of alienation – like a toy in her hands – informs her music no matter what she’s plugging into her pedalboard. Kiah’s “Black Myself,” originally recorded with supergroup Our Native Daughters, fiercely proclaims her love for herself and her ancestors.

Willi Carlisle

Willi Carlisle has seen a thing or two in his travels across the lower 48. Carlisle cut his teeth musically in DIY and punk rock, but his search for queer role models and love for poetry drew him to New York City. With disgust for the elitism of the poetry scene there – and their mockery of his roots in the Midwest – Carlisle went searching for a life of words in folk music.

Carlisle has a knack for painting complex portraits of down-and-out characters, refusing to be drawn into simple narratives of left and right, red and blue. His stunning “When the Pills Wear Off” from the upcoming Critterland demonstrates Carlisle’s ability to turn the personal into the political – and back into the personal again. This is not the blind invective of JD Vance, but the realization that only empathy can build bridges between people who think they have nothing in common.

(Editor’s Note: Willi Carlisle is BGS’s February 2024 Artist of the Month.)

ISMAY

ISMAY (née Avery Hellman) has spent their whole life around folk and bluegrass music – their grandfather is one of the founders of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. As a contestant on Apple TV+’s short-lived My Kind of Country competition series, ISMAY is very much a representative of roots music’s vanguard. With their sparse arrangements and winsome vocals, ISMAY’s music feels like deconstructed folk music. They understand the core elements of the sound thanks to a lifetime immersed in it, and they create something wholly unique from its constituent parts, as we hear on “Point Reyes.” There, ISMAY’s contemplative vocals are orbited by a gauzy cloud of pedal steel and gentle finger-picking. ISMAY’s upcoming album Desert Pavement speaks to their sense of place: all of their music is enamored by nature. “Golden Palomino” illustrates ISMAY’s love for their rural California upbringing, guiding us to realize how much our natural and inner worlds inform each other.

Buffalo Nichols

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more devastating songwriter or guitar player than Buffalo Nichols. Nichols, like many teenagers before him, picked up a guitar and played his way through the hip-hop and hardcore scenes in his Milwaukee hometown. He found himself drawn to blues music as he began to dig into his mother’s collection and connect with Cream City’s West African community. Nichols and musical partner Joanna Rose made a mark on the Americana scene with their duo Nickel and Rose, shining a harsh light on the ignorance on full display in the community’s supposedly liberal refuge on the song “Americana.”

With his most recent solo album The Fatalist, Nichols brings all of his experience to bear on a remarkable collection of songs that combine elements of all of his musical loves. On his rendition of the classic “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond,” Nichols’ guitar becomes an extension of his own body with lightning-fast licks. Buttressed by electronic drum samples and a haze of synths, Nichols shows that music is at its most vital when it is rooted in the past and embraces the future.

Ally Free

Ally Free is one to keep your eye on in 2024. They write in their bio that they see music as the universal language that can bring people together, and that’s clear on their versatile 2019 album Rise. From the nu metal-inspired chugging of “Fool’s Gold” to the craftsman’s approach to “Fast Train,” Free isn’t embarrassed to draw from any inspiration to make a damn good song. Free’s rich alto gives their music depth: from their performances, it’s clear that this is someone who has lived a lot of life. Free is one of the newest members of the Black Opry and has taken a few steps out of their Huntsville, AL hometown to playing more shows around Nashville. Here’s hoping that means the rest of us get to hear more from this remarkable performer soon.

William Prince

William Prince’s voice carries a warm, earthy timbre that is wholly unique. Prince grew up on Peguis First Nation (in what is now Canada) and is well-versed in the travails of people living under oppression. But that experience is translated into patience and warmth, a gentle perseverance that can only come from a keen observer. Prince’s stark breakout album Reliever (2020) has given way to the warm Stand in the Joy (2023), which details the travails and victories we most often find in daily life. “Tanqueray” is a gorgeous example of Prince’s dynamic, a story of two improbable lovers finally coming together to make it work.

Sabine McCalla

Sabine McCalla is readying for a breakout 2024. McCalla’s music is steeped in the sounds of New Orleans, which she has made her home. McCalla has performed with others, but her performance on Offbeat Magazine’s OnBeat Session from September 2023 shows us she’s ready to step out on her own. For now, we have her 2018 EP Folk, which sports arresting songs that feel timeless. Maybe it’s the gentle groove in her music that feels like the stately flow of the Mississippi River – discordant with the immediacy of her lyrics that protest violence and oppression, as demonstrated by “I Went to the Levee.”

Margo Cilker

Look – Margo Cilker is literally a cowboy, okay?? Isn’t that what you imagine when someone mentions “country music” and “authenticity” in the same breath? But Cilker’s music glorifies a life of searching, not a mythologized America of white picket fences, so you can also picture the quintessential Nashville executive saying, “We like cowboys, but no, not like that.”

Cilker’s latest album, critical darling Valley of Heart’s Delight, is nostalgic for her family orchard in California’s Santa Clara Valley – but not without a heavy dose of reality. “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me” caution the listener not to become too attached to any one place – and the cost of leaving it behind. Cilker’s impassioned “With The Middle” cuts to the core of her work – a weighing of the contrasts between pleasure and pain and yearning to find common ground between the two.

Brittany Howard

Brittany Howard transcends pretty much everything – except the act of exploration with wild abandon. Having gained notoriety as the lead singer of the retro soul band the Alabama Shakes, Howard seemingly will not rest until she’s drawn with every musical crayon in the box. In her recent interview with NPR’s Jewly Hight, Howard cracks that she grew up in a trailer and would still be perfectly content to be working the land somewhere. But her music has led her elsewhere, perhaps everywhere. Howard has teased a few songs off her upcoming album, What Now, with the title track featuring hooky grooves and propulsive energy, but it’s “Red Flags” that astounds with its jarring drum loop, woozy vocals, and disorienting production that demonstrates how much mastery Howard has gained in her craft as an artist and storyteller.

Samantha Crain

Few artists in the last decade have shown the same growth and versatility as Samantha Crain. A part of the rich Tulsa music scene that has given us John Moreland, John Calvin Abney, and M Lockwood Porter, Crain follows a road all her own. Under Branch & Thorn & Tree (2015) found Crain exploring the pride and trauma of her Choctaw heritage through folk-inspired music. In 2017, Crain broke her own mold with the quirky indie-pop album You Had Me at Goodbye (2017.) Since her 2020 album, A Small Death, Crain has been playing in the spaces in between, utilizing woodwinds, pedal steel, pianos, and guitar to create a woozy soundscape as her spacious, gravelly voice helps us stay anchored in the real.

Nick Shoulders

Nick Shoulders rounds up the list with his commanding All Bad. While Shoulders’ music leans traditional sonically, it’s anything but. The Fayetteville, Arkansas singer begins his album with phaser blasts and a menacing invitation to a “conversation,” and that conversation is explicitly about all the “country” stylings that deserve to be thrown in the trash heap – and the many, many qualities we need to hold on to and claim for ourselves: grit, honesty, love, and togetherness. “Won’t Fence Us In” and “Appreciate’cha” speak to this theme most clearly, but the way Shoulders approaches the classic country canon with loving irreverence reminds us that we never have to be weighed down by tradition.

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Photo Credit: Margo Cilker by Jen Borst.

Ed’s Picks: Tejano, Country, Bluegrass, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s note: Each issue of Good Country, our co-founder Ed Helms will share a handful of good country artists, albums, and songs direct from his own earphones in Ed’s Picks. 

Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)

Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.

When You Listen the Land Speaks

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)

An often nameless, faceless character present in all country music is land. In a genre commonly referred to as country & western, land is a constant presence, whether foreground or background, evoked or painted, longed-for or spurned. Another nameless, faceless character that comes hand-in-hand with country and its relationship to land is colonialism – white supremacy, genocide, and imperialism advanced by music that claims to simply center nostalgia, rurality, and an “old fashioned” way of doing things.

This kind of revisionist history in country music – a sanitization of this nation’s past and present, in order to fit into widespread myths, around which this genre and our national identity is built – is no less pernicious simply because it is common and pervasive. It’s important to not only acknowledge country’s relationship with land, but to also attempt to deconstruct the ways that these roots genres perpetuate colonialist ideals and norms.

Can Good Country exist if it must deny the history of the land it professes to love? Can Good Country exist if it must deny that there would be no “country & western” without Indigenous people? These are questions that we feel are essential to ask, right out of the gate, even if their answers are not so simple. Good Country hopes to be a place that can represent all kinds of country music, but it cannot do that if we accept, uninterrogated and unexamined, that country’s relationship to the land must be good, moral, wholesome, and just.

At the heart of the second edition of Counterpublic – an artistic activation described on its website as “a civic exhibition that weaves contemporary art into the life of St. Louis for three months every three years…” – just south of downtown and the towering Gateway Arch, sits Sugarloaf Mound. From April to July 2023, Counterpublic included twenty-five public art installations at a variety of locations, including Sugarloaf Mound, a sacred site for the Osage People and the last intact mound in the city. In earlier eras, the area was home to many thousands of Indigenous people – and the largest city in what would become the United States, Cahokia.

Adjacent to Sugarloaf Mound was the first Counterpublic installation and site, a collaborative piece that wove together sculpture, land, and music by mother-and-son artistic duo, Anita and Nokosee Fields. Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) is a fine artist who works in many media, but especially clay and textiles. Nokosee Fields (Osage/Cherokee/Muscogee) is a critically-acclaimed and in-demand old-time fiddler, equally at home in country and Americana as in old-time and string band traditions, and with a great deal of expertise on Indigenous fiddlers and Indigenous fiddling.

Their piece, WayBack, which was curated by Risa Puleo, is synopsized as such:

“Created in collaboration with her son Nokosee Fields (Osage/Cherokee/Muscogee), Anita Fields’s (Osage/Muscogee) WayBack invites visitors to gather in physical relation to each other, to Sugarloaf Mound, and to Osage ancestors, history, and legacy. When the Osage Nation purchased part of Sugarloaf Mound in 2007, the sacred site was reabsorbed into the Nation through the auspices of property, extending Osage territory from the site of their displacement in Oklahoma back to their ancestral homeland. Atop this site, forty platforms are installed, modeled after those found at Osage events in Oklahoma. Each platform is embellished with ribbons that reference Osage cosmologies of balance between sky, water, and earth. Nokosee Fields’s composition for wind instruments invites further consideration of the earth from which the mound was constructed, the sky that unfolds above the platforms, the sound of the Mississippi River on the banks below the quarry and the wind that flows through the surrounding trees that transform first into breath. After the exhibition, the platforms will travel from St. Louis to Tulsa where they will be distributed to Osage community members completing the link between the current home of the Osage Nation and its ancestral homelands.”

“Middle Waters,” the labyrinthine composition by Nokosee that acted as soundtrack for the installation, its platforms, and the adjacent mound (listen via the Counterpublic site here), perfectly illustrates how adept country music – and its textures, styles, and traditions – can be at capturing the ineffable, spiritual qualities of land and our relationships with it. Fiddle, field recordings, wind instruments, voices, and more intermingle in a piece that feels as organic and grounded as Anita’s sculptures.

Now, after the installation’s closing, each of the forty platforms constructed by Anita and displayed at the Counterpublic site will be moved to what’s now called Oklahoma, to be distributed to members of the Osage community and to have a continued life, further illustrating how art, music, and land gain all of their meaning from the communities that interact with and rely on them.

On the occasion of Good Country’s inaugural issue, we spoke to Anita & Nokosee Fields about WayBack, “Middle Waters,” the Counterpublic exhibition, and how humans, land, music, and art intersect and combine.

Could you just take me into the inspiration and the conception of WayBack and how you started working together and collaborating on the piece, not only with each other, but also with the land and with the site? Um, maybe Anita, do you want to start?

Anita Fields: Sure. Over two years ago now I was contacted by Risa Puelo, who was one of the curators chosen for the Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis. [Risa] asked if I would like to join and explained their purpose, what they were doing, and what their groundwork was for the triennial. She said, “I know your whole family are artists, so if you would like to invite somebody from your family to participate with you, that would be absolutely fine.”

But let’s begin with what their goal was, and that was to talk about the difficult histories of a place. St. Louis is certainly one of those. The reason that I was asked to join was that, for the Osage People, St. Louis, Missouri – and even further than that – is our ancestral homeland. It’s a large area, including St. Louis, Missouri, Arkansas, and even further than that in the beginning, migration from almost the East Coast to the Ohio Valley, to where our written and documented history begins in Missouri. So that was our homeland and there are documented villages there, still, and lots of history there, because after Lewis and Clark’s expedition we held the trade there. After Lewis and Clark, we started interacting real heavily and marrying with the French, partially because the French were trying to hold onto political power through the fur trade.

That is our history there [in St. Louis]. And then of course came displacement. A series of treaties started moving us out of that area, ‘til we came into Kansas. We had a reservation there and then we sold that reservation and with that money we bought what is our reservation today from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. That’s it in a nutshell, and of course it’s way more complicated than that.

Nokosee and I don’t live in close proximity to one another, so I was like, “Oh my gosh, is this going to be able to work over the phone and Zoom? That’s going to be kind of difficult!” Then an opportunity arrived for me to go to Bogliasco, Italy for a month-long residency. I asked if I could bring a collaborator, and that’s where we landed for a month – on the Mediterranean, in this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful place, on the coast of Italy, not very far from Genoa. We schemed and dreamed and planned. And it was very difficult trying to arrive at a place where we were both happy.

Nokosee, I wonder how, as a songwriter and composer, you began approaching this? How did you take your musical vision and dovetail it with the physical vision, with the sculpture, and with the place? What was the process like as you sat down in Italy to start creating together?

Nokosee Fields: When we were both in Italy, I had a little field recording kit that I had been using. I would just roam around the grounds recording things. There’s the ocean right there, there are all these really intense waves happening, a lot of sounds to be had. There was also a poet, Robin Robertson, who was a fellow there at the foundation and I asked if he wanted to do any collaborating, because we had a lot of time there – it was a testament to the importance of having space and time to have creative thoughts. Which, I feel it’s really rare. For a lot of artists, you have to hustle a lot. We were there for one month, I was getting very regular sleep, I was eating three nourishing meals a day, and getting some exercise. And again, it’s also in this beautiful location, and we were surrounded by really smart artists. It was just a very stimulating, nourishing, and calm environment. I was able to actually have some visions and clarity. And I was able to indulge a lot of things – where, you know, most of the time I’m just barely piecing things together to make money or to pay rent.

It began with [Robertson] reciting a poem, then I started layering him reciting this poem with the waves and different sounds from around the grounds, manipulating them. I like the idea of using really intricate, small, detailed, fine sounds – using a really sensitive mic – and then turning that into something else. Or, pitching it, layering it on top of people’s voices or singing, or maybe something a little more recognizable.

For me, the space and time to have all of that creative flow happening – it took what felt like a month of just space to finally get somewhere with something. It was eye opening, a testament to needing space and time, because we kinda flip-flopped back and forth on what we were gonna do. I wouldn’t say we were struggling, it was just that we were in this new place and jet lagged. Our project was not hands-on, because it was just all conceptual, so it was a little difficult to land on something.

I do want to talk about the site, because – obviously I’ve only seen the photos – there’s an interesting juxtaposition of this kind of dreamlike soundscape for the piece with “Middle Waters” and then the site itself feeling somewhat shoehorned into modernity. You have the river there you have the highway here and of course there’s a billboard incorporated into the piece, as well. Anita, can you talk about how you wanted to play around with that juxtaposition with this sacred site that now is somewhat entrapped by modernity and by settler culture?

AF: There’s always a backstory surrounding my work, and how I came to be. I was born on the reservation and spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who was full blood, and I’ve chosen to be very close to my culture, even as an adult. As much as I could, I did what my grandmother did for me for my children, to make sure they have a place there, [in my culture]. In my own work, as I became older and older, I would be inspired by things that come from our worldview, which is a very complex worldview, but it’s very beautiful.

We still have those values. As a modern person, those values are still in place – you know, where I’m from. You can witness them in how we interact with one another, a lot of times. I think that is a very beautiful thing to know that what my ancestors left for us you can still recognize. A lot of my work surrounds that kind of thought, that there is another way of looking at the world that is not just a tunnel vision of, “We’re all like this and we’re going to go to the mall forever.”

And that’s our worldview; it’s way deeper than that. Through art, that’s a beautiful place to be able to tap into those kinds of thoughts and values. So I wanted, because that is our original homeland and that is such an important site, I wanted to be able to bring in this sense that we’re reclaiming that space again, marking it as ours, and [saying] this is who we are. I want people to know this is who we are.

Those wooden platforms are actually found throughout [our culture]. I’ll describe it to you this way, because this is the way I write about it: They have been around for a very long time. My earliest memories of them are when I was a young person, a young girl going around with my grandmother, and I would see them outside of large Osage homes or outside of our dances.
At camps, people have family camps, and these platforms would be there and you’d see older people putting their blanket down and sitting on it and then maybe somebody giving them a glass of lemonade or a Coke. And then they’d light up a cigarette and they’d be just visiting and laughing away with a relative or a friend.

And it always looked very calming and peaceful to me. Those are the kind of memories too that I often tap into. But it’s also much deeper than that. What I was seeing there was, yes peaceful and calming, that was happening, but I was also witnessing survivors who had gone through a lot just for us to be able to be here. There are always these links.

What better place to be able to bring those [platforms], because that is the place that we had to survive from, to move from St. Louis. I’m always interested in giving people a glimpse into who we are. It’s not my job to talk about ceremony or rituals or any of that kind of thing. But I want people, again, with that thought in mind, I want people to know who we are and that there’s a different way of looking at the world and it comes from very complex, intelligent thinking and is based on observing nature and the cosmos. These values and these systems are still here for us today.

With the platforms, we started by going to Google Maps, downloading maps and images, and the site was kind of big, so it wasn’t working with one platform. And we just kept going, “Guys, that platform is gonna drown in that big space!” It’s beautiful to be able to work with a great curator because between our conversations with all of us we decided, if the money can be found, maybe we can have more – it began there. That is how those arrived and then we topped them with designs that are familiar to us as Osage People. We painted those on there, designs that are used in our ribbon work clothing – which comes directly out of our interaction with the French, when we started trading for ribbons and needles and threads and thimbles and that kind of thing. This kind of interaction with the French and our time there totally changed our culture forever.

…You know, with working with clay as long as I have, one of the things I feel very deeply about is that the earth holds memory. That has been revealed to me, just because of how clay is made over time. I’m certain it holds the memories of who was there, wherever in the world.

I mean, in Italy, a couple of times when we would travel to these places and then we would read about the history, I felt that there, too. No matter where you’re at there are always the similarities to what has happened in history – “the conqueror” and “the conquered” – these stories are all threaded together and similar. I couldn’t see WayBack without sound in any way, shape, or form. It just wouldn’t have the punch that I was looking for.

I did want to ask, where are we at in the lifespan of the piece? I know that the plan is to distribute the platforms to Osage community members back around Tulsa. I just wonder where you’re at in that process?

AF: Yes, it was temporary and as soon as Counterpublic closed, I think it was within two weeks, they were picked up and shipped back to Tulsa to the [Tulsa Arts] Fellowship. The Fellowship is storing them for me. Then I got a call from the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, which is I think in its second year. They have a beautiful courtyard plaza and they have built a mound-like area where you can witness the solstices. The curator was at the Counterpublic closing and she said, “I want to bring these to First Americans Museum, what’s the plan for these as soon as this is over?” Well they took half of them and then half of them stayed here, displayed at a place called Guthrie Green in Tulsa for about a week. Yesterday, the ones from First Americans Art Museum were delivered to the Osage Nation. I want to distribute them to the Osage community. In my mind I’m like, “What am I going to do with 40 platforms when they return? What’s going to happen with these and who owns them?” And actually that was [curator Risa Puleo’s] suggestion: Is there any way these could be returned to the Osage community?

People are excited about it, those that know about it. Not a whole lot of people know. I’m trying to keep it [quiet] ‘til I get it all figured out, but they’re excited about it. I’m excited about it, too, because that is another way to make art accessible. To bring it back to where you come from. Because those folks are totally my inspiration, and I say this at every turn, whenever I have the opportunity. You’re my inspiration. Your grandmother, my grandmother, every interaction I’ve seen throughout my life. This is my inspiration.

Nokosee, I wonder, do you see a similar way of bringing “Middle Waters” to the people? Do you see a lifespan for that piece beyond this installation? Or do you think it’s a moment in time and it’s onto the next work?

NF: Yeah, I think it’s just a moment in time. I might edit it, but I’m pretty pleased with it. If anything, it’s more of a reason to want to do more sound installations, sound art kind of things. I’ve been wanting to transition to that kind of work. As much as I’ve enjoyed touring – and I’ll probably do it for as long as I can – I find it to be pretty taxing. It’s tons of fun, but I think I need something that’s a little more cerebral, a little more isolated, a little more supported, and also a place for my voice and creativity. I feel like I’m kind of waking up from an obsession where I just got into traditional American music, traditional fiddle. Now that I’m steeped in that world and I feel like I’m really a part of it, I also feel like there’s a lot of it I just don’t really care for.

This sounds really uppity, but making traditional fiddle music feels kind of separate from [country], it’s just melody. I like the foundational aspects of music and the research and tone, things like that. And I like it because it’s not really tied to lyrics, it’s not putting on a type of personality, like lyrical content [does].

That, to me, is often just perpetuating settler mythology about old-time music. There are a lot of things that could be said about old-time music that are also problematic. Instrumental music is where I really jive and get into stuff, but I’ve also had to constantly interface and participate in lots of country music or lyrical music that has content that, to me, just feels like propaganda with really rudimentary, basic understandings of the land.

It feels like a type of erasure. It’s just kind of designed that way – maybe not maliciously – but it’s just so deeply woven into how things work in this country. …I find a lot of country music today, a lot of the younger, popular stuff, it feels like it’s about convincing white people that they’re white or something. There’s this pseudo-woke take on country music, which I think is fine, it’s just not radical enough for me or something. It’s like it’s just enough for people to kind of maybe get their outlaw fix.

It still doesn’t work for me and I still find it very rudimentary and actually not very confrontational or very deep, as far as what’s actually going on in the world or on this continent.

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Lead Image: Anita & Nokosee Fields via Counterpublic.
Image of Anita Fields: Courtesy of the Artist.

Headline text from Anna Tsouhlarakis, “The Native Guide Project: STL.” Billboard and digital signage. Curator: New Red Order. Counterpublic 2023, Sugarloaf Mound Site.

Ed’s Picks: Country From All Corners

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s note: Each issue of Good Country, our co-founder Ed Helms will share a handful of good country artists, albums, and songs direct from his own earphones in Ed’s Picks. 

Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)