A Force
To Be Reckoned With

Ghosts are so much more than spooky or goofy animations; they represent lived histories, past selves, and the ever-unfolding work of becoming. With her latest album, Every Ghost, country singer-songwriter Kelsey Waldon gives grace to all the women she’s been along the way, entertaining their urgent lessons as she considers who she is today.

“There’s good ghosts and there’s bad ghosts. Some of them have unfinished business and maybe they feed off fear, or maybe they feed off your happiness. I certainly have them, I have a lot of ghosts,” Waldon says. “It’s those types of ghosts, but also the ghost of every version of yourself that you’ve been and just being proud of where you came from, where you’re going, and honestly, where you’re at; meet yourself there.”

On the album’s first track, “Ghost of Myself,” she lays out how she got here:

I had to get tough so I could get wise
I’ve been a thousand women in my own time
Been a thousand women and I’ve loved them all
I had to get low so I could walk tall

From the album’s first lush, ebullient guitar run, Every Ghost is thick with layers of twang, accompanied by driving fiddle and classic country sounds. Waldon’s velvety voice, which has always been self-assured, sings clear and powerful. She’s standing on her own two feet; this is the album she’s been working toward over the last decade of hard work and meticulous touring.

Modern pop country is rife with men behaving badly or selfishly while extolling the unholy virtue of big truck worship. But long before their unceremonious relegation to the role of disingenuous machines, good for little else than scoring sex and drinking cheap beer, truck songs (usually about big rigs, not pickups) made poetry out of the long haul and produced some of country music’s most interesting characters. Look no further than Red Simpson and C.W. McCall’s catalogues, Jerry Reed’s “East Bound and Down,” Red Sovine’s “Phantom 309,” the Willis Brothers’ “Gimme 40 Acres to Turn this Rig Around,” or Kay Adams’ “Little Pink Mack.”

“Comanche,” track 2 on the new album (named after the 1988 Jeep Comanche Waldon bought recently) joins that lineage. “The rumble of the engine feels like my soul smooth when it’s runnin’/ A little rough when it’s not movin’,” Waldon sings.

Get behind the wheel on the open road, relax, blast some music, sort out your thoughts – there’s nothing like it. “We’ve all got our own amends to make/ We’ve all got our own hearts to break/ That’s the way it is,” Waldon continues, letting go of someone no longer in her life.

Spending time with an old, well-crafted object is a privilege and a joy in a commodified quick-fix world, one which Waldon manifests throughout the album as she tackles lessons and ghosts from a life lived deeply and broadly. The specters of Every Ghost include lost loves, of course; demons and vice; and also loved ones who are no longer earthside.

“Tiger Lilies” was written for her grandmother, whose beloved lilies she now tends in her own garden. Gardening and growth figure heavily in Waldon’s lyrics and worldview (notably “Season’s Ending,” off No Regular Dog and her cover of Jean Ritchie’s “Keep Your Garden Clean” on There’s Always a Song). “I think it’s sexy to know how to feed yourself and grow things,” she says. “What’s more country than that?” Later, she dwells more broadly on what we inherit generationally on “My Kin.”

The ghosts of vice have a particular way of lingering. “Happy new year, I’m scared to death/ My ol’ demons, they give me no rest,” Waldon sings on “Lost in My Idlin’.” Waldon has been, as she puts it “booze sober” for four years, but for her, the allure of letting loose and getting drunk lingers: “Wishin’ I was fucked up in some honky tonk/ Where they let me play my music way up loud.” Beyond an ode to temptation – and in some ways to simpler times – it’s an acknowledgement of those who’ve slipped and the hard work of holding the line. (Not to confuse resisting vice with moral superiority, addiction is a disease.) “I loved getting tore up from the floor up, that’s in my blood,” Waldon says; but staying sober is what’s best for her.

“I don’t wish for pain/ And I don’t dream of war/ When will it all end?? What are we killin’ for?” Waldon demands on the chorus of the wrenching, mournful “Nursery Rhyme.” “I honestly wrote that song after seeing pictures of children being bombed,” she says. Pertinent and direct, Waldon’s premise is simple: please, be kind and decent to each other. “How can you climb when you ain’t got a dime? / Workin’ your life away till you die/ Can’t pay what you owe ‘em, not in this lifetime/ Darlin’, it’s a nursery rhyme,” she continues in the song, lamenting the dissolution of the “American Dream” and economic parity for average people. “I’m a very, very proud American, but I know that sometimes the ‘American Dream’ does feel like a nursery rhyme,” Waldon says.

In 2019, that ability to zero in on the human condition landed Waldon the first new artist slot in 15 years on Oh Boy Records, founded by John Prine, who was likewise rivetingly dialed in to suffering and joy. Waldon’s bona fides include a bevy of appearances with Prine before his death in 2020. Before this she’s released six albums – Every Ghost her seventh – including 2020’s They’ll Never Keep Us Down, a cover album of protest songs including Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” and Prine’s “Sam Stone.” More recently, she released 2022’s No Regular Dog and 2024’s There’s Always a Song, covering some of her greatest musical influences.

Waldon’s been named a Kentucky Colonel, too. The highest title of honor awarded by the governor of the state, it’s often given to artists who guard Kentucky’s cultural traditions and further their future. She’s toured with Vincent Neil Emerson and 49 Winchester, the latter of whom she will join at the Ryman later in the year. She’s also looking forward to a long list of headlining shows, including at Under the Big Sky and FloydFest.

“That’s the only place that I do feel true freedom, honestly, is in the studio and then on stage doing whatever the fuck I want to, singing my heart out,” Waldon says. “I want the show to be a force to be reckoned with.”

Myriad wonderful songs have been written about ramblin’, but they’re all about men, Waldon says. She ends the album with one of the few exceptions, Hazel Dickens’ “Ramblin’ Woman.” At its release in 1976, the song represented a bold manifesto for female independence. As an album closer for Waldon, it acts as a bookend with “Ghost of Myself.” Waldon started the album telling listeners where she’s been and concludes with where she’s going.

“Hazel’s just saying ‘I got shit to do,’” Waldon says. “Women can ramble, too. I feel like we’re more than a girlfriend, a wife, a mother, even – and all these things that are so beautiful. We know we stand on our own. And we don’t have to explain it to anybody.”


Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Basic Folk: Kris Delmhorst

Kris Delmhorst is not a good sleeper. The Western Massachusetts songwriter is usually awake from 2 or 3 a.m. to about 4 or 5 a.m. Sometimes it feels nice and floaty, but other times she is wide awake worrying about anything her brain can get a hold of. This is similar to a feeling with which she ended her tenth record, Ghosts in the Garden, with the song “Something to Show.” Thankfully, she set us straight and explained that, indeed, the track is a hopeful prayer that she will have something to show for all the questioning, trying, pushing through, and general work that she and fellow humans are doing. Too bad it can’t happen in the daylight hours. In our conversation for Basic Folk, we talk about this and the other themes and songs on the new album, like the unbearable emotional density of summer ending, ambient restlessness during destruction, carrying unresolved loves, and, of course, death.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

Kris experienced a great loss in 2021 with the death of her dear friend and collaborator Billy Conway. Her husband, Jeffrey Foucault, memorialized Billy in his 2024 album, The Universal Fire, which he called “a working wake” for their friend. He appeared on Basic Folk and spoke at length about Billy and what he meant to the Boston music community. I encourage you to listen to that conversation and Jeff’s record. Kris had known Billy for many decades; he produced a couple of her early albums and had been a huge presence in her life. The title track, “Ghosts in the Garden,” addresses Billy’s death, which sounds like it was a beautiful one, something that not very many people experience. He was surrounded by a houseful of friends and family celebrating and keeping him company up until the moment he passed.

There are many types of ghosts on the album: lost loves and past mistakes, roads not taken, and our possible futures, too. It was recorded in rural Maine at Great Northern Sound, which is inside an 1800s farmhouse that must keep its own ghosts. Kris, a great lover of collaboration, brings in many guest vocalists like Rose Cousins, Anaïs Mitchell, Ana Egge, Taylor Ashton, Rachel Baiman, Anna Tivel, and her husband, Jeffrey. I was surprised to learn that she had not actually planned for any guest vocalists. She made the decision, recorded some reference mixes in Maine, and listened on the drive home. She was startled to discover that she heard each guest vocalist on the track with her in the car, which prompted her to write some emails and get them all on the record. The songs want what the songs want, so you better give it to them or else… more ghosts?


Photo Credit: Sasha Pedro

LISTEN: Jon Dee Graham, “there’s a ghost on the train”

Artist: Jon Dee Graham
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “there’s a ghost on the train”
Album: only dead for a little while
Release Date: November 10, 2023
Label: Strolling Bones Records (a subsidiary of New West)

In Their Words: “So, my old friend Charlie Hunter, who started Roots on The Rails – Train adventures with live music. We’ve been to see polar bears in Churchill, [Manitoba] on the Hudson! – had made friends with the guy who found and restored The City of New Orleans train of Steve Goodman fame. Charlie asked if I’d play the [train’s] first run from Chicago to NOLA. I was in.

“It’s such an old and iconic train, I got to talking with one of the porters and I said, ‘I bet this train’s got a few ghosts.’ He got all serious and said, ‘Oh, this train is haunted as hell!’ No matter how I wheedled him he wouldn’t say anymore than that.

“So I’m playing on and off late into the night. At one point during a break I’m heading back to the baggage car to have a smoke and as I’m approaching one of the doors between cars, I see a hazy figure on the other side, I get all gooseflesh, and it keeps coming and I think, ‘Sweet Jesus! I’m seeing a ghost on the City of New Orleans!’ When I reached the door, I realized that I was seeing my own reflection in the door’s window. Relieved, but disappointed, I pushed on through to the baggage car. When I entered the dark baggage car, I caught a brief glimpse of 3 or 4 guys sitting in the back and then it was gone… another trick of the light.” – Jon Dee Graham

Track Credits:

Produced by Jon Dee Graham, Michael Hardwick, and Stuart Sullivan.
Recorded by Stuart Sullivan at Wire Studio in Austin, Texas.
Engineered by Stuart Sullivan.
Mastered by Carter Greeves.


Photo Credit: Darrin Back

LISTEN: CJ Garton, “I’m Talking to Ghosts”

Artist: CJ Garton
Hometown: Bristow, Oklahoma
Song: “I’m Talking to Ghosts”
Album: Tales of the Ole West and Other Libations to Please the Palate
Label: G-Bar Records/Cowboy Carnival Publishing
Release Date: September 16, 2021 (vinyl); January 14, 2022 (digital album)

In Their Words: “‘I’m Talking To Ghosts’ is one of those kind of songs you hear and you just feel it. It leans on that edge of life and death and the unknowing of what lies beyond. It’s fascinating how much we still don’t know or understand, it peaks our curiosity and invites our imagination to play in that realm even for just a few minutes as it carries us deep into the catacombs of our subconscious.” — CJ Garton


Photo credit: Ty King/G-Bar Films

The BGS Life Weekly Roundup: Haunted Honky Tonks, Southern Shopping, Smoking Supplies and More

We're not just into music here at the BGS. We want to paint an entire picture for you, knitting together the lifestyles, talents, and culture of this Americana quilt we love so dearly. That's why we've taken the time to scour the web and collect the best food, style, travel, and lifestyle pieces that are affecting hearts and minds in a positive way. Here are some of our favorite stories of the week below. Do you have any recommendations? Let us know in the comments!

Culture

Photo c/o Bitter Southerner

• A haunted honky tonk? The Bitter Southerner explores the ghostly origins of one Kentucky beer joint. 

Food

Photo c/o Oxford American

The Oxford American looks closely at the South's culinary renaissance. 

Style

Photo c/o T Magazine

• The South's best shops, according to Garden & Gun

• SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOU. But if you're gonna kill yourself and/or break the law, do it in style

Travel

Photo c/o National Geographic

National Geographic chronicles the endless charm of the general store. 

• A badass grandma ran the entire perimeter of the United States.