Is Tyler Childers’
Snipe Hunter a Prank?
Yes and No

I remember my very first snipe hunt. I was a teenager and my family, along with a handful of others, had recently left our former congregation, deciding to spend each Sunday alternating between our various houses to hold “home church” instead. This particular Sunday afternoon, we had already finished our DIY service, had enjoyed our shared meal, and were sitting scattered in lawn chairs and on the front porch of a humble little brick home in the foothills of southeastern Ohio.

A few of the more mischievous, prank-minded adults had begun gathering as many of the kids as possible, from toddlers to teens like me to young adults, with empty plastic grocery bags spanning the distance between our arms as we tramped off from the porch to the surrounding trees and woods. We were taught to shout, to bang sticks together or against tree trunks, and to keep those grocery bags open and ready, as the snipe were hiding above and – when correctly startled using these certified methods – would fall directly and immediately into our waiting plastic sacks.

We made attempts, we marched around, we laughed and shrieked and ran about. No, we didn’t catch a single snipe that day, but that’s not how I determined it was a prank. It was my very first snipe hunt – we weren’t a Scouts or summer camp sort of family – and still, as soon as they began passing around grocery bags, I knew a joke was being played. I wasn’t on the inside of it yet, but I knew what was happening – even though I really had no clue.

As a young teen, I had at that point spent my entire life obsessed with two things: banjo and birds. So when the jokester adults began spinning their yarn about how we were going to all catch snipe together, I knew we most certainly were not. After all, I knew Wilson’s Snipe were the only snipe species native to North America and that they preferred grasslands, marshes, beaver ponds, shorelines, and flooded meadows to lush hardwood forests in the foothills. Plus, at that time of year they would have already migrated back to their summer grounds in the north.

I had also already passed my Ohio Department of Natural Resources Hunter Safety Course – incredibly proud that I had scored 100% and hadn’t missed a single question – and knew that Wilson’s Snipe were hunted across the U.S. as upland game birds. I hadn’t hunted or bagged any, but having already spent countless hours across multiple seasons tracking down pheasant, partridge, and grouse, I knew that a grocery bag wouldn’t be our first choice if taking home snipe were really our aim.

Though I had never before been initiated into the lore or ritual of such a snipe hunt, I immediately knew what was happening, why it was happening, and – somehow, despite the odds – I overcame my primary instinct as a know-it-all bird nerd and didn’t “Um, actually…” obnoxiously and ruin the joke for everyone. I stretched out that Kroger bag and ran alongside all my home church friends as we hunted for snipe.

On July 25, Kentuckian country megalith Tyler Childers released Snipe Hunter, a Rick Rubin-produced Appalachian fever dream of an album that has had a remarkably polarizing effect across the diverse and disparate swathes of folks who profess to be Childers fans. Drawing from grunge and garage rock as often as old-time fiddle and bluegrassy mountain music, the 13 songs of Snipe Hunter are impeccable, harlequin, and mystifying. This is a fantastic collection – superlative yes, but even moreso, these songs are pure fantasy.

Being a snipe huntin’ veteran myself, as I first listened through the LP, I was floored. As each unpredictable, unhinged, unparalleled song ended and the next began I was all at once shocked and surprised, but still knew exactly what was coming next – and why. (Even though, as for that first snipe hunt as a kid, I actually had no idea what was going on. How could any of us?)

It’s just, I was already on the inside of this joke, too. While the internet (especially TikTok and Instagram Reels) quickly became swallowed up in wall-to-wall speculative videos about the album – claiming it was a prank, a litmus test, a Rorschach inkblot, a middle finger to the red hat-wearing fans who blow capillaries in their eyes screaming for “Feathered Indians” at every show – a host of folks pushed back on their front porch gliders and smiled to themselves. Because, if you’re Appalachian, or a lifelong folk musician, or even just an ardent and committed fan of true country, Americana, and bluegrass, you know exactly what this album is – and you know without a single shred of doubt that it’s not a prank.

It’s clear that many listeners feel challenged and excluded by Snipe Hunter. Many folks think it must be a joke purely because the thing is downright silly, or because Childers forsook the Sturgill Simpson or Zach Bryan trajectory he could have taken quite a few records ago and they’re still grieving what could have been. Other listeners seem to think the album is unserious not because it’s hilarious, but because they don’t hear the country in it. Or the Appalachia in it. Or the homespun, DIY, front-porch, hay-barn-recording-studio, rural-East-Kentucky-VFW-hall of it all throughout the sequence.

But to folks from inside the scenes Childers paints, to folks who’ve lived their lives in or touching on the regions he tributes with these poetic (and ugly and greasy) songs, to folks who still have grounded, everyday relationships with this type of rural mountain creativity and the folkways he draws on, this is just a standard phenotypic Appalachian country record. With more than a dash of Childers panache, of course.

There are eye-widening and jaw-dropping tales of far-off and exotic places (“Down Under,” “Tirtha Yatra”); there are eyebrow-raising retellings of hunting trips that seem just a bit too good or too successful or too chaotic to be true (“Dirty Ought Trill,” “Poachers,” “Snipe Hunt”); there are songs about sticking it to the man, sticking up for the working class, and sticking out your wrist to clown your not-as-rich neighbors (“Eatin’ Big Time,” “Nose On The Grindstone,” “Getting to the Bottom”); there are tributes to the true, multi-ethnic reality of Appalachia and the Southeast (“Tirtha Yatra,” “Dirty Ought Trill”); and of course, there’s “transatlantic” “Scotch/Irish” present, too (“Tomcat and a Dandy”). In short, it’s a country album. It’s an Appalachian album. Rick Rubin be damned.

For a record that has been regarded by thousands and thousands of listeners as a “prank,” it’s striking how grounded in Kentucky, Appalachia, and the Southeast this set of songs really is. Though you may need to be viewing it from the inside of the kaleidoscope to hold onto this fact.

This is a traditional album; it might even be Childers’ most regional and culturally anchored project yet – which is saying something, given the terroir of Long Violent History, the Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? trilogy, and well, you know, his entire remaining catalog of country and bluegrass. Plus, he tracked the thing in Hawai’i. Quite a different set of mountains than East Kentucky.

Snipe Hunter is only a joke if you see Appalachia as a joke. And, my, how so many folks are telling on themselves in this moment. Luckily, Appalachians are used to being the butt of the joke. (And Childers is, too, as he writes himself into that role over and over again – on Snipe Hunter for sure, and beyond.)

The area grew its regional and cultural identity that we all still venerate today from being the first “wild west” of the New World. An ancient mountain range – the bedrock older than trees, older than our current continents, and older than bones themselves – with its hidden hollers, switchbacks, and impenetrable forests and hills, it was the perfect hiding spot for hardscrabble working class folks of all backgrounds and ethnicities fleeing civilization on a continent that didn’t have a lot of that to go around anyway. Villages and towns were often multi-ethnic (white, Black, Asian, Native American) and, by necessity, were remarkably communitarian as, until the advent of the railroad, survival, getting anything done, and getting anywhere in the Appalachians was a tall task that required insider knowledge and a host of help. Back then “it took a village” to survive in Appalachia, and it does to this day.

Alongside the trend of speculating about the intrinsic prank of Snipe Hunter online you’re just as likely to encounter dozens and dozens of vertical videos explaining and hyping up Appalachian folklore about cryptids, ghosts, and paranormal activity. Never before in the history of the region have skinwalkers and unexplained whistling in the middle of the night and beings like Mothman held such cultural power outside of the mountains themselves. You can make an entire career off of explaining creepy Appalachian myths without ever having been there yourself – and with an accent so passé you could be from anywhere.

You wouldn’t think these brands of videos – “Tyler Childers made Sniper Hunter to piss off the fans he doesn’t like” vs. “Here’s what to do when you hear a voice call your name in the middle of the night in rural Appalachia” – would be so analogous, but they really and truly are.

With these kinds of Appalachian myths, of monsters and cryptids and spirits and ghosts, their validity is entirely based upon their contexts, right? Appalachians know there’s no easier way to spot an outsider, a city slicker, or a poverty tourist in their midst than by letting someone who thinks they know what they’re talking about do just that with all the unearned confidence of a person who actually doesn’t know what they mean. These myths, while in many communities and families are held up as true in particular contexts or shared as knowledge – an amalgam of legend, myth, truth, science, and spirituality – their purpose has always largely been to determine one thing: Who’s an insider and who’s an outsider?

If you hear a stranger on TikTok explain to you that you should: 1) never go outside in Appalachia at night and 2) if you do, and you hear a voice you recognize call your name, you should 3) not do that and go back from where you came and thank your lucky stars that you respected this magical place enough to learn your lesson in advance – that person is not an insider. And, if you believe that video as truth or as cultural knowledge, you may not be an insider, either.

And that’s where we land. Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter is not a prank, except it most certainly is. It’s a cryptid. A litmus test to show who is on the inside of what he’s making and who’s on the outside. It’s artful, stunning, and resplendent because he makes his musical test such that anyone can pass, anyone can enjoy the product, and anyone can be a part of this wild, ridiculous, and joyous reality. But will you be inside the joke, or outside of it? Will you be shuddering in your car, doors locked, afraid of skinwalkers? Or will you be out under the stars on a ridgetop listening to the hounds bray as Dirty Ought Trill chases the dogs who are chasing raccoons down the holler?

Either way, the music will still hit, but wherever you start or end up here will change how the snipe hunt goes for you – and will determine whether or not you take anything home with you in that crinkled-up grocery bag.


Explore more of our Artist of the Month content on Tyler Childers here.

Photo Credit: Emma Delevante

Tyler Childers: The Backstory (In Songs)

Tyler Childers has taken an unlikely path to the top via live performance, not radio singles. He’s become an improbable arena-level star by ignoring typical Nashville bromides – equal parts Patterson Hood’s working-class Southern blues, Chris Stapleton’s bluegrass bonafides, and Woody Guthrie’s progressive populism. After all, you’re not gonna call your touring band The Food Stamps unless you lean left, at least a little.

Like Billy Strings, Childers has become enough of a sensation for his appeal to extend beyond the Americana-adjacent world, too. Last year, he even turned up onstage for a live cameo with pop star Olivia Rodrigo in his Kentucky stomping grounds to do his song “All Your’n.” It went over like a house on fire.

Since country radio is finally, belatedly catching on with “Nose On The Grindstone,” lead single to Childers’ fine new Rick Rubin-produced LP Snipe Hunter, let’s take a look back to where he came from.

How’d this happen, anyway? Like this.

“Hard Times,” Bottles and Bibles (2011)

Going back to the beginning, “Hard Times” was the song that opened Childers’ full-length debut Bottles and Bibles. It’s an actual hillbilly elegy that definitely sets a tone, with finely detailed lyrics that unfold like a short story. Simultaneously stoic and emotional, Childers’ quavering vocal about a holdup gone wrong makes him sound like a protagonist who somehow regrets both everything and nothing at all: “And if the Lord wants to take me, I’m here for the taking/ ‘Cause Hell’s probably better than tryin’ to get by.”

“Long Violent History,” Long Violent History (2020)

Bluegrass roots and of-the-moment progressive activism makes for an unusual combination, but here we are. “Long Violent History” is the title track to a bluegrass album and it’s the only original and non-instrumental track on the record. Evoking “Faded Love” at the outset and “My Old Kentucky Home” on the outro, it’s a rural Southern score for the Black Lives Matter protests that swept America in 2020.

“It’s the worst that it’s been since the last time it happened,” Childers sighs at the outset, resigned to the inevitability of violence happening again. For good measure, Childers made a supplemental spoken-word video (below) explaining the necessity of BLM: “If we didn’t need to be reminded, there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, a Kentuckian like me, and countless others.”

“Jersey Giant” – Elle King (2022)

If Childers ever records his own version of “Jersey Giant,” he’ll have to hustle to top Elle King’s cover. As with the similarly themed “Me and Bobby McGee” (written by Kris Kristofferson, but owned for the ages by Janis Joplin), King just completely inhabits the song’s bittersweet, longing anguish. “I left town when we were over… Just didn’t feel the same” – the way she pauses a beat between lines is just chef’s-kiss perfection. There are numerous cover versions of “Jersey Giant” out there, but this is the one that’s going to linger.

“Luke 2:8-10,” Rustin’ In The Rain (2023)

Remember the big pivot-point moment of truth in the classic holiday cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas – the “Lights, please” speech that his friend Linus makes? Childers must have grown up with that, too. Linus spoke these Bible verses, Luke 2:8-10, which Childers transposes to the key of honky-tonk in this song with his drawl in full effect. You can almost imagine the “Peanuts” dancers doing a two-step to it.

“Purgatory,” Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (2022)

Childers’ ambitiously wide-ranging 2022 album Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? featured eight gospel songs, each done in three different versions dubbed Hallelujah, Jubilee, and Joyful Noise. The latter category tricked each tune up with samples and remixes, which might be the closest Childers has ever come to hip-hop electronica (at least so far!). In this guise, the title track from his 2017 project Purgatory cuts the sort of groove you’d expect to hear in New Orleans.

“The Heart You’ve Been Tending,” Harlan Road – NewTown (2016)

What does it mean that so many of the best covers of Childers’ songs are by women? Who’s to say, but here’s another great one, from the Kentucky band NewTown’s Harlan Road album. “The Heart You’ve Been Tending” is in waltz time, with fiddler/singer Kati Penn’s vocal shining bright as a lighthouse cutting through a foggy mountain breakdown.

“In Your Love,” Rustin’ in the Rain (2023)

Another multimedia project of sorts, this song from Childers’ Rustin’ in the Rain started out as a relatively conventional devotional love song. Then he enlisted collaborators including his fellow Kentuckian, author Silas House, to make a video that casts “In Your Love” as a sort of country music version of Brokeback Mountain set in coal-mining country. As beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

“Matthew,” Country Squire (2019)

Childers has always been wildly eclectic and this song from his Country Squire LP is a prime example. “Matthew” is yet another working-class waltz, with enough bluegrass savvy to drop bluegrass legend Clarence White’s name in the lyrics – plus an actual sitar as oddball sound-effect mood-setter at the beginning of the song. Somehow it makes perfect sense.

“Bottles and Bibles (Live),” Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (2018)

With or without a band, Childers has always been a riveting performer. This live version of the title track to his 2011 studio debut closed out 2018’s Live on Red Barn Radio I & II and it’s just voice and guitar. All the better to focus on the tale of a preacher as wayfaring stranger pondering the difficulties of keeping to the straight and narrow: “But they ain’t had to walk with the weight that you’ve hauled/ They don’t know you at all, but they think that they do.”

“Coal,” Bottles and Bibles (2011)

What might Bruce Springsteen have been like if he’d grown up in a Kentucky coal-mining family? You can imagine him turning out like the narrator of this song, which sounds way too timeless to have originated in this century. It’s pure working-class desperation: “We coulda made something of ourselves out there, if we’d listened to the folks/ That coal is gonna bury you.”

“Oneida,” Snipe Hunter (2025)

To be a Childers fan is to accept that he does have some idiosyncratic boundaries. There are songs from his live shows he’s never recorded, like the previously mentioned “Jersey Giant”; or popular recorded songs he has sworn off playing live, including the now-widely-seen-as-problematic “Feathered Indians.” For the better part of a decade, one of his unrecorded orphans was “Oneida,” a longtime fan favorite that’s like a Harold and Maude for the country set. Lo and behold, a recorded version finally surfaced as one of the best songs on Snipe Hunter. Dreams do come true.


Find more of our Artist of the Month coverage of Tyler Childers – including our Essentials Playlist – here.

Photo Credit: Sam Waxman

Artist of the Month:
Tyler Childers

Next to fellow Kentuckians Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton, you’ll be hard pressed to find a singer more influential on the Commonwealth – or on all of Appalachian music – than Tyler Childers.

The Lawrence County-born artist first began cutting his teeth on dark corner stages inside diners across Eastern Kentucky and in grainy YouTube videos prior to laying the foundation for the cult-like following that’s been enamored with him since with 2011’s Bottles & Bibles and 2016’s Live On Red Barn Radio I & II. The following year he burst onto the national scene with his Simpson-produced studio debut, Purgatory.

From a voice as gritty and raw as the black gold he sings about on songs like “Nose On The Grindstone” and “Coal” to lyrics that shatter stereotypes and perceptions cast down on his home region by those outside of it, it’s easy to see why Childers’ music has become a soundtrack for not just part but all of Appalachia.

Whether it be the combination of humility and holler-bred antics within Purgatory, the intimate honky-tonk vignettes of Country Squire, the fiddle tunes of Long Violent History, the gospel-fueled experimentation of Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? or the spiritual embodiment of Elvis on Rustin’ In The Rain, Childers has found success by shaking expectations at every turn, keeping old fans on their toes and bringing new ones in along the way.

When violence perpetrated by police was front and center during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020, Childers opted to cap off that fiddle album with its only vocal track, the protest anthem “Long Violent History.” During a heated societal moment, he approached the tune from an angle of empathy rather than pretentiousness as he tried contextualizing everything going on with past events like the Battle of Blair Mountain. Then in 2023 he had his first hit on country radio with “In Your Love,” an epic love tale that he recast as a gay one with the help of then Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House in 2023.

While some fans have been turned off by his “political” statements, his viewpoints ultimately led to more people going down the rabbit hole of Childers’ catalog than ever before. This growth has culminated in sold-out shows at fabled venues like New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Lexington’s Kroger Field, London’s O2 Arena and the Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. It also resulted in recording a track for last year’s TWISTERS soundtrack, collaborating with Olivia Rodrigo for a cover of “All Your’n” during a GUTS tour stop in Kentucky, and performing during The White House’s Fourth of July celebrations in 2024. Close to 10 years removed from his breakthrough moment, the singer is as popular and influential as ever.

That influence is sure to grow with the release of his latest studio album, Snipe Hunter. Recorded with and produced by Rick Rubin in Hawaii in early 2024, the 13-song compilation charts the red-headed stranger’s creative and spiritual coming of age with stories of the band’s success. The project is sprinkled with a bit of anti-capitalistic sentiment (“Eatin’ Big Time”), a yearning to escape on a trek to India (“Tirtha Yatra”), his fear of Koalas (“Down Under”) and hunting for whitetail deer (“Dirty Ought Trill”).

Much like its predecessors, Snipe Hunter captures Childers signature sound while also sounding like nothing he’s released before it, a fact no doubt aided by Rubin’s knack for crafting material that sticks to the cultural zeitgeist like superglue. Songs like “Nose On The Grindstone” and “Oneida” – a story about falling for an older woman – have been in Childers’ performance rotation, on YouTube playlists for years, and traded as coveted bootlegs, but the versions captured for Snipe Hunter, with their additions of organ, synths, and other studio toys, has each feeling reborn and completely new again.

Collectively, the album feels rooted in country funk bands of old like Goose Creek Symphony just as much as it incorporates more modern influences like Charlie Brown Superstar (whose remixes for Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? are sublime) and Eric Church, serving up the perfect combination of past, present and future sounds in the process while sticking to the deeply personal Appalachian flavoring that has long highlighted his grand storytelling.

To celebrate the release of Snipe Hunter, we’ve named Childers our Good Country and BGS Artist Of The Month for August. Throughout the month, we’ll celebrate Childers by going back into our archives for all-things-Tyler, plus we put together a retrospective look at his catalog of songs and recordings here, have shared a thoughtful examination of whether or not Snipe Hunter was created as a musical “prank,” and of course, don’t miss our Essential Tyler Childers Playlist, below.


Photo Credit: Sam Waxman