Tag: thinkpiece

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

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

One Fair Summer Evening…

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

My fifth grade teacher, after announcing pop quizzes, would, without fail, remind my panicked classmates and I sitting at our desks to “Look down in desperation, look up for inspiration, but do not look side-to-side for information.” A memorable way to keep ten-year-olds from cheating on each other’s exams. There’s something about the adage that’s stuck with me twenty-five years on.

To this day, if I’m feeling desperate or helpless, my head droops down, oftentimes collapsing into the palms of my hands. I still also look up for answers to the unanswerable, the unknowable, or as Mrs. Schock put it, for “inspiration.” Sat at my desk once again, reading about last month’s flooding in Texas on this country’s 249th birthday, my head automatically fell into my hands and, just as quickly, my eyes lifted their gaze upwards. Above my computer, nestled in the Napa Valley Wooden Cassette Rack, something caught my eye, the audio cassette of One Fair Summer Evening by Nanci Griffith.

The GRAMMY-winning “Lone Star State of Mind” singer landed like a raindrop into this world on July 6, 1953, in Seguin, Texas, a small town in Guadalupe County in the watershed of the Guadalupe River. Raised in Austin, Griffith achieved international attention following the release of her breakthrough 1986 album, The Last of The True Believers, that showcased her impressive singing and songwriting, which she had honed in the decade prior alongside the likes of her Hill Country contemporaries Townes Van Zandt and Lyle Lovett.

Griffith died on August 13, 2021, at the age of 68. Thirty-three years earlier, on August 19 and 20, 1988 – less than two months after that May’s blue moon – she recorded her sole live album, One Fair Summer Evening, at Anderson Fair, an intimate folk club in Houston. It’s a remarkable recording, not just for how good Griffith’s songs sound stripped of the instrumental flourishes that colored her studio albums up to that point, but the Texas charm she provides in the banter between songs.

While introducing “Trouble in The Fields,” she jokes self-deprecatingly, “Most of my mother’s family came from way out in West Texas in a little town called Lockney, which is somewhere close to Lubbock, but not too close to Lubbock. Nobody likes to be too close to Lubbock.”

The crowd laughs, hysterically.

She continues with her squeaky soliloquy, one long run-on sentence without much pause for breath, “My great aunt Nettie Mae said that surviving the Great Depression on a farm was not easy and she understands why the young farmers nowadays are having such a hard time, because she went through it herself and the dust blew so hard during the Great Depression on her farm that she said she was afraid to go to sleep at night, because she was afraid the dust would blow so hard one night that she’d wake up the next morning and find herself living in Oklahoma and she by God didn’t want to live in Oklahoma.”

The audience, cackling louder now and showering Griffith’s gift of gab with rounds of applause, quickly quiets themselves as Griffith shifts her tone and launches into the song about her family’s trials and tribulations being farmers in Texas during the Dust Bowl, singing the words: “And all this trouble in our fields/ If this rain can fall, these wounds can heal.”

Sometimes, we look up in desperation as well, for any precipitation the sky can offer us.

In the introduction to the next song, “The Wing and The Wheel,” Griffith tells her captive crowd, “There’s no need for any human being to ever be complacent.” The emotional whiplash might be too much to take, stark laughter swiftly shifting gears to deadpan seriousness, if the sincerity in the songs didn’t shine through with each passing line: “The wing and the wheel, they carry things away/ Whether it’s me that does the leavin’ or the love that flies away/ The moon outside my window looks so lonely tonight/ Oh, there’s a chunk out of its middle, big enough for an old fool to hide.”

Ten years later, in August 1998, Griffith’s relationship with her home state had become fraught. She wrote and sent letters to every major newspaper in Texas – the Dallas Morning News, the Houston and Austin Chronicles, the Austin-American Statesman, Texas Monthly – after a poor critical reception to her album Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), released the month prior. In her letter, she defiantly rails, “There has always been a certain amount of pathos within artists who leave their sacred bountiful homes of birth for the benefit of preserving their own belief in their art—especially in cases such as my own where my native soil that I have so championed around this globe has done its best to choke whatever dignity I carried within me.” In the probing missive, she references Thomas Wolfe, whose own novels so severely damaged his reputation in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina – which last year was decimated by the historic flooding of Hurricane Helene – he never returned.

The full moon in July is otherwise called a “Buck Moon,” named for the time of year the male deer’s antlers grow anew and hunters can track them more easily midday. This year, the Buck Moon swung across a fair, summer evening sky over Texas on July 12th, barely a week after the floods. That night Luke Borchelt, a country musician and singer-songwriter from Maryland, was seated at a bar in Austin. The night prior, he had performed at Parish, a club in the heart of the state’s capitol, right near where a Woolworth’s once stood at Sixth Street and Congress Ave. The very same shop Griffith sang about in her “Love at The Five and Dime” – and is pictured in front of on the album cover for The Last of The True Believers.

After striking up a conversation with a local patron at the bar, Borchelt was asked, “You’re a country singer? Could we do a concert tomorrow to raise money?” Borchelt agreed. So it often goes with Texans: forward, empathetic and community-oriented. Prior to becoming a full-time musician, Borchelt worked for Mercy Chefs, the Virginia-based, disaster relief non-profit.

“I managed logistics and the distribution of meals in disaster areas. That was my passion. It’s also where I got my musical start. After hours, I would play for the chefs. Disaster is a part of my story.”

As Borchelt recounts his journey, it sounds like a country song. There’s a rhythm to his speech that’s musical. He tells me “…there’s a stereotype of ‘badass’ Texans,” but in the wake of the floods, the “Every Rain” singer says, “I can’t say enough about the amount of people that showed up. We asked them ‘What brought you here?,’ and they would say, ‘I’m a Texan. We just show up.’”

After his performance in Austin, Borchelt headed to volunteer with Mercy Chefs, who had stationed themselves at a church in Kerrville to prepare and serve meals to evacuees, first responders, and search and rescue teams. Since the intense rains fell on July 4 in the central part of the state, 136 people lost their lives – 116 of which were lost in Kerr County.

In the flash flood’s waters, which crested at 30 feet, lay Camp Mystic – a girls’ summer camp situated alongside the banks of the Guadalupe River, northwest of Seguin. It was there that 27 people, counselors and campers, mostly children, died during one of the most tragic natural disasters in recent memory.

The six different flags that have waved over Texas throughout its history – some more star-spangled than others – have always flown over a proud people. When I speak to Mercy Chefs’ Ashbi Wilson, the managing chef on the deployment teams in Kerrville and Ingram, it’s no surprise she’s proud of her Texas roots. She lived in Kerrville for eight years before relocating southeast to her current home in Wimberley. At 21 years-old, before she became a chef, she spent a summer as a counselor at Camp Mystic, based on the recommendation of a professor at the local college, Schreiner University.

Regarding Camp Mystic she recalls, “Mystic is a really special place. Everybody was so warm and welcoming. Everybody was really just there to be encouraging and to have fun, and to help these girls, growing up to be young women.”

Hours before she got the call to deploy to Kerr County in early July, her bags were already packed. “It was a lot more personal this time, so I was ready to go,” she tells me. “Disasters are always both devastating and inspiring at the same time. So, even though there’s been so much heaviness and devastation around the lives and the places lost, it’s still really rewarding and inspiring to watch the community, and people from all over the state, and the first responders from all over the country and all over the world come in and do the work that’s needed.”

One Fair Summer Evening…

If these rains can fall, these wounds can heal.

— Nanci Griffith

Thousands of Texans called FEMA for assistance, and in the days following the torrential downpours, those calls were left unanswered, leaving recovery efforts largely in the hands of local authorities and volunteers. Firefighters from Mexico, a nation whose flag once flew over Texas, travelled north to Kerrville, and served a critical role in search and rescue operations. Earlier this month, after several Texas lawmakers fled the state in protest of a vote in the State Senate to gerrymander congressional districts along racial lines, one of their peers called upon a different federal agency, the FBI, to bring them back home. Is it any wonder why someone with such deep Texas roots as Nanci Griffith would disavow her home state?

Simultaneously, from where I write in Southern California, taqueros in East Los Angeles, farm workers in Camarillo, and day-laborers in the parking lots of Home Depots strewn across the city are being hunted like bucks at midday by armed and masked agents of the state, taken into federal custody to be deported to Tijuana, where there are now makeshift slums filled with deportees. In January, Mexican firefighters again headed north to volunteer to battle the blazes that burned across various pockets of the sprawling metropolis. Fire and I.C.E.

The desperation and helplessness one is inclined to feel while watching disasters both natural and unnatural unfold can be crippling. You don’t know how to do anything but languish in hopelessness and hang your head in shame, but as Wilson says, disasters can be both devastating and inspiring, no matter which way you look. Oftentimes, we turn to music to guide us through the dark and remove us from our solitude.

A live record gives its listener a glimpse into a communal space from afar, a moment captured crystalline and pure. Griffith’s One Fair Summer Evening served as my reminder that, not only in Texas, but everywhere a human draws breath, that “there’s no need for any human being to ever be complacent…” After all, “if these rains can fall, these wounds can heal.”

Donate to support flood relief in Texas by giving to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country here. Learn more and support Mercy Chefs here.

Scans by Shane Greenberg, That Scans.