Tyler Childers vs. the Old Country Church
the man who would be Appalachia's Scold-in-Chief
It was summer of 2018, and I was on my parents’ front porch reading news on a laptop my older sister had recently given me for college use (as one of nine children, I’m used to hand-me-downs), and in the course of my reading, I somehow wondered onto Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone was then quickly losing touch with the average American (or at least this was becoming more apparent) and was saturated with elitist moralism. So I was not in the habit of frequenting their website, but a new article caught my eye.
The article was titled “How Songwriter Tyler Childers Became the 21st Century Voice of Appalachia”. I was interested for two reasons. The first thing that caught my eye was of course the mention of Appalachia, my much-beloved homeland. It was not a place often discussed in the national press, other than the occasional segment on poverty, drug addiction, or its conservative values, but this changed a little when almost two years previous, the nation’s upper classes were stunned by the election of Donald Trump. Much of their frustration trickled through corporate media in their attitude towards my home. Appalachians had become a topic of interest as media personalities from New York and DC tried to understand Trump’s appeal (insert obligatory Pauline Kael reference here). The questions usually boiled down to asking why Appalachia’s poor white people were too backward to realize that Trump was an evil, existential threat to the system (see Rolling Stone’s article about Oliver Anthony, a singer for whom I harbor no special adoration). This naturally made any mention of Appalachia in the national press suspect in my eyes– an inclination I hold to this day.
The second reason I clicked on the article was the name in the headline– Tyler Childers. It was a familiar name, as he was a local hometown hero. Hailing from Lawrence County, Kentucky (country I knew very well), he spent a lot of time in his early career playing in the town I was born in, and it was common to hear people my age discussing a show of his they had seen recently. He even performs a song written by a relative of mine. So I had of course listened to his stuff before, but– though he’s undeniably talented– I can’t say I’m a fan, save a couple songs here and there.
I did find his popularity interesting, though. As early as 2018, a peculiar fanbase demographic was apparent. In the Kentucky counties that bordered West Virginia (his home country), everyone seemed to know and like Childers’ music, but the further you got from that main fanbase, the wealth of the typical Tyler Childers fan increased. This is not the norm for country music, which typically stays the genre of the working class nationwide. For example, Childers spent a lot of time in Charleston, West Virginia, so naturally there was a healthy fanbase there, but the tastes became more mainstream and vintage country as you went into the rural counties. That is, until you hit the tourist town of Fayetteville an hour south. One of West Virginia’s few booming towns, the residents are more foreign (lots of out-of-staters), wealthier, and gayer than the rest of the state, but they love to show their appreciation for Tyler Childers. They don’t have the ancestral ties to the land Childers has, but they’ll blare his music from Fayetteville’s pride-flag-adorned Main Street bars and cafes all the same. This was a pattern I found all over central Appalachia.
This dynamic was clear even within my own social circle. It was not the “Catfish, Man of the Woods” archetype I knew in my childhood who listened to Childers; nor was it the elders I knew who grew up in coal or timber camps and without electricity who sang his songs. Rather, it was the progressive urban college students I had class with and worked alongside in retail who loved him so.
Stories of the “[random singer] is a new voice for [this population]” formulation from media outlets are always tiresome, but the Rolling Stone piece is perhaps notable for its lack of proof that Childers could rightfully be called Appalachia’s voice. The author’s argument can be boiled down to a) Childers had a typical Appalachian childhood and b) Childers has achieved moderate success as a musician. No suggestion is made as to why Childers deserves the title over other Appalachian musicians with greater success or less privilege growing up. That sounds like I’m dismissing the piece, but I beg you to read the article and find a convincing argument anywhere. I suspect that’s why the headline promises to tell you how Childers became Appalachia’s Voice– so it can sweep the declaration of his importance under the rhetorical rug as a given.
The Rolling Stone article also describes Childers’ hatred of Appalachian stereotypes, but the descriptions of his work sounds a lot like the stereotypes he seeks to correct. This tension is unintentionally a common theme in articles about Childers, and is never resolved. I would venture to say that it was also an early indicator of his later career, as that tension matured. I’ll clarify what I mean by that below.
Two years later during 2020’s summer of George Floyd, Childers released the album Long Violent History, an album full of traditional old-time music (I thoroughly enjoyed his lingering rendition of “Camp Chase”), but inspired by the progressive protests happening at the time. The album’s title track is the only song with vocals, and was accompanied by a video message from Childers.
Childers uses the video to chide his fans who are in his opinion insufficiently sympathetic to the cause that inflamed the riots that characterized America at that time. He asserts that if rural whites suffered under treatment similar to what urban blacks do (it’s unclear what he prescribes for rural blacks), we’d “take action in such a way that hadn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia”. He even explicitly equates empathy for those who have lost loved ones to police violence with support for Black Lives Matter.
It should be apparent to anyone who pays attention to current events beyond black squares and corporate media headlines that this a faulty analysis. A five-minute look at The Civil Rights Lawyer’s YouTube channel (based out of West Virginia) can tell you firsthand that Appalachia is no stranger to hostile policing. I’d even venture to say that I find modern policing’s evolution concerning in its attitude towards citizens, but let’s not pretend the riots of 2020 were anything more than a small concern for policing reform that quickly morphed into revolution LARP and mass looting. Not even Blair Mountain was a prudent way to go about instituting change, in spite of it’s mythological status among hicklibs. I could go on discussing more of the numerous clumsy broadsides Childers makes against his “white rural listeners”, but the attitude is the larger point.
The video message marks a shift in tone for Childers’ relationship to his fans. He no longer comes off as someone attempting to be a voice advocating for his homeland, but rather its Scold-in-Chief. Even my Australian friend was uncomfortable with the way Childers' addressed his fellow countrymen, so much so that he pulled it up to show me on his phone while I drank my morning coffee in a daze.
Last year, Childers released another album. In contrast to Long Violent History, the scolding becomes more subtextual. In the song “Jubilee”, Childers describes a man getting to heaven, but makes a sly comment in the chorus declaring the song’s main character didn’t even care Jesus wasn’t white. I grew up going to very conservative churches (one a mountain church with less than 50 congregants and a circuit-preacher for a pastor), but it was never a secret that Jesus was not from our culture. Far from it, as Christ was depicted universally with shoulder-length hair, something forbidden for churchmembers. Sermons often discussed what the words of the KJV verses being exposited meant in the original Hebrew and Greek. Maps of Canaan were common decor. So unless Childers went to an unnaturally racist church, it seemed to me Childers was condemning the typical Appalachian as seen by Nashville, not the actual common man.
The scolding continued when Childers released the video for his new single a few months ago. The video is the story of two miners who begin a homosexual relationship in 1950s Appalachia. They are the victims of gaybashing, and one dies of black lung, reminiscent of AIDS. The video is beyond tiresome, as gay issues have lost their edge in pop culture (“Take Me to Church” was ten years ago!), and the production value doesn’t help any. But the tone is once again unmistakably austere. And since Tyler doesn’t know how to culturally engage with Appalachian evangelicals in good faith, he settles for throwing tomatoes at the strawman, and at the caricature of the “Old Country Church" (a song he covers with apparent conviction in Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?).
I don’t know what work Childers has coming down the pike, but the trend says that it will likely be something that further alienates him from the culture of his birth– the precious culture people experience and savor in his music. I hope I’m wrong.