Chris Stapleton

Asked by the music site The Vinyl District which version of "Tennessee Whiskey" he'd covered for Traveller, Stapleton didn't credit George Jones's hit — he named the 1981 original. "The version I grew up on was David Allan Coe's," he said. "That's the one that I knew the most. Certainly, George Jones' version is the more popular one." He remembered playing it at Willie Nelson's picnic with Coe watching from the side of the stage, thinking, "This is kind of weird. We're playing this song as David Allan Coe is sitting over there." Coe's unhurried phrasing is the direct model for Stapleton's slow-burn reading.

listen: upstream & heresource: The Vinyl District — Chris Stapleton ↗share

1981

Tennessee WhiskeyDavid Allan Coe

→↓

2015

Tennessee WhiskeyChris Stapleton

listen forCoe's 1981 original is spare and countrypolitan, his voice dragging just behind the beat in an easy, unbothered croon. Stapleton keeps that same behind-the-beat phrasing but slows the tempo further and thickens the arrangement with organ and a bluesier guitar tone, turning a honky-tonk ballad into a smoldering soul number. Listen for where each singer holds back the title line until the last possible second — the same restraint, filtered through a rawer, more strained voice.

Every account of Stapleton's Kentucky childhood names Willie Nelson in the same breath as Waylon Jennings. "Outlaw country, you know, Waylon, and Willie," he told radio journalist Nancy Brooks of his father's car-radio listening, calling those sounds "the standard that you hold music to." The debt turned literal in 2017. For From A Room: Volume 1, Stapleton cut a studio cover of "Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning," a deep cut off Nelson's 1982 album Always on My Mind, and brought in Mickey Raphael, Nelson's own longtime harmonica player, to reprise the same part he'd played thirty-five years earlier.

listen: upstream & heresource: Country 103.7 — Chris Stapleton's Formative Musical Influences (Willie Nelson/Otis Redding testimony) ↗share

1982

Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This MorningWillie Nelson

→↓

2017

Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This MorningChris Stapleton

listen forNelson's original rides a loose honky-tonk shuffle, his voice conversational, almost spoken, while Mickey Raphael's harmonica curls around every line like it's filling in his unstated thoughts. Stapleton's version keeps that same harmonica part but roughs up the guitar underneath it, trading Nelson's dry restraint for a heavier, bar-band grind. The tempo barely changes; what changes is the weight each singer puts behind the ache. Listen for how both versions let the harmonica, not the vocal, carry the song's loneliest turns.

Stapleton has named Otis Redding, alongside Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, among the sounds "always present in my mind and are formative things" since childhood, he told Relix. "There are some people who might feel that all of those don't quite fit together," he said of mixing soul with the outlaw country his father favored, "but I connected with all of them." Rolling Stone's Will Hermes reached past country entirely to describe "Either Way" in 2017: its "broken whisper to chilling holler" arc, he wrote, "conjures Otis Redding as much as Waylon Jennings."

listen: upstream & heresource: Country 103.7 — Chris Stapleton's Formative Musical Influences (Willie Nelson/Otis Redding testimony) ↗share

1965

I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)Otis Redding

→↓

2017

Either WayChris Stapleton

listen forRedding's original starts hushed over a slow-building horn section and detonates into full-throated pleading by the bridge, his voice fraying at the edges as the band swells behind him. "Either Way" strips the arrangement down to acoustic guitar alone, but Stapleton follows the same arc: a near-whisper verse that cracks open into a raw, unshielded holler, with nothing but his own voice left to do what Redding's horns once did. Listen for the identical trick — restraint spent all at once, not doled out gradually.