walking upstream…
Tyler Childers
photo: roberta · cc by 2.0 ↗Tyler Childers
sourcesWikipedia — Tyler Childers · Rolling Stone — How Songwriter Tyler Childers Became the 21st Century Voice of Appalachia (bio, Prine discovery) · Rolling Stone — Tyler Childers' John Prine Cover Is a Drinking Song to Dull All the Pain (2021 studio cover) · WMOT Roots Radio — Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers, New Stars of Roots Music, Carry It Back to Old Kentucky · Rolling Stone — See Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson Play 'Whitehouse Road' at Nashville's Ryman (2018 live guitar solo)
Tyler Childers was born in 1991 in Lawrence County, Kentucky, a red-haired kid who figured he'd become a journalist or an English teacher until his grandfather bought him a guitar. He wrote his first song at 13, a self-described "hardcore knock-off of 'Tangled Up in Blue,'" about a woman who dies asleep on the railroad tracks. Raised on Baptist hymns and roadside cassettes, he dropped out of college for flooring and landscaping jobs while building a following across Kentucky and West Virginia, self-releasing Bottles and Bibles in 2011 out of a friend's backyard studio. His 2017 breakthrough Purgatory, made with fellow eastern Kentuckian Sturgill Simpson, turned that raising into unvarnished songs about coal country and addiction — the plainspoken voice of a place he refused to let anyone flatten into stereotype.
the sound in question
2017
Feathered IndiansTyler Childers
walk the tributaries ↓
John Prine1970s · Folk / Country / Americana
In eighth grade, benched on his JV baseball team, Childers heard his coach play a cassette in the dugout and turned around: "What is that?" "You mean you have never heard John Prine?" the coach answered. "Ever since then, I've been blaring him," Childers said, "and he's one of the first songwriters who had a big influence on how I wanted my sound to be." He later shared stages with Prine, singing "Paradise" and "Please Don't Bury Me" beside him, and in 2021 paid the debt back directly, cutting a full studio cover for a tribute album on Prine's own label.
listen: upstream & heresource: Whiskey Riff — Tyler Childers Recalls the Very First Time He Heard John Prine's Music ↗
1972
Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After YouJohn Prine
2021
Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After YouTyler Childers
listen forPrine's "Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You" is a fiddle-sawing, chorus-less tear-in-your-beer tune, built without a hook because, as Prine put it, "once a song was done, it was done." Childers's 2021 cover for the Prine tribute record keeps that same fiddle and structure, but drapes tinkling barroom piano underneath and sings the self-pitying line "sometimes I feel like an awful fool" with more ache than Prine ever let show — proof he learned the plainspoken trick, then pushed the hurt further.
Sturgill Simpson2010s · Outlaw country / Progressive country / Americana
Simpson, a fellow eastern Kentuckian, didn't shape Childers's ear so much as build the room around it: after his drummer Miles Miller fell for Childers's songs at a Nashville show, Simpson produced 2017's Purgatory with engineer David Ferguson at Nashville's Butcher Shoppe studio. "He got the right guys in the room, for sure," Childers said of the sessions. "He nudged it where it needed to, and sat back when something was just fine where it was." Simpson returned to produce Country Squire two years later, and in 2018 walked onstage at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium to rip the guitar solo on Childers's own "Whitehouse Road."
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Hear Tyler Childers Talk Sturgill Simpson, Kerouac With Chris Shiflett (Ralph Stanley cassette, Simpson production quote) ↗
2014
Turtles All the Way DownSturgill Simpson
2017
Whitehouse RoadTyler Childers
listen forSimpson's "Turtles All the Way Down" rides a searching, effects-soaked guitar tone that drifts toward psychedelia without losing its country backbone. "Whitehouse Road," from the album he co-produced, pushes that same drive toward rock and roll but pins it under Childers's harder, more clipped delivery and a full band's forward lean. When Simpson later sat in on "Whitehouse Road" live, tearing into its guitar solo himself, producer and protege briefly became the same sound.
Ralph Stanley1950s · Bluegrass / Old-time / Gospel
Two cassettes lived in his father's truck when Childers was young. "I remember there were two tapes that my papa had in his truck at all times when I was younger," he told Rolling Stone. "It was a Ralph Stanley gospel cassette and the Hee Haw gospel album." Alongside Sunday-morning hymns at the Baptist church, that tape gave Childers his earliest sense of bluegrass's austere, high-lonesome gospel sound — the bare, mountain-church register he'd return to years later on his own set of hymn reworkings, 2022's Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Hear Tyler Childers Talk Sturgill Simpson, Kerouac With Chris Shiflett (Ralph Stanley cassette, Simpson production quote) ↗
2000
O DeathRalph Stanley
2017
Universal SoundTyler Childers
listen forStanley's a cappella "O Death," recorded solo for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, strips a mountain-gospel dirge down to a single unaccompanied voice, letting every crack and quaver carry the dread. Childers's fiddle tune "Universal Sound" isn't the same song, but works from the same instinct: stripped to almost nothing, with the fiddle standing in for a congregation, so a plain, old-time Appalachian sound alone bears the weight those two cassette tapes in his father's truck once did.