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THREE SOLD OUT NIGHTS @ The Burl Tyler Childers/The Local Honeys/Laid Back Country Picker
October 12, 2017 @ 8:00 pm - 11:30 pm
SOLD OUT
Like many great Southern storytellers, singer-songwriter Tyler Childers has fallen in love with a place. The people, landmarks and legendary moments from his childhood home of Lawrence County, Kentucky, populate the 10 songs in his formidable debut, Purgatory, an album that’s simultaneously modern and as ancient as the Appalachian Mountains in which events unfold.
The album, co-produced by Grammy Award winners Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, is a semiautobiographical sketch of Childers’ growth from wayward youth to happily married man, told in the tradition of a Southern gothic novel with a classic noir antihero who may just be irredeemable. Purgatory is a chiaroscuro painting with darkness framing light in high relief. There’s catharsis and redemption. Sin and temptation. Murder and deceit. Demons and angels. Moonshine and cocaine. So much moonshine and cocaine. All played out on the large, colorful canvas of Eastern Kentucky.
Childers had been searching for a certain sound for his debut album for years as he honed his craft, and was finding it elusive when his friend, drummer Miles Miller, introduced him to Simpson, the Grammy Award-winning musician and fellow Kentuckian. Childers sent Simpson a group of his songs, then went to visit him in Nashville.
“And he said, ‘There’s this sound. I know what you’re trying to get at, the mountain sound,'” Childers recalled. “‘So I asked, ‘What are you doing?'”
Intrigued, Simpson enlisted the aid of Ferguson, the Grammy Award winning sound engineer. They assembled a band that included multi-instrumentalists Stuart Duncan, Michael J. Henderson and Russ Pahl, bassist Michael Bub and Miller on drums, of course, and helped Childers make a debut album of consequence that announces an authentic new voice.
“I was writing an album about being in the mountains,” Childers said. “I wanted it to have that gritty mountain sound. But at the same time, I wanted a more modern version of it that a younger generation can listen to — the people I grew up with, something I’d want to listen to.”
The Local Honeys are a charming duo, born and raised in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The pairing is comprised of Montana Hobbs and Linda Jean Stokley. Montana and Linda Jean are the first females to graduate with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Traditional Music from Morehead State University.
Their sincere dedication to Kentucky music led them to spend many late evenings in the college’s traditional music archives where they listened in awe to the many regional fiddle and banjo players from which they have drawn much of their repertoire. They listened eagerly through the static and crackle of many field recordings to transliterate the living and late Kentucky artists whose stories, songs, and tunes were recorded by those foreseeing the importance of their survival.
These ladies have cultivated a distinguishing sound by utilizing their powerful voices, in both sweet and haunting, intricate harmony. Their voices lay fittingly suspended in air in a capella fashion or befittingly entwined with appropriate instrumental accompaniment. Late one evening in Cork City, Ireland they found themselves singing in an abandoned stairwell with thirty-sum Irish companions where a man proclaimed, “My sweet girls, you sing like angels and play like devils!” They diversely incorporate entrancing balladry, pleasing lullabies, the blues, and driving fiddle and banjo tunes.
These ladies are bringing the home music of the mountains to listening audiences throughout the region and elsewhere. They have sung and played for audiences across the Appalachian region and internationally in Ireland, Jamaica, and Canada. They are so very proud of their culture and hope to instill a sense of curiosity in their audiences about their own heritage while strengthening the appreciation of the high lonesome sound some have forgotten.