Country
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When Bailey Zimmerman takes the stage to perform his brooding, multiweek Country Airplay chart-topper “Rock and a Hard Place,” the memories of a particularly bad breakup come flooding back to him.
“There was a girl I really loved. I wanted to give her the world and bought her a ring, and then she did some really messed-up stuff,” Zimmerman says. “Every time I see people cry during ‘Rock and a Hard Place’ when I’m singing it live, it takes me back to that moment. I remember being in my truck, screaming the lyrics to [Morgan Wallen’s] ‘Sand in My Boots’ because I was so sad and hurt. The line in ‘Rock’ about ‘We’ve been swinging and missing’ just resonated with me.”
When it comes to his career, Zimmerman (who is signed to Warner Music Nashville/Elektra Music Group) has been doing plenty of swinging — and making lots of contact. Now he’s not just screaming the lyrics to Wallen’s song: He’s opening the superstar’s stadium tour this summer. Less than four months after notching his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart with “Fall in Love” in December, “Rock” reached the top spot, too. “Fall in Love” was still on its way to No. 1 when Zimmerman’s management team began seeding radio executives with the follow-up single.
“ ‘Rock’ checked all the boxes — great lyric, great melody, and it perfectly fits the direction Bailey is going,” says The CORE Entertainment co-founder/CEO Kevin “Chief” Zaruk, who co-manages Zimmerman with 10th Street Entertainment. “The feedback we received was that it would be an even bigger hit.”
The early stations that jumped on “Rock and a Hard Place” were prescient: The song (written by Heath Warren, Jacob Hackworth and Jet Harvey) achieved even more chart success than its predecessor, leading Country Airplay for six weeks. And in April, it became Zimmerman’s first top 10 on the all-genre Hot 100.
In less than three years, the 23-year-old native of Louisville, Ill., has gone from burgeoning TikTok star to bona fide hit-maker and, now, Billboard’s inaugural country Rookie of the Year. After high school, he began working on a natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia and gained a modest TikTok following for his videos of custom-lifted trucks. Singing was simply a hobby for Zimmerman until December 2020, when he uploaded a video of himself performing “Never Comin’ Home,” a song he had written with high school friend Gavin Lucas. The track went viral, and Zimmerman gave his union notice the following day.
“It was funny, because they were like, ‘You mean we should just take you off the schedule for a bit?’ And I was like, ‘No, I quit. I’m done,’ ” Zimmerman recalls. He continued writing songs and moved to Nashville to record, adding producer Austin Shawn to the core group of collaborators helping him craft his raw, unflinching brand of rock-tinged country. Zimmerman recorded in a spare bedroom in Shawn’s house, cutting his vocals in a small closet. “It’s the same room [where] I met Bailey for the first time, where we talked about lifted trucks and dirt bikes for about three hours straight,” Shawn says.
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Zimmerman signed his co-management deal in 2021 and announced his label deal the following year. Now he’s one of several artists who have recently ascended swiftly from social media virality to packing venues. (The Neal Agency books his shows.) He’s acutely aware that he sidestepped years of the grueling club shows that typically pave the way to country stardom — and that his learning curve is happening publicly. A few months ago, a clip of him singing off-key live went viral, leading him to post an endearing video in which he apologized for sounding “absolutely awful” before launching into a sturdy a cappella version of “Rock and a Hard Place” to prove he had simply experienced an off night.
“You can say, ‘You didn’t have to go through the 10 years in the bars to get where you are at.’ At the same time, [those artists] had plenty of time to deal with things like your mic not being on or your [in-ear monitors] going out — they could learn all that in clubs,” Zimmerman says. “I had to learn it in front of thousands of people.
“The first two years were rough,” he continues. “I got [vocal cord] nodules and had to not talk for almost three months. My voice was so weak, and I had to build it back slowly — I never went hoarse for a show, thank God, and I never needed surgery. But my voice is stronger now, and I’ve learned how to take care of it.”
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Not that Zimmerman has had much time to ponder his whirlwind success. Following its May 12 release, his major-label full-length debut, Religiously. The Album, entered the Top Country Albums chart at No. 3 and the Billboard 200 at No. 7.
“We’ve been working so hard, and to see the songs touching people like they have is amazing,” Zimmerman says. “And to be Rookie of the Year for Billboard is such a big deal. I can’t wait to call my mom — she’s going to freak.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Ashley McBryde is sitting in a hotel room in Oxford, Miss., cracking up, thinking about the people who tried to tell her what to do. People like the staff at her first publisher, who laid out their version of Music Row Songwriting 101 to her early on.
“It was like, ‘Here’s who’s cutting records — so there can’t be any cursing, and it can’t be about drinking or staying the night with anyone,’ ” McBryde recalls. “What am I going to write about, corn dogs? That was really challenging, and the songs were terrible.”
The singer-songwriter can laugh about it now. Three critically acclaimed albums, six Grammy nominations and one win later, the 39-year-old Arkansas native has carved out a sweet spot between niche Americana and stadium-scale country-pop, where songwriting matters more than anything else.
But crafting that niche took McBryde years of pounding the Nashville pavement — so by the time she got the aforementioned unsatisfying publishing deal, she had honed her ability to work a crowd through endless bar gigs. “The music wasn’t as unusual as the way that she spoke,” Warner Music Nashville co-president Cris Lacy recalls of a 3rd & Lindsley showcase where McBryde performed in 2016. “There was a really clever wit and a different type of storytelling just in her banter.”
WMN held back, “just wanting to watch for a while,” in Lacy’s words, but manager John Peets signed on immediately after that show. “I’ll do this right now. This is amazing and doesn’t sound like anything else,” Peets remembers thinking. He told McBryde: “You never have to write a song that you hate ever again.”
McBryde’s differences from most prospective Nashville hit-makers drew Peets to her. “She was kind of on the front end of that regrounding in traditional country sounds that we’ve been seeing,” says Peets. “She wasn’t a 19-year-old blonde girl, either.”
Ashley McBryde photographed on May 3, 2023 at Skyway Studios in Nashville.
Diana King
With Peets’ help — putting her in rooms with veteran songwriters and encouraging her to write personal, honest songs — McBryde refined her writing to better match the sharp, between-songs banter that audiences had found so appealing. With her 2016 EP, Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, McBryde felt much closer to finding her voice. “Finally, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This tastes like the meal I would prepare,’ ” she says. It included “Bible and a .44,” a vivid, heartfelt homage to her father that helped her break through after fellow Peets client Eric Church invited her to sing it onstage at one of his shows; Lacy signed her to WMN soon after.
Since then, this year’s Country Power Players Groundbreaker has found success without much help from country radio. After more than a decade in the business and seven years on the country charts, McBryde has notched only one No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay list: her 2021 duet with Carly Pearce, “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.”
“It does piss me off when someone walks out of their mother’s womb into headlining arenas and releasing songs that go No. 1 instantly, 1,000%,” McBryde says. “Because if I put that person who skipped all the steps in a single bar I played in North Little Rock that’s full of bikers and truckers, they couldn’t catch anyone’s attention.”
Radio’s failure to reflect McBryde’s rise speaks to its entrenched problem of gender inequity. “It’s not because female artists haven’t been consistently making great music,” she says. “It’s just that it’s easier to play songs on the radio that sell trucks. I guess it’s sort of pendulum-like, and I think things are starting to swing back in a more equal direction.”
In her songs, McBryde is never explicitly political — yet she also doesn’t shy from topics like religion and inclusivity. “I was raised in a really, really rigid, strict Church of Christ home,” she says. “I was really successfully trained to fear, and we know that hate comes along with fear.” She’ll skip “Shut Up Sheila,” a potent rebuke of an imagined Bible-thumping relative off 2020’s Never Will, at some tour stops (it uses the word “goddamn”), but the refrain of “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” — “Hallelujah, Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers” — will never be censored. “It felt really good to say,” McBryde says of the track from 2022’s Lindeville, which, like Never Will, was nominated for best country album at the Grammys.
McBryde long wondered if she would ever get to the heart of Music Row, and now that she has, she still sometimes questions if she belongs. “You can’t change the direction the machine is going unless you’re inside it,” McBryde says. “You can’t change any of the rules unless you understand how it is played.”
Now she’s just trying not to push herself as hard as she felt she had to in those early days. She’s still working through the effects of a serious 2021 horseback riding accident and fought so hard to resume touring that at one point she was pushed up to the side stage in a wheelchair, then wheeled back to bed after her set. “On one hand, I’m a woman of country music, damn it, and this is what the f–k we’re made of,” she says. “On the other hand, something groundbreaking was learning to just stop and take care of myself.
“That’s something that’s different for me than it has ever been: I’m not in a hurry anymore,” McBryde concludes. “We’re good. It’s going to happen.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Kimberly Perry has launched her return to country music as a solo artist with her new song, “If I Die Young Pt. 2,” from her upcoming album, Bloom, out June 9 via RECORDS Nashville. The new song revisits one of the signature hits from her work as part of sibling trio The Band Perry, “If […]
Singer-songwriter Jelly Roll topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “Dead Man Walking” in May 2022, hit No. 1 on Country Airplay seven months later with “Son of a Sinner,” and went on to spend a record-setting 28 weeks atop the Emerging Artists chart. The Nashville-area native has sold-out shows at both Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Bridgestone Arena; he also took home multiple honors at the CMT Music Awards in April. Now, he’s on the cover of this year’s Billboard Country Power Players issue. On Friday (June 2), he will release the full-length project, Whitsitt Chapel.
During his cover story interview with Billboard‘s Melinda Newman in Nashville, Jelly Roll opened up about his journey from spending time behind bars to selling out arenas and topping the charts in multiple genres. Jelly Roll spoke of how, at age 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult.
“I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he told Billboard. “This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did.”
He also expressed a lingering bitterness over how the judicial system offered him such little opportunities for rehabilitation, despite his young age. Jelly Roll was facing a potential 20-year sentence, though he ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years of probation.
“They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he told Billboard. “I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt. I was charged as an adult years before I could buy a beer, lease an apartment, get a pack of cigarettes … I feel like the justice system at that point kind of parked me on my only set path.”
Given Tennessee’s zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, the charge is still on Jelly Roll’s record, and thus has lingering repercussions. Jelly Roll cannot vote, volunteer at most nonprofits or own a firearm. Until recently, he also could not get a passport, which impacted his ability to tour internationally. He also told Billboard about his attempt to buy a home in a gated community with its own golf course (Jelly Roll is an avid golfer); he was ultimately rejected.
“Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at,” he told Billboard. “My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago.”
He recalls the moment he began to turn his life around, after learning of the birth of his daughter, Bailee. When he was 23, Jelly Roll was incarcerated for drug dealing. Then, on May 22, 2008, he learned that his daughter had been born.
“I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different. I have to figure this out right now,” he said.
He was transferred from the violent offenders’ unit to the education unit and began studying for his GED, passing the test on his first attempt. After his release, he met his daughter on her second birthday. Bailee now resides with Jelly Roll and his wife, Bunnie, whom he married in 2016. He calls Bunnie “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he says. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”
Taylor Swift has her Swifties and Jelly Roll has his Bad Apples.
Jelly’s life story is told by the tattoos that cover his body, including a crudely drawn apple core on the rapper-turned-country artist’s left cheek.
Given his prison past, it’s easy to imagine it could be a symbol for “rotten to the core,” or, considering his religious upbringing, a reference to the concept of Original Sin and Eve and then Adam biting the apple in the Garden of Eden. But the truth is much less complicated: The ink is an homage to some of his hardcore fans, an unofficial group who refer to themselves as “the bad apples.”
Jelly’s fans took the name from his 2014 song, “Bad Apple,” a catchy, light-hearted tune about a frolicking night out with lyrics including, “Some people call me a bad apple/Yeah, I may be bruised but I still taste sweet/Some people call me a bad apple/But I may be the sweetest apple on the tree.” His fans’ usage of the term happened organically, but Jelly wanted to acknowledge their allegiance to each other with the tattoo.
Jelly Roll, who is on the cover of Billboard’s Country Power Players issue, releases his new album, Whitsitt Chapel, tomorrow (June 2). The album includes his Country Airplay No. 1, “Son of a Sinner” and rising single, “Need A Favor.”
In 2017, the Bad Apples started a private fan page on Facebook devoted to Jelly Roll that now has more than 55,000 members and with members sharing stories about Jelly and his music.
More recently, Jelly also named his new cannabis line Bad Apple; he launched the product during a late May visit to the marijuana dispensary Greenhouse of Walled Lake in Michigan. “Frankly, Michigan’s got some of the best weed in the United States. There’s no other way to say it. And trust me, I’ve smoked everywhere,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “The Michigan weed is grown with love, it’s tender, it’s all greenhouse weed. You never have to worry about getting no mountain weed on this side of the country.”
Jelly Roll will perform at Billboard‘s inaugural Billboard Country Live in Concert event in Nashville on June 6.
In January 1999, one month after he turned 14, Jason DeFord was baptized by full immersion at Whitsitt Chapel Baptist Church in Antioch, Tenn. By the end of that year, he was incarcerated for the first, but not the last, time. For the next decade, DeFord cycled in and out of juvenile and then adult correctional facilities for crimes ranging from aggravated robbery to drug dealing.
“I got baptized in here some 20 years ago and have since done nothing but go to prison, treat a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, [then] go on to be a f–king multimillionaire and help as many people as I possibly can,” says DeFord today, a hint of awe in his voice as he sits in a red upholstered pew at Whitsitt Chapel. The 38-year-old — now better known as the inspirational, tattoo-covered artist Jelly Roll — recently returned to the church for the first time in decades. “It’s the f–king wildest story ever to me — maybe because I’m the one f–king in the middle of it — but that sh-t’s crazy.”
Jelly (whose mother christened him with the nickname when he was little) has risen from the streets of Antioch to the upper reaches of Billboard’s rap, rock and now country charts, and even played the revered Grand Ole Opry. But he still struggles to reconcile that hopeless past with his prosperous present and seemingly limitless future. On the gut-wrenchingly raw Whitsitt Chapel, out June 2 on Bailee & Buddy/Stoney Creek Records/BMG, Jelly relives his search for refuge and redemption in a world where sinners outnumber saints and hell often feels closer than heaven. As he sings on “Save Me”: “I’m a lost cause/Baby don’t waste your time on me/I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and dreams.”
“That’s what country is, anyway, right? Three chords and the solid truth,” says Jelly, paraphrasing legendary songwriter Howard Harlan’s oft-quoted description of a good country song.
Much of Jelly’s own truth is written in ink on his face. There’s a heart with a lock, a rose, three crosses and a tear drop. There’s his 7-year-old son Noah’s name. His hair has grown over his 15-year-old daughter Bailee’s name, but it’s there, too. On his left cheek, there’s an apple core, an homage to some of his die-hard fans who called themselves the Bad Apples. Emblazoned across his forehead, Jelly’s latest tattoo describes who he is now: “Music Man.”
Music was his way out — it just took him decades to get here. He wrote his first rap when he was 9 or 10, and by the time he was in eighth grade, he was passing out mixtapes of his music in the high school parking lot. “There was a place in Antioch that would let us cut demos for like 30 bucks an hour,” he says. “We had a dude who had a rolling keyboard and he’d make beats.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Rolex watch.
Eric Ryan Anderson
But his love of music couldn’t keep him out of trouble. Everyone around him had a hustle — even his father, who ran a wholesale meat business, was a bookie on the side — and he wanted one of his own. “As f–ked up as this may sound, there were drug dealers and drug users,” he says. “I wanted to be the guy getting money, not the guy losing it.”
Jelly has three older half-siblings, but he’s the only child from his parents’ union, which he says was his father’s fifth or sixth. His parents divorced when he was 13, and Jelly felt responsible for his mother, who suffered from mental health and substance abuse issues. “I told my dad before he died [in 2019], ‘I wonder, if I’d have moved in with you when you divorced, if I’d have went to Vanderbilt [University] or something.’ But I felt this need to take care of my mother back then. I think that’s what really did it, too,” he adds, in terms of why he turned to crime. “When he left, I was like, ‘Somebody’s got to do what he was doing, at least trying to figure out some money.’ ”
Still, he never abandoned music entirely. Customers who bought quarter ounces of cocaine also got a free mixtape of his raps. “I always knew that the music was my only chance because I knew [from] the way that people in the community responded to it that it could be big,” he says.
Jelly says when he was 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult. “I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he says, his voice still filled with remorse. “This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did.”
But he’s also bitter that at such a young age the judicial system offered him little chance at rehabilitation. “They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he says of a potential 20-year sentence. (He ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years’ probation.) “I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt. I was charged as an adult years before I could buy a beer, lease an apartment, get a pack of cigarettes … I feel like the justice system at that point kind of parked me on my only set path.”
Tennessee has a zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, so that one charge is still on his record — and has very real repercussions. Jelly, an avid golfer, tried to buy a house in a community with its own course not long ago and was rejected. “Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at,” he says. “My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago.”
Jelly can’t vote, or volunteer at most nonprofits, or own a firearm. Until recently, he couldn’t get a passport, which limited his ability to tour abroad. “The trick is when America finally says, ‘We’ll let you leave,’ the amount of countries that won’t let you come in … We had to cancel my London debut show.”
That cancellation is one of the few roadblocks that Jelly has faced recently. But after years of struggling, he’s finally knocking down the doors that once seemed closed. He’s writing with Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde, the latter of whom will open for him in select cities on his 44-date North American arena tour later this summer. Drake responds to his Instagram posts, and Garth Brooks, the artist he has seen most in concert, greeted him with a massive bear hug when they met in May at the Academy of Country Music Awards. In May 2022, he topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “Dead Man Walking,” only to reach the summit of the Country Airplay chart seven months later with “Son of a Sinner.” Starting in 2022, he spent a record-setting 28 weeks at No. 1 on the Emerging Artists chart, which ranks the most popular developing acts in all genres.
But a difficult truth follows him: As he sings on “Unlive,” a Whitsitt Chapel track featuring rapper Yelawolf and co-written with McBryde, “you can’t unlive where you’re from.”
It’s April 20 — the widely recognized day of celebration for cannabis enthusiasts — and by the smell of it, Jelly Roll has already partaken by the time he arrives at the Grand Ole Opry, where Billboard first meets him. “As I walked in here, my publicist was a little worried about it, and I said, ‘Let me tell you something: I’m as high as I can be every time you’ve ever seen me,’ ” Jelly admits with a shrug. “The day doesn’t change that.”
As it is for so many country artists, the Grand Ole Opry was “holy ground” to Jelly even before he made his debut there in November 2021. After being released from jail in 2009 — while still wearing an ankle bracelet — he scraped together the money to see Craig Morgan there; while in jail, Jelly would play his 2002 hit “Almost Home” endlessly. He cried as Morgan played the song at the Opry, thinking, “’That’s what I want to do. I want to make people feel the way this makes me feel.’”
Several times during the day, Jelly steps outside to smoke a joint. He says it’s “better than Xanax” for his mental health and anxiety (he’s launched his own cannabis line, Bad Apple). He has cut down somewhat on his drinking and stopped taking the other harmful drugs “that really had a hold of my life,” including cocaine, pain pills and codeine. But those substances still have a hold on people from his past. “Unfortunately, my friends in Antioch haven’t quit dying from fentanyl or are getting locked up or still doing time. I’m still accepting collect calls to this day.” He estimates he has been to funerals for 30 friends who have died, mainly from drugs.
At April’s CMT Awards, Jelly won all three categories for which he was nominated. But the week was bittersweet. “I’d just had a friend overdose on fentanyl. I missed his funeral because I was camera blocking [for the awards telecast],” he says.
That’s Jelly’s life now. Though he lives on the other side of Nashville from where he grew up, part of him remains firmly planted in Antioch, while another part has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on speed dial, sits courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers playoff game in the same row as Adele and proudly shows off his latest chain, with a pendant that reads “Son of a Sinner” in diamonds. After Jelly’s song of the same title became his first No. 1 on Country Airplay, he went to the Icebox in Atlanta — “Where all the rappers like Lil Baby go,” he says — and had identical chains made for him and his co-writers ERNEST and David Ray Stevens.
“New playground, new playmates,” he says of his life today. “I live in a totally different space. But I’m always conscious of keeping in touch with where I’m from. My heart is to help,” he says of his old Antioch connections, even as he admits he has had to cut off old buddies still living what he calls “a certain life. They know I love them, but I can’t afford to risk being on the phone with you and [it] sounds like I’m involved in something I’m not involved with. I might not talk to you, but I’m still bonding you out.” To make a clean break, Jelly recently got rid of his cellphone for several months. Only a handful of people have his new number.
At 23, while incarcerated for drug dealing, Jelly “all but gave up,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to die in prison or young.’ ” Then he experienced what he calls his “road to Damascus” moment. “May 22, 2008. A guard knocks on my cell door midafternoon during lockdown,” Jelly recalls. “He goes, ‘You had a kid today.’ I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different. I have to figure this out right now.”
Jelly knew when he went to jail that a woman he had been seeing was pregnant, but he says impending fatherhood had just felt like another mistake in a litany of bad decisions. “I was just irritated by it,” he says. “Like, ‘I’ve really f–ked up now.’ ” But Bailee’s birth inspired him to change. He was granted a transfer from the violent offenders unit to the education unit and started studying for his GED — which, much to his surprise, he passed on his first try. “I spent less than 60 to 70 days in high school. I thought I was a real dumbass. I thought I was learning disabled,” he says. “I walked in there and smacked that b-tch out of the park.”
Once released, he met his daughter on her second birthday. “I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs,” he says. Bailee now lives with him and his wife, Bunnie, whom he married in 2016, and he frequently sees Noah (nicknamed Buddy), who is from another relationship. He calls Bunnie, a former sex worker who now hosts the popular Dumb Blonde podcast, “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he says. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”
After his release, Jelly turned to making rap music his career, independently releasing albums, posting music on YouTube and taking any gig he could. From 2010 to 2015, he lived in an old van, driving wherever there was work. “I’d go to Columbus [Ohio] and do $50 features; I’d sell rap verses for 50 bucks,” he says. “I was so petrified of sitting idle because I was afraid I would resort back to what I felt like I knew.”
Jelly Roll photographed on April 21, 2023 at Warren Studios in Nashville.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Though Jelly’s breakthrough on the country charts is recent, he first appeared on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart in 2011 with the independently released Strictly Business, a collaborative album with Nashville rapper Haystak. It peaked at No. 67 — which is news to him today: “That makes me want to call my distributor and get an audit on the money,” he says with a laugh.
Over the next five years, Jelly — who taught himself the ins and outs of the music business through various partnerships with artists and both local and national distributors — charted several more albums, including 2013’s No Filter with Lil Wyte, which reached No. 17 on Top Rap Albums. He collaborated with friend Struggle Jennings on the Waylon & Willie series of four rap albums, released between 2017 and 2020, and named after Jennings’ step-grandfather Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The volumes addressed bleak topics including substance abuse and the inescapable weight of a troubled past (even in the pursuit of love, as on the RIAA gold-certified single “Fall in the Fall”).
On such efforts, Jelly would occasionally sing, though he says he was “petrified” to do so for an entire track. But some liquid courage, karaoke and Bob Seger helped him find his voice. He bursts into “Old Time Rock & Roll”: “Risky Business, baby,” he says, name-checking the 1983 movie that gave Seger’s tune a new life. “Any time that song comes on, I’m single for three minutes. I’m Elvis Presley. I’m singing to women. It just brings it out of me.”
“There are not many artists out there that can rap like he does and then switch over to a soulful, melodic voice that’s instantly recognizable,” says fellow country artist and longtime friend Brantley Gilbert, who co-wrote and sings with Jelly on Whitsitt Chapel’s “Behind Bars.” “He is one of the most genuine people you’ll ever meet. He’s consistently himself and never changes who he is to fit a certain mold. He has had some experiences that not many artists in this genre can say they’ve had, so he’s able to open up a whole new world to folks while making those experiences relatable to everyone.”
“Save Me” — which initially appeared on Jelly’s 2020 independent album, Self-Medicated, and which he remade with Lainey Wilson for Whitsitt Chapel — was one of the first songs Jelly released as a singer with no rapping. “We were all in the darkest place we’d been in a long time when I wrote that song in May 2020. They were still spraying boxes with Lysol,” he says. “We were all living with our own thoughts a little more than we’re used to.”
His ability to capture the truth of the moment earned Wilson’s respect. “Jelly goes against the grain and is 100% himself 100% of the time,” she says. “I love that about him as a human and an artist.” After “Save Me” came out, labels started calling. “My heart was to do country music and be respected on these streets that I grew up on,” says Jelly, who is now managed by John Meneilly. (Jonathan Craig serves as his day-to-day manager.) “And [BMG Nashville president Jon] Loba got it. But he also knew that I wasn’t willing to give up control of my masters or my creativity, so he was open to us working out a deal that could reflect that. It’s a fair partnership.”
After Stoney Creek vp of promotion Adrian Michaels heard Jelly, he brought him to the attention of Loba, who Googled the video for “Save Me” and was sold. “I saw that pain, vulnerability, that tenderness,” Loba says. “I loved his vocal. I just said, ‘That’s a country song.’ I was convinced his storytelling, his heart and his brand would be accepted by our genre.”
Though Whitsitt Chapel, produced primarily by Grammy nominee Zach Crowell, bears the name and likeness of its namesake rural, red brick church, Jelly made the project for people like himself who may not find salvation on Sunday morning. As he professes on current single “Need a Prayer,” “I only pray when I ain’t got a prayer.”
“You’ll never see a man pray harder than as soon as sh-t gets tight,” he says. “I was like, ‘What if worship music is honest? What would my worship song sound like to God?’ ”
History has a funny way of repeating itself. Just as Jelly’s friends took him to church when he was 14, last year, Bailee started attending a small church with her friends and asked Jelly to accompany her — an experience that started him on his path back to Whitsitt Chapel.
“That little back-road church reminded me so much of this little church, and it was just so nostalgic because Bailee’s getting in trouble [and] smoking weed,” he says. “She’s going through what 15-year-olds go through. I went through all that. I know that’s whenever my life turned all the way worse. It started bringing up all these emotions of me being right there on that fence.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Jason of Beverly Hills necklace, Icebox necklace.
Eric Ryan Anderson
After going to church with Bailee, Jelly ditched all but two of the 70 songs he had written for a new project and started on what would become Whitsitt Chapel, which also addresses the hypocrisy he has witnessed from so-called Christians questioning his faith (particularly on songs like “Nail Me”).
“I never thought that I would do something in life that would make people care to hear my story. So equally, I never thought that my story would ever be judged,” he says. “It just hurt my spirit. It was all happening while I’m cooking this album. I had Christian people that were judging my faith based on my use of language or marijuana or drinking references. I just felt really cornered, and it felt really judgy.”
Loba has a message for any Christians who question Jelly’s faith: “I say to them, ‘He will bring more people to God than 95% of the pastors.’ He is touching an audience that has felt invisible [and] dismissed. On the album, there’s hope that you can be redeemed.”
So for Jelly, Whitsitt Chapel is a starting point, not a destination. “Whitsitt Chapel planted the seed of a higher power. We were a very Southern family, so [we did] a lot of praying before dinner and stuff, but it was the first time I feel like I separated from the house and found God by myself,” he says. “So if I was going to make an album that felt so faith-based, I wanted it to reflect where I felt like it started. I think we’re all trying to wash away something.”
Jelly Roll loves Winnie the Pooh. He also loves Jim Croce and James Taylor. And he especially loves the 1993 Disney movie Cool Runnings, loosely based on the story of the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. “Because 98% of every problem in my life I caused, but one or two times in my life the most heartbreaking things I dealt with was the stuff I didn’t cause,” he explains. “Cool Runnings made me understand that sometimes you can do everything right and the sled still breaks. I needed that for the sh-t I went through in life.”
To sort through the wreckage of his past, he’s in intensive therapy, including “timelining” his life. He’s up to age 12. Therapy “is one of the first things I splurged real resources on,” he says. “I found [trauma] to be like one of the roots of probably my obesity, right? This isn’t a lack of discipline. I run a multimillion-dollar business. I work 12, 15, 18 hours a day. I’m a disciplined man. It’s got to be something else.”
As he fights to “overcome some of these demons that I’ve had to deal with,” he’s also taking Bailee to therapy. “Her father was in jail when she was born. Her mother ended up hooked on heroin and disappeared,” he says. “I’m watching the cycle still continue. That’s another reason it’s so easy to draw inspiration from my songs: I’m still watching it in real time.”
He looks at his life in two acts now: Act 1 is the Jelly who used to do bad things; Act 2 is the Jelly of today. “I was a less-than-desirable human in that era,” he says of the time before Bailee was born. “I like to separate myself from that guy like two different people now because it’s the way I’ve made peace with that. And that dude wasn’t a good dude, man.”
Asked if he believes God has forgiven him, Jelly goes silent and tears up. After a long pause, he says, “I think God forgave me way faster than I forgave myself.” As for what it will take for him to forgive himself? “Being a man of service. Trying to care about people.”
Nahmias jacket and pants, RCSLA t-shirt, Icebox chain and bracelet, Rolex watch, Kaws x Air Jordan sneakers.
Eric Ryan Anderson
In December, Jelly sold out Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena — an astonishing feat not just because he’s still a developing artist, but because the venue is just a little over a mile from where he turned 15, 16 and 17 as inmate No. 00364950 in Davidson County Juvenile Detention Center. (The run-up to the concert and Jelly’s compelling backstory are captured in the Hulu documentary Jelly Roll: Save Me, which premiered May 30.)
Jelly, who is booked by CAA’s Hunter Williams, donated all his money from the Bridgestone concert (over $400,000) to Impact Youth Outreach and other organizations to, among other things, build studios in that same juvenile detention center, and he has already pledged to help fund a studio in a new building opening at the center in five years.
“More than anything, I just want to try to help these kids” who are now incarcerated, says Jelly. He wants them to understand that he believes in them in the way he wishes someone, anyone, had believed in him when he was younger. He funds programs at the facility to teach kids Pro Tools and offer them classes with visiting producers and engineers. “Who knows where I’d be if they had a real education unit in juvenile at the time,” he says. “If they’d had a studio, if they’d had trade work and I was being inspired every day instead of being reprimanded.”
And his plans go far beyond the detention center. The day before this interview, he bid on a $4 million building in North Nashville that he wants to turn into a community center. Beyond music, helping at-risk kids may be Jelly’s true calling. “Whenever I’m done doing the circus of the music business and I want to leave the carnival and be a normal human, that’s what I’ll do,” he says.
For now, his own honesty and search for redemption are resonating with fans, who comment on his social media that his songs have saved their lives. “Who in life can say they really helped somebody in the darkest moment of their life that was fixing to kill themselves?” he says. “I look at that as something that inspires me to do more.”
He hears the same praise face-to-face. As he leaves Billboard’s photo shoot at an old paint factory, a worker rushes out to tell him that because of Jelly’s music, he’s approaching 18 months of sobriety. Jelly asks the exact date, not once but twice, and tells him he will be thinking of him on that day.
Fans also recognize him and want to party with him — an offer he happily accepts. During a video shoot the day before at Tin Roof, a bar he and his father used to frequent on Lower Broadway, some bros from Pennsylvania recognize him, and filming halts while Jelly joyously glad-hands and buys a round of tequila shots.
Bunnie calls the public smile that hides the pain so evident in Jelly’s songwriting “the Robin Williams effect,” referring to how the late comedian’s outward exuberance masked inner turmoil. “My wife is like, ‘[People] would never think that this lifetime of pain and carrying caskets and death and drug addiction and all this dark sh-t would come out of you if [they] just met you at a bar,’ ” he says.
But those who have listened to his music already feel a certain kinship with Jelly — and he has a message for them: “I want to be a guidepost of hope for people to know that losers can win. That who you were isn’t who you are.”
It’s a message he still tells himself. And as he moves forward, he wouldn’t mind if his good works brought him a pardon from Tennessee’s governor. “A pardon would change my whole life,” he says, then quickly adds that he would only accept it if it came with a change of policy for currently incarcerated youth. “Maybe we’re disciplining an age group that should be rehabilitated. I just want to have that conversation, and if it can end in a pardon, f–king let’s go.”
A pardon would mean having many of his rights restored — and should it happen, he may have to take a little joyride around a certain ritzy neighborhood that didn’t believe in second chances. “I’d love to move back to that neighborhood and ride around in my golf cart blaring gangster rap music, flipping people off,” he says with a wry chuckle. “I’m joking, but I’m not.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
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Welcome to the jungle! Carrie Underwood is set to join rock band Guns N’ Roses for three shows on the North American leg of the group’s 2023 Global Tour. Alice in Chains, The Pretenders, The Warning and Dirty Honey are also joining the trek.
The country star will open for the rockers during two shows in Canada (Aug. 5 in Moncton, New Brunswick, and Aug. 8 in Montreal, Quebec), followed by a show on Aug. 26 in Nashville at GEODIS Park.
“SO ready for this!” the American Idol season four champ gushed in an Instagram post announcing her addition to the tour. “I CANNOT WAIT!!”
Underwood has long incorporated songs from Guns N’ Roses’ classic rock catalog — such as “Welcome to the Jungle” — into her own concert setlists, and welcomed lead singer Axl Rose as her surprise guest during her headlining set at the Stagecoach music festival in 2022, where the two performed “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Paradise City.”
Later that year, Guns N’ Roses later welcomed Underwood to reprise those same songs during Guns N’ Roses’ London concert.
This marks the first time Guns N’ Roses has toured North America since their We’re F’N Back! Tour in 2021. The tour launches overseas on June 5 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and continues through Europe through July 22, wrapping in Athens, Greece. The band then continues on to North America, starting Aug. 5 for the Moncton, NB show at Medavie Blue Cross Stadium. The tour traverses several U.S. states and wraps on Oct. 16 at BC Place in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Underwood previously told Jimmy Fallon about meeting Guns N’ Roses for the first time, during one of the band’s concerts in Las Vegas.
“I might have, like, hung out with Axl after the show a little bit!” she joked. “I do always say that it’s hard when you meet your heroes, because I do consider him to be somebody who taught me how to sing, because I loved how he could just do different things with his voice. I was like, ‘I don’t know! If I meet him, and he’s not everything I want him to be…’ But he was. It was great. He was super cool and nice, and we talked — we’re best friends.”
See her post announcing her dates on the Guns N’ Roses tour below:
Two Sony Music Nashville artists have announced their exits from the label, according to recent social media posts.
Rachel Wammack, who signed to the label in 2018 and released songs including “Enough” and “My Boyfriend Doesn’t Speak for Me Anymore,” revealed via a series of Instagram videos that she parted ways with the label late last year.
“I’m really thankful for the time that I had there, and all the opportunities that I got, It’s amazing really,” she said in one of the videos. “I’m really thankful for that time. Now I am an independent artist. There’s so much to unpack, but I’m very excited for this new chapter and all the blessings that really come with being an independent artist.”
Wammack also unveiled an unnamed new song about not giving up and staying committed to your dreams, with the singer saying, “It’s really cool to share a sound with y’all that I’ve wanted to share for a really long time.”
Meanwhile, Australian duo Seaforth, who signed with Sony Music Nashville’s RCA Nashville imprint in 2018 before shifting to the Arista Nashville imprint in 2021, relayed the news to fans this week that they have exited the label after the Arista Nashville imprint shuttered in March. During their time with Sony, Seaforth — comprised of Tom Jordan and Mitch Thompson — issued music including the single “Love That,” the Mitchell Tenpenny collaboration “Anything She Says” and the Jordan Davis collaboration “Good Beer.”
Jordan and Thompson shared the news of their departure on social media, saying, “As of today, we have amicably parted ways with Sony Nashville and are officially a fully independent artist. Sony was great to us, supported us when times were tough, and we owe a lot to them for what we have achieved thus far.”
The duo added, “Over time, it just honestly became a very emotional challenge for us to persevere through certain things behind the scenes. Although it ultimately took us a while to get here, anyone who knows us knows it’s the best decision for all parties involved, Sony included…we truly believe that a big change like this will inspire a whole new life for Seaforth, and it honestly already has.”
Seaforth also revealed that their upcoming independent single, “Get the Girl,” will release on June 16.
Sony Music Nashville did not respond to Billboard‘s request for comment by press time.