Appalachia Kid LP Celebrates 4th Anniversary
- Amanda Colleen Williams
- Oct 29
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Happy Anniversary to Appalachia Kid LP that was released 4 years ago today on October 29, 2021.
First of all, THANK YOU to everyone that preordered the album when it was first announced.
That helps so much for an artist to gauge demand, and can offset the cost of making new music - both pressing up vinyl records and CDs, but also recording costs like paying your musicians, engineers, studio and songwriter royalties.
Lucky for me, I was able to take my time over the years with the recording process for this collection of songs, largely written with my collaborator and signed writer Pete Garfinkel, who somehow managed to get me to write songs about growing up hillbilly.
On this occasion, I'll tell you a little more of the story behind this album project. And please, for the sake of civility and polite company, please infer no politics in this story, because there are none.
So...
Pete is a former medical social worker that reads widely about all kinds of topics from science to sociology, to anything he thinks might spark some creativity and lead to a good songwriting session.
One day, after 7 or 8 years of working together, Pete comes in with a bunch of enthusiasm about a new book he was reading: The title - Hillbilly Elegy. Now I already warned you not to infer politics into this here story, but in case you need reminding, the author of that book, JD Vance was not even on most people's radar as a politician, let alone, the sitting Vice President of the United States.
Pete, he's reading all about "my people" and having all these funny insights, usually about something Mamaw said, and I'm getting madder and madder, telling him what I thought about Mr. Vance and his "hillbilly" book.
First of all, I told Pete, "Ain't no hillbillies in Ohio! Maybe somebody's cousin moved there, or what not, but hillbilly territory, Ohio ain't." There, I said it.
But Pete would not give up. No, he laughed at my antics, and kept plying away at me to read Elegy, all the months we were writing songs about what growing up hillbilly meant to me through the lens of my own wild and wooly family and cast of characters.
Eventually Pete and I had written a fair collection of tunes around these theme of hillbilly, and the idea of doing a record started to warm on me.
There was just one thing missing.
I needed a cover tune that could help tie the whole thing together.
As a writer, publisher, artist, producer, there's a lot of moving wheels when it comes to the ideas spinning around in one's mind when it comes time to put out an album.
For one thing, you have to pick the right songs that fit together as a whole and tell a greater story than just one song can muster by itself.
Also, you have to make sure you're not just spinning circles in your own head, as artists are sometimes prone to doing, and make sure you're putting together something that is both artistically satisfying and potentially commercially successful.
This feat of extraordinary tight rope walking is part of the job of making a record album, as I have learned over the years of watching those far wiser than I do it successfully, in a large scale way.
For those of you that haven't listened to the Appalachia Kid LP album yet, and without giving you a spoiler, I can tell you that the high whooping hollers, characteristic of singers in the mountains, is present throughout, such as "Happy Song" and the title track
"Appalachia Kid."
That particular sound, while familiar to me and those of us who grew up in the hills of Eastern Tennessee, Kentucky and Western North Carolina and Virginia, comes across as completely foreign to people not used to our kind of music.
Enter my dilemma. I needed a bridge, a connector - some way to take this unfamiliar sound and make it seem more normal - make it make sense to more people than just my cousins.
One day, I was jamming out on the guitar playing some songs that I love from my youth, especially ones that made me think of growing up in East Tennessee, surrounded by family and neighbors, or as my mom said, "by a bunch of long haired hippy hillbillies."
My fingers found some unfamiliar chords way up the neck, and behold, I figured out how to play Springsteen's "I'm On Fire," a song my cousins had unsuccessfully tried to make me avoid as a child, because, "freight train running through the middle of my head, yuck!"
The image intrigued me as a metaphor, and perhaps hinting at something more dark and sinister on the other side of my naive understanding at the time. The song stuck. And when I found the fingers to play it, my voice wailing out those high notes, well, everything suddenly clicked into place, and I knew I could finally finish the record.
Now with the story complete, the bridge blueprint laid out, I set about getting the sounds out of my head and onto tape. Tape, that's what some of us still call it when we record sounds in any medium, knowing full well that in most cases, it's not really 2 inch magnetic tape we record on anymore, it's in digital zeros and ones.
The labor of love recording the songs, many written with Pete and some with other writers, including my Colorado pal, J Morley who appears as a guest performer on "That Playground Is Closed," based on a true family story, and Michelle Hill, a fine Texas singer-songwriter, collaborator on "Lost Love Saloon," who is currently working on a top secret, super awesome record LP with me as producer, carried on as long as it needed to. I tried out different options, hired out players and tabled some great sides, because they didn't fit with the overall sound at the end of the day.
After the album was done, I got wind that the book Pete had been hounding me about was being made into a movie by Ron Howard, a favorite because of his red hair and former role as Opie on the Andy Griffith Show, the star of which was rumored to be a long lost relative of my mamaw Elzada Griffith.
Hmm, there might be some good in reading Hillbilly Elegy afterall, the publisher in me thought.
Our songs just might turn out to be useful as a sound track, if they're looking for that sort of thing, I reasoned.
Around this time, I got a copy of the book and read it.
I must admit, I loved it cover to cover. It was a reflection of what life was like for me as a kid growing up in East Tennessee, as Vance refers to as, "one of the ones that never left the holler," until I did, of course.
His experience was unique to him, and through his eyes, I was able to see a lot of insight into some of the unusual and yet highly accepted behaviors of growing up in a hillbilly household - things like, your uncles pointing rifles at each others heads, grinning ear to ear, dozens of raccoon hides nailed up on the side of an out building behind them. You know, the usual.
Seriously though, Vance not only told his own story, and just enough of the family story not to get his self whooped, and also put the whole mess into a sociological and scientifically referenced framework that explains it a little better.
Reading Hillbilly Elegy helped me to answer questions I never had, such as, why non-hillbilly people think hillbilly people are angry, when we're really just getting warmed up for a good conversation, you know, things like that.
To add a bit, and just a tad really, to what JD Vance had to say about how non-hillbilly people don't understand what it is to be a hillbilly, and maybe cannot without proper cultural education (and who wants that?!), is to note that the closer in proximity a people is to the hillbilly territory, the more likely they are to diss and distance themselves from being associated with us.
This was particularly the case when moving from East Tennessee to Nashville, Tennessee back in the late '80s. People are often surprised when I say, in all honesty, that it was more culture shock moving from East Tennessee to Nashville than it was moving from Nashville to Boston.
Perhaps it will save some unsuspecting soul a bit of trouble when I explain that hillbilly is totally different from your aw-shucks-y'all have a nice day you want some peach pie to go with that sweet tea variety of southerner. We're more of the out house, wipe your hind end with the sears and robuck and don't let the door hit you in ass on the way out type of folk.
No, we didn't get shoes just for the trip, but our grandparents made-do with one pair a year in the winter, no shit. I told some of Mamaw's stories in "We Couldn't Tell" written with and recorded by Brandon Rickman of the Lonesome River Band, and on my Revelation EP.
Having read Elegy, I made a call to the movie production office and received quite the reception from the phone answerer, "We got a live one here," I imagine them saying.
If I had my creative way, and maybe I one day might be so honored as to try, I would love to make a "Composer's Cut" of the film Hillbilly Elegy using songs that I wrote and curated specifically for the purpose of telling the story through the medium of a soundtrack.
Not to give it away, but I will say, the new soundtrack has songs from the radio that JD and family actually listen to along the way in the book, and of course, one totally new and previously unheard cover song adaptation that serves as a bridge, just as "I'm On Fire" serves as a bridge song for Appalachia Kid.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Appalachia Kid LP album recorded in Nashville, Tennessee with loving care at The 515 Studio. See the full album credits here.
For this week only, when you buy a vinyl record Appalachia Kid LP, you'll get a complimentary copy of the Appalachia Kid CD, too, included with your purchase.
Happy Anniversary, Appalachia Kid! Here's lookin' at you.
P.S. There's nothing more hillbilly than being able to listen to your music off-the-grid.
Comments