Following Chris Stapleton’s rise from Nashville songwriter for artists like Tim McGraw to mainstream outlaw country success story, sweeping both the Academy of Country Music Awards and this year’s Grammy Awards, mainstream country has been forced to re-examine the ‘bro’ed-out’ party anthems dominating radio airwaves.
“How many times have we heard ‘I listen to every type of music but country’?” Chicago gallerist John Corbett said in a discussion on the similarities between country and free improvisational music. “It’s something that mainstream music listeners can push away.”
Even popular country music artist Chase Rice, whose radio singles “Ready Set Roll” and “Whisper” fall under the category of boastful bro sexcapades, recently expressed displeasure over the types of country songs selected for radio airplay. In a letter to fans, Rice wrote, “I’m not ignorant, there are a lot of people out there waiting for country music to find a little more depth and meaning.”
This is hardly new for Nashville. On his 1997 record, South Mouth, Chicago-based singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks critiqued the city’s business practices he experienced first-hand on the song “F— This Town.”
While Chicago’s absence of a music industry stronghold offers more artistic freedoms to country-influenced songwriters, it can be hard to burst through the city’s bubble nationally.
“The good news about Chicago as any kind of artistic person is that you can kind of do what you want here,” Fulks said. “But the problem about art in Chicago is that people outside of the city don’t always care as much. When I think of Chicago music I think of blues and after that I think of the Liz Phair outsider noise-y rock people. But I don’t think of country.”
Although country music may not be Chicago’s calling card, Fulks is a known face in the city’s music scene and has been for almost twenty years. He hosts a regular Monday night residency at the Hideout club on the city’s North Side and is signed to locally based record label Bloodshot Records.
Bloodshot recently released Fulks’s latest record, Upland Stories, which, unlike many recent albums tackling the theme of Southern life, is indebted less to musical influences and more so to literary figures from the South, as well as Fulks’s own life growing up in North Carolina and Virginia.
“The sadness and melodrama of the South is an archetype from many writers like Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner among others who created this literary landscape of the South that’s connected to the real thing but is also this place, this literary place,” Fulks said.
Three of the record’s tracks, including the pedal steel tinged “Alabama At Night”, were inspired by James Agee and Walker Evans’ Depression-era book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In 1936, Agee and Evans traveled south to document the lives of poor rural sharecroppers in hopes of exposing the injustices of capitalism and the endurance of the human spirit. Fulks originally wrote these songs for a Broadway project with playwright Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal, The Last Ship) on Agee’s life.
Over the course of twelve studio albums, Fulks’s ability to cull literary, deeply introspective and, at times, sarcastically witty lyricism into his storytelling has made him one of the most interesting voices in alternative country music. Storytelling remains paramount to country music’s broader identity, as seen by the rise of the Sturgill Simpsons and Margo Prices, but Fulks’s songwriting and instrumentation challenges listener expectations.
“Needed,” one of the stand out tracks from Upland Stories, is a father offering advice to his daughter from his past, frankly admitting his own faults. On “A Miracle,” he sings “to grow up Southern is a troubled way, pay to mind to what the writer’s say.”
“The thing I like best about that song is that it’s a writer telling you not to trust what the writers say, so it’s an infinite loop of contradictions,” he said.
Recent Bloodshot Records signee, singer-songwriter and banjoist Al Scorch said he was initially drawn to country music as a child because of its reliance on storytelling. Scorch’s own brand of music sounds in part like Woody Guthrie fronting the Minutemen, equally reliant on the punk ethos and anarchistic playing style with the traditional bluegrass and country instrumentation.
The track “Everybody Out” takes a page from the Guthrie handbook; “Every bossman is on another bossman’s take/There ain’t no free man except the one you make.”
“When people ask ‘What style of music do you play?’ what they are really asking is how should I be listening to this, what should I be thinking when I listen to this, and what should I be expecting when I listen,” he said.
Guthrie’s own “Slipknot” is given a raucous reboot on Scorch’s latest release with his Country Soul Ensemble Circle Round the Signs, his second album and first on Bloodshot.
As Americana music becomes co-opted by groups like the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons, roots music is not a buzzword to Scorch but at the heart of his musical mission. His socially conscious lyricism and distinctive banjo style are steeped in America’s musical history–soul, punk, bluegrass, country, blues and jazz.
“When people say it’s country punk or folk punk I’m always like my concept of punk is more like the Minutemen,” he said. “That’s what I want people to think of when they listen to me. Its really more about all of the kinds of music you love and just having this incredible bond of friendship with the people you play with.
“It’s punk because you don’t care what you’re playing, you’re just going to play the music you want to play. It doesn’t all sound the same, it’s not a consistent sound. It’s true expression and you aren’t hindered by anything.”
Scorch, like Fulks, has become a recognizable figure in Chicago, hosting several Sunday afternoon Winter Slumber concerts at the Empty Bottle this past winter, continually playing around the area. Scorch said the Chicago craftsmen mentality is what has kept the city musically vibrant for centuries.
“In Chicago, it’s more of ‘I’m making this event happen and I am making this happen for me and this is the place where it is possible,’” Scorch said. “Chicago is this wild west frontier town where crazy people go to their crazy ideas backed by other crazy people, which is really awesome.”
