Colton Bowlin is inspired by Albany and Clinton County
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| Colton Bowlin (Photo by Sommer Daniel) |
By Al Cross
Colton Bowlin was riding with his grandfather in a truck, singing along with a Merle Haggard tune.
“That don’t sound half bad,” Gayle Bowlin told him. That compliment spurred Colton to teach himself to play guitar, and he started to write songs.
One was about his grandfather’s mill on the headwaters of the Clear Fork in Happy Hollow, where he worked before and after graduating from Pickett County High School in 2023. When Gayle Bowlin died in July 2024, Colton had written one verse of “Grandpa’s Mill.”
“After he had passed, I went back and finished it, as a way of mourning his passing,” Colton recalled in an interview. It became the title song of his latest album, released in March on State Line Records, his own label. “I decided to dedicate that record to him because of how close we were.”
Colton says on his website that the songs on the album were “written mostly between loading feed, swapping stories with old-timers, and playing local bars on weekends. I shaped these songs from the rhythms of real work and small-town life.” The album "has been named one of the year’s best so far by a number of outlets," notes Matt Wickstrom in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Bowlin’s songs and rhythms will be featured Friday night, July 3, in the opening concert of the Spirit of 76 Celebration at the 76 Falls Country Club and golf course. The event will be free, but the nonprofit country club is selling VIP seats. Kristen Hunter and Thomas Oesterricher will be the opening acts.
The songs of Colton Bowlin are mainly about his life, the lives of people he has known, and stories he heard around the mill and elsewhere. His most-heard song on Spotify is “Don’t Come Home,” a country rocker that says he was “raised in the holler . . . mixing meal in an old feed mill.”His second most-heard song is “Clinton County,” in which he sings, “The sounds of the city push away this hillbilly” and “Let me go back to the hills that I call home.”
Bowlin still lives in Albany. “I like to stay home as much as I can, stay out of the Nashville scene,” though “Nashville’s a great place,” he said. “I think I can bring out my best art in the quiet times, away from the noise of the city.”
He says he is inspired by classic country and Southern rock, and by two Kentucky country stars, Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers, neither of whom he has met. “I try to lean more to the outlaw side of things, going against the grain,” he said. “I always love the dark songs.”
What he would like people in Albany to know most about his music? “There’s always a meaning behind something. I’d like people to know that I try to write songs that people can relate to in some form or fashion. I just try to make music from the heart. . . . I want people to say, at the end of the day, that ‘He’s not fabricating anything; those are stories that could happen, or things that he’s seen.’”
Bowlin’s first album, “Songs from the Holler,” has millions of listens on Spotify. His latest album was produced by David Ferguson of Nashville, who has worked as a recording engineer with Childers and Simpson, and the late Johnny Cash and John Prine.
“I thought he fit the job that I wanted to get done the best, and his track record of who he’s worked with is cool, to say the least,” Bowlin said. The album was recorded at Chase Park Studios in Athens, Ga., with his band, “a lot of hippies from Atlanta: great guys, really talented musicians.”
Bowlin met Ferguson through Alan Scher of Atlanta, who became Bowlin’s co-manager in a meeting at McDonald’s in Albany. Now that he’s become known as a country artist, “I can’t even go in there much without somebody wanting a picture,” even at the drive-thru.
“Bowlin writes with a surprisingly mature perspective and sings with a deep, lived-in tone,” wrote Tennessean music reporter Bryan West, who related the story about the Gayle Bowlin compliment that started Colton toward a musical career.
People magazine online wrote of Colton, “By blending emotionally powerful country sonics with red-dirt sound, Bowlin evokes the energy of names such as Jason Isbell, Zach Bryan and the early work of BJ Barham and American Aquarium. Bowlin's emotionally charged, unique blend of Appalachian-honed, country-driven storytelling is precisely why his artistry has been noticed by everyone from Hank Williams Jr. to Asley McBryde, both of whom have tapped the budding star to open for them on tour.”
"It's mind-blowing," Bowlin says. "I just never would've thought that my songs would have that reach or even have the capability of reaching that far.”
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| Gayle Bowlin |
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| Knight says, "I just try to sing the songs like I mean it." |
Knight “remains boldly empowered to make music that always delivers the unflinching truth,” says the bio on his website. “That brutally honest, no-frills philosophy fits his Americana-fueled, backwoods-grown merger of folk, country, and rock.”
The musician grew up in Webster County, earned an agriculture degree from Western Kentucky University, and was a state strip-mine reclamation inspector and consultant for 10 years before embarking full-time on his entertainment career. He began writing songs when he was 26 after being inspired by hearing Steve Earle on the radio, and started performing at 30. After a couple of years he got a spot on songwriters’ night at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, and attracted the interest of music producer Frank Liddell, who signed him to a contract when he was 37.
When Liddell became an artist-and-repertoire representative for Decca Records, Knight got a contract with Decca, which released his self-titled debut album in 1998. At the time, Knight still lived in a 10'-x-15' trailer on 90 acres in Slaughters, Kentucky. Decca went out of business just two years later, but after two years without a label, Knight signed with Dualtone Music Group. He licensed his music to Dualtone for two records, then began released his music independently with the help of his manager.
His own songs have been the backbone of nine studio albums, from 2001’s A Pretty Good Guy and 2003’s The Jealous Kind, to two demo-styled discs (2007’s The Trailer Tapes and 2009’s Trailer II, recorded in his trailer at Slaughters), to the electric-guitar-heavy Almost Daylight in 2019. He collaborated with former Decca labelmate Lee Ann Womack on "You Lie When You Call My Name" on the Little Victories album in 2012. He was joined on the title track by his longtime musical hero, John Prine.
“Chris Knight is one of the most starkly honest lyricists working today, much like his late friend John Prine,” wrote Massachusetts music columnist Jay N. Miller. “His songs tell the stories or set the mood of working-class folk and their struggles in candid, often dark shadings. . . . There are songs about these people prevailing against tough odds, and also songs where it is clear they just won’t.”
Opening for Chris Knight will be Emi Sunshine and Larry Cordle, a country-and-bluegrass singer-songwriter best known for writing “Murder on Music Row,” recorded by George Strait and Alan Jackson, which received the Country Music Association award for Vocal Event of the Year, and was nominated for CMA Song of the Year in 2000. He plans to reunite his band, Lonesome Standard Time, at the Spirit of 76 Celebration.
Award-wining singer-songwriter Larry Cordle will entertain July 4
By Randy Speck
“Mom said I could sing 'I’ll Fly Away' all the way through when I was two years old!” Cordle fondly remembers on his website, recalling his grandfather's influence. “We lived so far away from everything that we had to make our own entertainment. Papaw would get the fiddle out in the evenings sometimes and play and dance for us. Just as soon as I was old enough to try to learn to play, I did so and kinda seconded after him on the guitar. He ran an old country store and I spent many happy hours in there with him playing, talking about and listening to music. It was our escape into another world, something we grew up with and looked so forward to. I was always happiest when we were in a jam session.”
After graduating from high school, Cordle spent four years in the Navy, was honorably discharged and attended Morehead State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in accounting. “I just didn’t see how I could ever make a living doing only music,” he explains, “so I worked for a CPA firm during the day and played in clubs at night.” All the while, he desperately wanted to devote all of his time to music, but his commitments would remain divided, until writing a song that changed everything for the aspiring singer-songwriter.
Cordle's childhood friend and neighbor, musical prodigy Ricky Skaggs, heard Cordle’s “Highway 40 Blues” and promised that he would record it one day. In the summer of 1983, it was the No. 1 country song in the nation, helping launch Larry’s songwriting career and skyrocketing Skaggs’ already solid music career. “A lot of people who hear it think it's about Interstate 40, which runs through Nashville, but I actually wrote it about that little state highway in Kentucky,” which runs from Salyersville through Paintsville and Inez to the West Virginia border, almost touching Lawrence County.
Cordle's best known song is “Murder On Music Row,” co-written with Larry Shell in 1999 as a complaint against the rise of “country pop” music. It was first recorded by his bluegrass group, Lonesome Standard Time, as the title track of an album, and gained its greatest fame when it was recorded as a duet by George Strait and Alan Jackson, reaching No. 38 on the country singles chart even though it was never officially released as a single. Cordle’s songs have also been recorded by Alison Krauss, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.
Cordle shared in a Grammy Award with friends Carl Jackson and Jerry Salley for the song "You’re Running Wild" on Livin', Lovin', Losin': Songs of the Louvin Brothers, a project that featured numerous country music stars singing songs made famous by the legendary duo. It won the 2004 Grammy for Country Album of the Year. Cordle has played on several other collaborative albums and singles, including the 2022 Gospel Music Association Dove Award-winning song, “The Sweet By and By,” with Jackson, Salley, Dolly Parton and Bradley Walker. He has provided harmony vocals for artists such as Brooks, Blake Shelton and many more. At last count, Cordle’s songs had appeared on projects that had sold a combined total of more than 55 million records.
Cordle released one of his best albums to date, “Where The Trees Know My Name,” in 2021. The album produced three hit singles (“Sailor’s Regret,” “Cherokee Fiddle” and “Breakin’ on the Jimmy Ridge”) along with more chart singles “The Devil and Shade Wallen” and “Natural State” on the Bluegrass Today Top 20 song chart.
“Cordle remains highly active in all facets of his career,” his official biography says. “He regularly records and performs. He is also still first and foremost a songwriter, now writing independently for his own company, Wandachord Music (BMI). He is a long-time resident of the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, where he lives with his wife Wanda. However, he still enjoys the opportunity to make frequent trips back to his Kentucky home place. Those Eastern Kentucky roots certainly shine through on his award-winning original songs.”
EmiSunshine writes and sings a blend of country, folk, blues and rock
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| EmiSunshine no longer looks like a child star on the cover of her new double album, Miss Demeanor. |
EmiSunshine, one of the opening acts for Chris Knight at the Spirit of 76 Celebration concert on July 4, is only 22 but has been in the music business for 15 years.
Emilie Sunshine Hamilton recorded her first two albums at 7 and found an international following at 9 when a fan posted a video of her flea-market performance of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 6” on YouTube and it became a viral hit. That led to an appearance on the Today show and a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. She was soon opening shows for Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn and Tanya Tucker and had appointments to write songs with Nashville songwriters.
While she still has elements of that little girl from Madisonville, Tennessee, EmiSunshine’s new album, Miss Demeanor, is a testament to who she is now. The songs are more personal, more mature, and give honest insights about growing up in the spotlight, writing and playing country, folk, blues and rock.
“It takes a double album to represent who EmiSunshine is now,” her publicity says. “There’s plenty of familiar dark themes, old-time country stylings, and the clever lyrics and odd twists that have always been Emi’s signatures. This time, though, they’re delivered with a more nuanced and mature vocal style. One track is “Now You Know,” Emi’s first public acknowledgement that she is gay.
“I had a fan base that had a false perception of who I am,” says Emi. “This is the first time I’ve talked about that. . . . I loved every moment of my spotlight. It was an important part of my journey, but if I could go back I’d be more honest about who I was.” Emi’s publicity says, “If she loses a few fans, so be it. She’s more concerned about reaching people who want to connect with who she really is.
There are fans whom Emi is happy not to have. Her song “P.D.L.M.A.” (“Pedophiles Don’t Love Me Anymore”) depicts creepy requests and inquiries she got as a child. She says it isn’t really intended to make light of the subject: “It’s a way for me to deal with what happened.”
Emi knows she’s making a statement with her new album. “I’m re-introducing myself as an artist,” she says, “and ending the child-star era of my life.”
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