Old world charm, string music surprises in Tyler Childers’ ‘Long Violent History’

Standing on the stage of Rupp Arena on the last Friday of February, Tyler Childers was the unassuming king of all he surveyed. Before an audience of 16,000 on a bill shared with fellow Kentucky song scribe Sturgill Simpson, the Lawrence County native marveled at playing the venue, having spent the preceding years playing every Lexington club or concert hall “within walking distance, well, stumbling distance” of Rupp.

That night, in some ways, was a parting shot from another world. Within two weeks, the country went to lockdown conditions to combat the mounting COVID-19 pandemic that crushed all live music as we know it, including the remaining three months of Childers’ arena tour with Simpson.

What emerged last week was a revitalized artist, now six months sober, with a new recording that would affirm his Eastern Kentucky roots, challenge some of his most ardent fans and bring into focus the role an artist plays in the social standing of a troubled nation.

On Sept. 18, Childers dropped his fourth album out of the blue, his first new record since 2019’s “Country Squire,” which topped the Billboard Top Country Albums Chart. One of the songs on the album, “All Your’n,” garnered him his first Grammy Award nomination.

Childers’ new work was a broad detour from his brand of electrified Southern storytelling, but not the rural inspirations that sat at its center. Topping it all was the fact he wanted the work to essentially speak for itself, knowing there would be no tour to promote it and no serious press push to illuminate its motives.

That was a tall order, considering nearly all of the record was instrumental. It offered a selection of traditional tunes with Childers playing fiddle that would form a ballet-esque prelude to the record’s title song, its lone vocal entry — “Long Violent History.”

Let’s examine the music before we look at the song. The first eight of the album’s nine selections are instrumentals illustrated with accents of Appalachian, old-timey and pre-bluegrass colors that preface anything akin to country music as we know it today. As such, were you to listen to this portion of “Long Violent History,” you would have little, if any clue this was a Tyler Childers recording.

The old world sentiments are immediate as the album opens out into a waltz as light and lyrical and it is majestic. Then the melody hits and you realize this isn’t some ancient fiddle tune, but a crafty reinvention of Stephen Sondheim’s immortal “Send in the Clowns.” The chorus is slowed to where the inherent melancholy sounds less like Broadway or even the mountains of Eastern Kentucky but, for a brief and probably unintended moment, the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill.”

Traditionalism takes over after that. Multiple fiddles glide away from Appalachia to across the pond, revealing the wonderful antique lyricism of the music’s Celtic ancestry in “Squirrel Hunter.” A percussive but still drummer-less melody propelling a giddy serenade of fiddles, banjo and mandolin then fortifies “Sludge River Stomp.” Music more brittle and plaintive allows strings to establish a drone, then a fuller, more orchestral cushion for a fiddle melody to sail on during “Midnight on the Water.” Best of all, there is the effortless manner in which stark fiddle exchanges bring the ancient imagery of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” back to life.

Nothing sounds hurried or forced in the arrangements and production Childers and fiddler, bandmate and Morehead State University professor Jesse Wells provide these tunes. The old world charm abounds. In fact, lessen the sound fidelity, add in a few hisses and pops and much of the album would have sounded like the field recordings Alan Lomax made while journeying through rural America during the early to mid 20th century.

Now we’ve landed at the host tune of this string music surprise — a composition still ripe with antique country atmosphere but told with a level of blunt urgency that makes the song shockingly contemporary. Childers sings of headlines here – or more exactly, of ‘what-if’ scenarios that ask fans, contemporaries and fellow Kentuckians to imagine themselves in the place of recent police arrests and shootings that triggered extensive protests, unrest and calls for accountability. At its core, is the very uneasy suggestion of how accountability can bleed into revenge.

“How many boys could they haul off this mountain, shot full of holes, cuffed and laid in the streets,” Childers sings with no small level of immediacy, “until we come in to town in a stark ravin’ anger, looking for answers and armed to the teeth?”

The songs isn’t a war cry. It simply asks us to ponder what kind of response would arise if a friend or neighbor had been killed during police actions this year instead of Breonna Taylor or George Floyd.

“I’d venture to say if we were met with this type of daily attack on our own people, we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia,” Childers said in a recorded message on his website, his only direct comments thus far on the making of “Long Violent History.”

“And if we wouldn’t stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened? Or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?”

How will this be met by the largely red state populace that makes up Childers’ Eastern Kentucky homebase? Hard to say. Fellow Kentucky country stylist Chris Stapleton was met with a mix of support and backlash over his comments to CBS News earlier this month in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. How then will an increasingly polarized world take to a more permanent form of commentary, regardless of its placement within a collection of songs reflecting a devout sense of rural music inspiration?

To that, Childers asks us again to examine the heart of “Long Violent History” and ponder the prospect of a life already accustomed to prejudice that is suddenly and forever silenced.

“Now, what would you give if you heard my opinion, conjecturin’ on matters that I ain’t never dreamed, in all my born days as a white boy from Hickman, based on the way that the world’s been to me?” Childers sings midway through the song. “It’s called me belligerent. It’s took me for ignorant. But it ain’t never once made me scared just to be.”