Country music star Tyler Childers visited a KY animal shelter. More dogs got adopted.
Tyler Childers can write great country songs and help get dogs adopted.
Childers, a Lawrence County native and Paintsville High School graduate who recently received his first Grammy nomination, stopped at the Floyd County Animal Shelter on New Year’s Eve.
The visit increased interest in adoptions and donations, said shelter manager Jackie Brown.
“It made people more aware of our shelter,” Brown said. “Everybody was like, ‘We have to go to this shelter to adopt an animal.’ “
Prestonsburg lawyer Ned Pillersdorf, who arranged the visit, said buzz about the visit on social media drove up adoptions and donations. He posted about the visit on Facebook.
Brown said the shelter got an additional 200 likes on Facebook in the couple of days after Childers’ visit and there was a “surge” in calls.
The backstory on how Childers came to visit the shelter might not make a country song, but it’s certainly interesting.
At the time Childers finished high school in 2009, Eastern Kentucky was awash in advertisements for Floyd County lawyer Eric Conn, who had one of the nation’s biggest Social Security disability practices.
Conn was a colorful, tireless promoter. He rented billboards around the region, with life-size mannequins of himself sitting on top, and sent attractive young women — some called them Conn hotties — to public events with cardboard cutouts of himself.
His practice later crashed amid allegations of massive fraud.
Conn pleaded guilty to charges that included stealing from Social Security, bribing an administrative law judge who approved benefits for thousands of Conn’s clients, and conspiring to retaliate against a Social Security employee who tried to blow the whistle on the problems.
He is serving a 27-year sentence in federal court.
Pillersdorf said Childers had followed the story of the rogue lawyer, and wanted to get the mannequins that used to sit atop Conn’s billboards, perhaps to use in a music video.
A publicist for the singer contacted Pillersdorf about the request. Pillersdorf, a longtime supporter of the shelter who never misses a chance to promote adoptions, asked if Childers would stop by.
He did while he was in the area for a concert in Pikeville, Brown said, posing for a photo with a blind Chihuahua named Martini that Pillersdorf has since used in a video promoting the shelter.
Brown said Childers was very nice. Celebrity hasn’t gone to his head, she said.
“He’s a really cool, really down-to-Earth guy,” Brown said.
Brown, a bit chagrined, said she doesn’t normally listen to country music, so she wasn’t familiar with Childers before he stopped at the facility.
But it seems everyone else, is, she said. She got some envious responses after his visit.
“Oh my God, you met Tyler?” was typical, she said.
Brown was so busy at the shelter she didn’t think to get Childers’ autograph.
Pillersdorf found Childers smart and interesting.
Sitting in Pillerdorf’s car outside the shelter, the singer broke into an impromptu performance of the song “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which the late rocker Warren Zevon included on a 1978 album.
The song is about a wastrel who needs all three because of his gambling and other problems. One line is about him “hiding in Honduras.”
That’s where police caught up with Conn six months after he fled the U.S. to avoid sentencing in his criminal case, taking him into custody as he had lunch at a Pizza Hut before turning him over to the FBI.
Pillersdorf said he hasn’t yet located the mannequins from Conn’s old billboards, but is trying.
As for the shelter, the celebrity boost was helpful, but there were still about 100 cats and dogs there Wednesday, Brown said.
The shelter is busy, with hundreds of cats and dogs passing through each year.
The facility has an adoption rate above 90 percent, Pillersdorf said. It takes many animals to programs in Chicago and Minnesota to be adopted there.
Brown said the facility is old and needs to be replaced. The hope is that Childers’ visit will be a springboard for efforts to raise money for a new facility.
There may even be a request for him to do a benefit concert, Brown said.
Childers hasn’t forgotten his home area, donating bottled water last year in Martin County because of problems with the water system there, for instance.
Childers, who lived in Lexington at one point, has been a hot ticket in country music since his breakthrough album, “Purgatory,” was released in August 2017.
Childers’ site said when he was growing up in Lawrence County his father worked in the coal industry and his mother was a nurse. He sang at a Free Will Baptist church and started learning guitar on an instrument his grandfather gave him.
In an August 2018 profile, Rolling Stone described his music as “a fusion of folk, bluegrass and country with a raw, emotionally-gripping tinge.”
His latest studio album, “Country Squire,” debuted atop Billboard’s Top Country Albums and American/Folk Albums last August, and a song from the album, “All Your’n,” is nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Country Solo Performance” category.
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 1:41 PM.
