Forty-five minutes after published start time, with the Ryman Auditorium’s house lights blazing, the chanting began. “Jelleeeeeee! Jelllllllly! Jelleeeeeeeeeee! JELLY!”
For most people on the coasts, as well as polite society in the flyover, the phenomenon that is Jelly Roll, a rapper-turned-country breakout sensation, may not yet have registered. Even for music industry pundits, the jaundiced eye can paint him as one more hip-hop bro-country expansion, albeit one with some serious facial ink.
But for what served as the release party for Jason DeFord’s first full-length country release — “Whitsitt Chapel,” out this weekend – the sold-out audience’s response Wednesday fell somewhere between altar call and full-on revival. To a mixed crowd of the elderly, the face-tatted, the backwards-cap-wearing dudes, zaftig hotties, little kids, 12-step/recovery T-shirt-sporting 20-somethings and the kind of regular working class people who don’t stand out, the night was an affirmation of their own worth in a world that’s quick to judge or dismiss them.
When the lights cut, the stage turned red and a giant skull with golden eyes lit up the screen behind the stage, the shrieks were deafening. Though the band looked standard-issue modern metal, a banjo plinking signaled the entrance of the man they’d come to see.
Jelly Roll, gold teeth flashing, strode onstage equally beaming and overtaken with emotion. As the band picked up momentum, Jelly — as his fans call him — started “Halfway to Heaven,” the album’s opening track. Like Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” the song tumbled through a survey of juxtapositions that suggests no matter how lost, one can be found and saved.
What feels like convenient rhetoric in a time of polarizing Christian values, which are often long on judgment and short on forgiveness, is a lived sermon for the 300-pound rapper. A convicted felon and drug dealer who’s served multiple stints in prison, he’s lost family and friends to addiction, ODs and shootings, and is committed to trying to help others not find the same fates.
Not since Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck has mainstream country music seen an artist who’s sung about being on the wrong side of the law or its consequences, let alone done time there. Jelly Roll’s authenticity creates a fierce bond with the audience that fires this kind of rapt devotion.
That his redemption isn’t used as a club to preach at his fans has further deepened a rabid subculture. Last year, Jelly Roll sold out Nashville’s much larger Bridgestone Arena.
At the more intimate Ryman, where he’d debuted his “Save Me” documentary the previous evening, Jelly Roll was looking to play an entire album of largely unfamiliar material for an audience of hardcore fans before releasing his country/hard-rock song cycle to the general public. Shaking his head, he welcomed the crowd after “Halfway,” saying, “Have a seat. Let’s hang out.”
Taking a seat himself, he spent the next 70 minutes telling stories of how the songs were written, the life he’s lived and the way these songs work together. Clearly overwhelmed by the love, the 39-year old songwriter was about sharing “Whitsitt Chapel” as an album with the people who’ve been there over the course of 17 albums (!!), various collaborations, genre shifts AND an industry who didn’t get what he was trying to do until an ascendence that began with the No. 1 country radio hit “Son of Sinner.”
Equal parts emo and Texas songwriter, “Sinner” mined the overlap between Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” and Townes Van Zant’s “Pancho & Lefty.” Quiet, it weighed flawed humanity and embraced the broken bravado of a man living just beyond the law who seeks a morality that can liberate him. If it sounds lofty, Jelly Roll delivers these kinds of truth in a way that people living in counties with literacy rates well below passing standards can identify them as their own.
What Hillary Clinton might think of as “deplorable” is every bit as powerful a segment of humanity as the intellectual elite. But more than the labels, Jelly Roll recognizes and refuses to judge sex workers, fellow ex-convicts, those battling addiction and those grieving the ones whose lives have been ravaged by loss as anything worthy of contempt.
As “Whitsitt’s” song cycle began its climax, he talked about not getting political onstage “except right here.” He then lambasted big pharma and spoke of being able to get prescriptions for Fentanyl, herion and Oxycontin but not being able to have a bag of weed. Direct, he pulled no punches about the real epidemic, then pivoted to assail the largest loss in reckless drug brokering: people’s lives.
With a gentler tone, he invoked whomever that person lost to addiction was for anyone in the Ryman, saying this next song was for them – and for them to share it with that person they loved who was going under.
“She” started with just acoustic guitar; his voice raw and forward in a fairly stark mix. The kind of big rock ballad that fueled ‘90s hair metal bands, he sang as video ran behind him of a grown woman in the last stages of what opioid addiction creates. “She was the life of the party,” the chorus laments, before facing the inevitable, “I wish I woulda known before she was too far gone / I’m afraid to lose her now, she’s afraid of coming down…”
Sobering. In your face. BOOM.
Behind him the words “No One Is Too Far Gone” were superimposed on the images. Underneath those words “For Help Call 800-662-HELP” provided a lifeline any who might be struggling. In a world where NARCAN is a fact of life, a superstar-on-the-rise caring passionately creates a trauma bond people can use to lift themselves up.
Not that the night was dour. Jelly Roll’s talk leans conversational and long on humor. Making jokes, he exuded a wide-open joy rarely seen with this kind of musical intensity. He’d clearly come to savor the moment.
Friends Brantley Gilbert, who fired up onstage, and frequent collaborator Struggle Jennings, who rapped as well as sang, appeared early for “Behind Bars.” On this trap-undertowed country ballad, the trio worked a lagging rhythm on the literal and metaphoric wages of drink narrative that evidenced an easy fellowship similar to the Highwaymen’s Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson and Johnny Cash.
Later, YelaWolf, all in black with aviator shades and a Metallica T-shirt, would drop a scalding rap on the foreboding, minor-keyed trailer-life portrait “Unlive.” Co-written with Ashley McBryde, it was a cinema vérité song that served as perhaps the evening’s most impactful moment.
Before leaving the stage, Yelaworld cheered his peer’s success, proclaiming, “For all of us, we tried for so many years, but you’re the one who found the formula…” Strays, outcasts, those who felt thrown away — Yelawolf spoke for everyone who’d come to see one of their own’s victory lap. Half-embarassed, half-thrilled, Jelly Roll bowed his head and took it in.
For the Antioch, TN-born and -raised artist, the songs about redemption found at stop lights, back rows of churches where he didn’t always feel welcomed, on the fringe of the wrong kinds of crowds or even jail was a gift he wanted to pass on. He didn’t come to deliver righteousness, but to suggest even in the most faltering moments, there’s a way through.
“Dancing With the Devil,” the second-to-last song on “Whitsitt Chapel,” acknowledged that the familiar sins don’t go away. Indeed, life is often lived on both sides of the line; lapses happen and good times can get away from you. But a stumble isn’t a failure.
When “Devil” broke down to just piano, Jelly took liberties with the timing of the chorus; the fluidity of his performance demonstrates one’s humanity becomes something that bends instead of breaks. The crowd flowed along, hands uplifted and side-to-side in time.
As a father of a 15-year old daughter, he’s not the same man he was when he started rolling from town-to-town in a van, making it up as he tried to build a career. These days, he has plenty to be thankful for. He’s also aware vigilance and reaching for something more than a bottle, a pill, a vape or a bad decision is an active proposition.
For everyone who’s facing the same struggles, Jelly Roll is their Springsteen. A better singer than you’d imagine, he takes the mantle of what some would call poor white trash, then tells their stories, offering salvation they can actually attain and says, most profoundly, perhaps, that your busted way of living is OK.
It ain’t perfect, but it is. It’s not going away, and Jelly Roll knows that. But these songs — and this album, named for the small church he grew up going to and interlaced with brimstone preaching snippets — offer a path to find something more than the standard dead ends of flatlining in a convenience store bathroom, turning tricks in diesel lots or worse.
By the encore of “Son of a Sinner” and “Save Me,” his intentions were clear. This night and this project would be more than a benediction. He delivered a prayer for the best of who they all are: works in progress, figuring life out. It’s not easy, but it’s what they have, and with this soundtrack, Jelly Roll’s offering songs they can believe in along the way.