Two Records, One Year, and the Question Traditional Country Was Asking Itself

Two records arrived in 2017 that belonged in the same sentence, though they came from opposite ends of the continent. Tyler Childers released Purgatory on August 4th, his second studio album, recorded in Lawrence County, Kentucky's shadow, on his own Hickman Holler Records through Thirty Tigers. Colter Wall released his self-titled debut on May 12th, out of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, on Young Mary's Record Co., also through Thirty Tigers. The shared distributor is a detail. The shared instinct is the whole story. Both men were in their early twenties. Both were making records that sounded like they had been waiting decades to be made. And both were asking the same question: what does traditional country music mean when you come to it with complete sincerity and no commercial obligation.

The producers alone tell you something. Childers walked into The Butcher Shoppe in Nashville with Sturgill Simpson and engineer David Ferguson. Simpson, who had already made his own case for serious country songwriting with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, brought a session cast that included fiddler Stuart Duncan, drummer Miles Miller, and Russ Pahl, who covered acoustic guitar, electric guitar, pedal steel, and Jew's harp across the record. Simpson himself played acoustic guitar and sang background vocals. The result is a full-band Appalachian sound, fiddles sawing against Pahl's pedal steel, with Childers' high, plainspoken voice sitting directly in the center. Wall, meanwhile, went to RCA Studio A with Dave Cobb, the producer who had already shaped records for Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton, and the sessions were stripped to near-nothing: Cobb on acoustic guitar, Chris Powell on drums, Mike Webb on piano, Robby Turner on pedal steel. The record breathes with space. Where Purgatory fills its rooms, the Colter Wall album empties them.

Both records reach backward with intention. Wall's self-titled includes a cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Snake Mountain Blues," a choice that reads less as homage than as a statement of lineage. The Townes tradition, plain speech and dark geography and the refusal to explain, runs through Wall's originals as well, in "Kate McCannon" and "Codeine Dream," songs that treat violence and longing with the same flat, unsentimental gaze that Van Zandt perfected. The album also includes a cover of Lawton Williams' "Fraulein," on which Tyler Childers himself appears, lending his voice alongside Wall's baritone in a pairing that makes the two artists' shared sensibility audible in a single track. Childers draws from a different but adjacent well. Purgatory's ten songs, all written by Childers, move through Appalachian folklore and personal reckoning, from the outlaw momentum of "Whitehouse Road" to the tender restraint of "Lady May," the album's closing track, to the title track's meditation on limbo and faith. The record's spiritual weight is its own kind of traditionalism, one rooted in the mountains rather than the plains, in Pentecostal hymns rather than cowboy balladry.

The geography matters more than it might seem. Childers wrote from a specific place, Lawrence County in eastern Kentucky, and Purgatory is inseparable from that landscape. The fiddles and banjos are not decorative. They are the sound of where he is from. Wall's relationship to place is equally specific but structurally different. He grew up in Saskatchewan, the son of the province's premier, and his debut album is haunted by the Canadian prairie the same way Childers' record is haunted by Appalachia. Both men were writing place-based music at a moment when place-based music had largely been replaced, in mainstream country, by music about an idea of place. The distinction is audible. When Childers sings about the mountains, you believe he is inside them. When Wall's baritone settles into a lyric, it carries the weight of actual distance.

The establishment of the form recognized both men quickly, and through different channels. After Wall's 2015 EP Imaginary Appalachia, Lucinda Williams invited him to open a show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, and Steve Earle called him "bar none the best young singer/songwriter I've seen in 20 years." Wall's profile had also grown through an unlikely route: his song "Sleeping on the Blacktop," from that same EP, had been featured in the 2016 film Hell or High Water, pulling his voice into living rooms far outside the country music audience. Purgatory, for its part, reached No. 9 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and No. 2 on the Americana/Folk Albums chart, numbers that told a story about where serious country listeners were looking. These are not the endorsements of a music industry smoothing a path for a commercial product. They are working musicians and audiences recognizing something real in younger artists and pulling them closer to the tradition.

What makes the Childers-Wall parallel worth sitting with is that neither record sounds like the other, and that is the point. They share a refusal of polish, of compromise, of the easy melodic hook that country radio would require, but the refusal expresses itself differently in every room. Purgatory is warm and full, a record made with people who love the music and wanted to surround it with the right instruments. The Colter Wall album is spare and slightly austere, a record that trusts the voice and the song to carry everything. Two young men, two producers, two studios in Nashville, two geographies that could not be more different, and two records that arrived in the same year asking the same question. The fact that they answered it differently, and that one of them even showed up on the other's record to sing a verse, is the whole argument for why traditional country music still has room to move.