**photos by Lisa Sullivan/Lisa Was Here, on assignment for Cincy Groove
Based on how many times she has mentioned it, I reckon my spouse’s least favorite Bible story is the hardening of Pharoah’s heart. If there is a God, we would hope that She, He, or It would melt our frozen hearts, soften our cold hearts, break our indifferent hearts, & renew our beating hearts for the hard work of being loving, imperfect, & vulnerable humans. So many hearts are already hard, & we don’t need God all-in on that game. (Spare me the exegetical gymnastics on that Hebrew Bible story, as that is not really what this ramble is about.)
It’s easy to admit that my heart has been hardened of late, not by God, but by the year of 2024’s versions of Pharoah, not by a peaceful spirit but by propaganda slingers & the holy hatred of so-called Christian love. I haven’t just felt like I have lost love & faith, I have felt like weapons real & imagined have destroyed & stolen my tenderness & gratitude. My personal life if hanging together, but I cannot say that for everyone, as the struggles out there are real & occasionally too much to bear.
Music & community are my first lines of self-care in situations like this. These last few weeks, I have traveled near & far on pilgrimage & kneeled at the font of the music festival. At the end of the line & at the end of the rope about the immoral moment in which we find ourselves, my personal struggles are few compared to some in my feed. But the world “out there” has contaminated the heart “in here.”
Sharing live music with strangers is a potent medicine for me, especially at times like this, & this later summer itinerary included four consecutive weekends of music festivals, concluding with Healing Appalachia in a small town in eastern Kentucky at the Boyd County fairgrounds. Healing Appalachia defines itself like this:
“The Mission of Healing Appalachia is to produce events that help connect and grow communities of recovery and healing in Appalachia, raising funds and awareness to combat opioid addiction through a wide array of projects and programs from youth prevention, healthy lifestyles and wellness to recovery houses and recovery to work. Like Farm Aid does to raise awareness and funds for America’s small, sustainable family farms, we want to bring together folks to raise funds and awareness to celebrate recovery through our main event Healing Appalachia each September, and work year-round on more projects fostering communities of recovery.”
That mission statement says so much, & I cannot take it for granted that in-between sets at this festival, we heard mini-talks & short shares about every aspect of living drug & alcohol free. Not in a side-tent, but on the main stage!
Likewise, the yellow balloon family at the back of this festival took me in like a stray teenager feeling lost on a field trip. On early Saturday night, when the food truck lines were way too long, the yellow balloon tribe fed me a cheese sandwich & potato chips & cookies; it was like coming home to Mom when you are an overworked & exhausted & famished school-kid with too many extracurriculars on your calendar. These are the little things about new festival friends, & this generalized generous spirit seemed even stronger at Healing Appalachia than at other festivals.
In recent weeks, I have been feeling morally & emotionally broke-down like a truck in a ditch; I have felt bitter, angry, agitated.
But then, some special song comes to carry your saggy-draggy ass back into the orbit of the real & hopeful. The likes of Mary Gauthier & Mike Scott have broken my heart with their songs “Mercy Now” & a reworked “This Is The Sea.” But I did not expect Timmy Tyler’s snarky summer jam “Bitin’ List” to bring me to, & back from, the same emotional rock bottom that keeps reinventing itself.
The thing about these emotional rock bottoms & desperate spiritual deserts are that they crush & hurt in the moment, as if not just unraveling your inner world, but annihilating the world itself. All this with the smashed ego as a simple & necessary casualty of seeking to control outcomes that are so obviously beyond our control.
“Bitin’ List” is a goofy-AF diss track, & for many of us, the undisputed song of summer 2025. Lots of people were making their own lists, some silly, some scandalous, still others quite scathing. But when Tyler Childers introduced this song at Healing Appalachia, the meaning of this song took a turn for me.
We know that Tyler has been sober since early 2020. From the likes of the “Bitin’ List” preamble we heard on Saturday, September 20th, it also sounds like Tyler works a real recovery program.
We know that the hate in our hearts hurts us, not so much the object of our hate. As we have heard it said by Anne Lamott & others, resentments are like eating rat poison & expecting the rat to die. When your hatred hates a public figure, they surely cannot feel the toxicity so directly, nor know that you are its source.
This kind of curdling hate is ultimately futile, a failure of imagination. But you cannot bottle it up either. Because it will fester & foster all kinds of self-harm. Untended hate will not lay entirely fallow in the fields of your being. We end hate not with plastic slogans or spiritual bypass, but with real work, & music & community are part of that real work.
In all this, we witnessed the magic of Tyler’s brief sermon before “Bitin’ List.” A song like this will let it out. A song like this will let your bottled resentments fly & get air. But after this purge, we can let them die. Timmy Tyler taught us that a Bitin’ List is an emotional purge to the people renting resentments in your head & heart.
As faithful as I feel about this paraphrase of Tyler’s sermon-speech, the folks over at Whiskey Riff transcribed the entire introduction to Bitin List, & it’s just too good not to share. Here is what we all heard:
“This one right here is for those people that you just can’t stand. But more importantly, this is for you. Because I am sure that when I said that, there is at least one person that came to your mind. And you were like. ‘I know that person. I know exactly who that is!’
And I’ll tell you exactly who it is, because nobody wants to know. Nobody needs that, come on now! And you know what, furthermore, you don’t need that.
You know why? I’ll tell you why because hate is a thing that can poison your veins and your eyes when you’re sweaty on stage, shifting around for a clock on the wall to tell you that it’s just about over. See, the thing about hate is, it’s a bad chemical that you are carrying within you. And I know the person that you were harboring it towards, they don’t even know! They don’t even care. It bothers them not nearly a bit!
But it is bothering you and killing you slowly! And you got to get that sh** out of there. So, I wrote this song, and it made me feel better. And I hope it does the same exact thing to you.
Now, if you ain’t heard it, there’s a chorus and it kind of repeats itself and you can hop in there whenever you can. And if you can’t, there’s gonna be a part at the end where you can expel all that ugliness that you’ve just been holding onto, and get it out of there. We’re gonna shoot it straight up in the sky, and it’s going to fall in the sludge of the Big Sandy River.”
Everyone around me was smiling & dancing as we sang “Bitin’ List” at the top of our lungs.
It’s amazing how much of the new album Snipe Hunter that Tyler snuck into a 25-song, 2-hour-and-15-minute set. (I will be checking the setlist every night of tour, & the first regular tour headline set after this festival was 23 songs.) Of the new songs, “Eatin Big Time” & “Watch Out” & “Cuttin’ Teeth” & “Dirty Ought Trill” were moving, mind-blowing, next level. The addition of members from Sylvan Esso to the Food Stamps brings another layer to the all-hands-on-deck trippy revival feel of what this group does, how it expands & reveres the country-folk idiom with psychedelic-funk & of course rock-n-roll flourishes.
But for me, it was in the older hits, whether “All Your’n” or “In Your Love” early in the set or “Shake The Frost” or “Nose on the Grindstone” late into the night, it was then that I really noticed something unique & felt something deep & special about this Kentucky festival.
Tyler doesn’t talk much at his shows, but when he does, I tend to savor every phrase & swallow hard on every word. He did mention at one point on this night that he had slept in his own bed for this show, that he celebrated his son’s birthday & had to skip Chris Stapleton’s set for it. Healing Appalachia was a hometown show.
As he talked to the audience, he spoke directly to a lot of people from there, as a person who is from eastern Kentucky. Observing all this, over the course of the night, I really started to feel something unshakable & deep inside. It was verified by a fan with whom I spoke before the show, who grew up in these hills & took pains to tell me more details behind the song “Follow You To Virgie.”
I saw this homeplace reverie & reverence on the grizzly faces of a group of strong & burly brothers who were all wearing matching Tyler shirts from about two or three tours ago. I saw these feelings in the eyes of mothers singing along to every song with their daughters, like the pair that were auctioning off their Cincinnati tickets to raise funds for the daughter’s cheer team expenses. I saw these sentiments in all the Camp Grindstone volunteers, all locals from a variety of local recovery centers & communities. The palpable community pride that they all shared for Tyler, in this hometown festival filled with recovery, service, & mutual aid for the entire region, all these vibes & values were contagious & filling my empty emotional tank back to full.
It’s no news that there’s a culture war in country music that reflects the larger culture war. I have felt first-hand what it’s like when an artist & a fanbase are so clearly on a different side of that culture war than I am. I have felt that in the room, for an artist I had been excited to see, when during the pre-show mix, everyone got suddenly quiet & then everyone started singing along to Toby Keith’s “Angry American” like it was a childhood church hymn.
But it’s not always like that. From the Mine Wars to now, this part of deep Appalachia has a long tradition of communal support & rebellion that is so different than the cookie-cutter red-versus-blue of today. Tyler Childers has made all this so beautifully clear without getting canceled & by finding ways to bridge the chasm.
Tyler Childers made himself clear with the message to the Long Violent History album in 2020 & with the narrative the YouTube video he released to coincide with that record, a song he performed live for the first time this past summer during the crisis in Los Angeles. Tyler made himself clear with all the mystical, skeptical, & inclusive lyrics on his funky gospel 2022 album Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? He made himself clear with the Silas House co-produced gay-affirming narrative video for “In Your Love” in 2023 part of the release of the Rustin In The Rain album.
With the lyrics for “Poachers” on the new record, we know that Tyler Childers has contemplated the backlash to these things.
I can hear 'em now talkin', ah, God, it is scandalous
His Papaw'd be rollin', I don't know where he strayed
I know that you'd know him, he's the one on the rad'ya
He's the one with the vid'ya of the coal minin' gays
I can hear 'em now talkin', ah, God, it is scandalous
He could have been somethin' if he weren't such a mess
If he hadn't went broke, God cancel him sideways
We lost us another to the others, I guess
From all this to singing for the inauguration for Governor Andy Beshear, an unlikely progressive state leader in an otherwise staunchly Republican state, we know how Tyler leans. But he is neither strident nor cringe from the stage about it, & his folksy authenticity is obvious to all, not worthy of the fake & forever online authenticity-wars now plaguing the drunkest factions of the bros in drunk bro country.
We can look up the electoral maps from these counties & know that it’s not a unified counter-narrative in Boyd County, Kentucky, a place that is over 90% white & approximately 70% Republican. But at Healing Appalachia, we can bear witness to mutual aid in action & also look at the harm reduction & healing models shared here & see all the Hick Lib t-shirts & acknowledge that this Kentucky is more nuanced & varied than the electoral map might reveal. I am not saying that progressives are perfect or that everyone here at this festival is a democratic socialist or whatever (hardly), but damn if this is not a little bit refreshing & different than what I experienced in late 2024 when a few alt-country shows I attended were basically MAGA rallies.
I am not from here, but I have lived in the hills of middle Tennessee for 30 years, now on the part of the Cumberland Plateau that touches Appalachia. I am a Yankabilly from the midwest suburbs of Michigan & Ohio who has fully adopted myself to my home in the South. My absolute adoration for, & immersion in, country, folk, old-time, bluegrass, & other traditional musics, this hobby has completely sealed the deal for how at home I feel here.
Sometimes though, as home as I am at home, I can feel ideologically & theologically homeless here. But not last Saturday at Healing Appalachia, when my hardened heart was broken open with songs like “Way of the Triune God” & “Tirtha Yatra,” dancing & singing & getting all up in the vibes, spinning such an expansive spiritual vision for all the versions of us. Tyler Childers, please keep breaking my heart with your beautiful songs & unforgettable Kentucky voice.
Even though I have mostly reflected on Tyler, so many sets were so good at Healing Appalachia & contributed to the warmth inside my soul. I was also overjoyed to hear Abe Partridge, Jesse Welles, Molly Tuttle, Lukas Nelson, Cole Chaney, American Aquarium, Remi Wolf, among others.
Healing Appalachia was hope bottled, with a little dust, delicious-if-pricey food truck food, Kentucky swamp sweat, & it absolutely, completely, therapeutically healed some of the hate in my heart. I sucked up this show & this festival like a parched man in need of water, like a gasping woman in need of air.
My heart will surely get hard & bitter again from time to time, but I will always have the "hope in the hills" of Healing Appalachia to remind me what we can accomplish together in the spirit of music, community, & mutual aid.
-Andrew/Sunfrog/Teacher On The Radio
autumn 2025
