Childers grew up in Eastern Kentucky, in the shadow of the Baptist church. His father had a job in the coal industry and his mother worked in the health department. While the family had a double-wide caravan with running water and electricity, the neighbors didn’t, so he and his sibling were well aware that they were “one bad decision” away from disaster. At age 15, Childers moved to a new school, where he coped with being the new kid by spending his lunch playing the guitar. Eventually, his classmates noticed. They invited him to sing at parties and introduced him to new music.
“Drive-By Truckers became the soundtrack to my teenage angst,” he said, wearing dark jeans and a button-down despite the 100-degree weather. He began writing his own music and quickly built up a following in Kentucky and West Virginia – country fans were eager to hear fiddle and steel guitar, and his voice carried that lonely sound of someone who’d studied both Ricky Skaggs and Kurt Cobain. When he sings live, his eyes burn with a preacher’s ferocity, and fans hold on to every word.
When “Purgatory,” co-produced by another Nashville frontier, Sturgill Simpson, was released, things moved quickly. Childers went from opening shows with his band, the Food Stamps, to headlining the same venues in just over a year. In 2020, he made his first overtly political statement with ‘Long Violent History’, an album fueled by his anger over the police killing of fellow Kentuckian Breonna Taylor. He wanted to be explicit and release the title track with a video statement speaking directly to his country white fans, telling them, “We can stop being so surprised by Black Lives Matter.”
“I felt compelled,” he said, leaning forward in his chair and froze as he spoke. “I started looking at the people who listened to me, and I listened to them. I wasn’t stretching in a weird, forced way; I wrote that song in 10 minutes. Now he sees it as a responsibility not only to speak for his people, but also to grow with them. “There are a lot of artists trying to do the job,” said Childers. “Any little effort to give someone a glimpse of that light helps put water on the fire before it turns into white-hot rage.”
