Tyler Childers IS GOING HOME

Tyler Childers IS GOING HOME

And the country superstar is bringing his people with him

Evan Minsker

Glen Jean is one of these coal-mining towns in West Virginia that once bustled. Forget the company store, at one point this town a few miles out from the New River Gorge had its own opera house. It’s not there anymore, and there isn’t nearly as much going on. But to call Glen Jean a “ghost town” would be disrespectful to the bars and small businesses that serve the white-water rafters. It’s a beautiful corner of the world nestled in the mountains near one of the country’s greatest wonders. And all this natural beauty means somebody built a big-ass zip line here for literal children.

As a band, called Of the Dell, from my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, was covering “Don’t Let Me Down,” I was half a mile overhead at this Boy Scout camping complex wearing an elaborate harness. Somebody counted backward from three, and with my feet off the ground, they let go of the rope holding me in place. I whooped, careening down past a statue of Sen. Joe Manchin. Whooping is an absolute requirement of zip-lining, an activity I only participated in because it’s an option at this festival and I’m writing for a magazine. There aren’t many other zip-line festivals; when in Glen Jean’s Summit Bechtel Reserve, as they say.

For the purposes of this piece, let’s say I glanced toward the band on the stage, which sat in front of a lake where people were actively fishing. The scene was idyllic—a valley nestled in mountain trails, where winding blind curve after winding blind curve led to this sprawling high-adventure camping compound. It’s this landscape that drove the cigarette-smoking co-headliner Arlo McKinley to tears while he sang about being “home.” It makes sense; this part of the world can pull it out of you.

This was the mythic setting of Whizzbanger’s Ball, the first such event on the Scout compound. It’s a music festival featuring the roster of Ian Thornton’s country music management company WhizzbangBAM. Burgeoning country talent like Abby Hamilton and John R. Miller played this camping festival at an actual campground. There were countless families with small children and dozens of people walking around with fishing rods. It was a real community vibe even among those who didn’t arrive together. Standing at the edge of a dock was Trystyn Blake, a 20-year-old. As she baited her hook with a hot dog and started talking about the chill vibe of this event, a girl fishing a few feet away suddenly recognized her friend from high school: “Trystyn?!” It was a running theme of the weekend, interactions like that one.

Blake was one of the many people primarily here to see Tyler Childers, a country singer who spent the days before this fest on stage with Kermit the Frog and the Rolling Stones. Those were individual shows, but if they happened together, that wouldn’t be shocking. In 2024, after Grammy nominations, massive albums, headlining festival sets, and later a July 4 gig at the White House, Tyler is concurrent Mick Jagger and Kermit the Frog famous.

The man has become something of a huge deal while eschewing the traditional country radio and CMA sound. On the first night, I fell asleep to the sound of his raw, powerful voice singing barn burners and tearjerker ballads on a Bluetooth speaker four tents down—someone’s pregame 24 hours in advance. (They also played that bomb Shaboozey single.) At 7 a.m. the morning of his headlining set—15 hours and 30 minutes before Tyler took the stage—a father and daughter from Franklin County, Virginia, camped out in the front row. Skye Carter, 16, was holding a sign that said “Remember me?” featuring several photos of her meeting Tyler at different shows; she’s always up front. “Tell Tyler we’re here,” Skye said to me. (I did not.)

Tyler is a self-described “outgoing homebody,” and that’s a quickly evident energy in our tour bus conversation. I'm a stranger; we just have mutuals. He listens attentively and chooses his words carefully. He’s a charming, deeply handsome sumbitch. He doesn’t always laugh, but his smile is radiant and affirming. He sat near a closed container of corn bread salad and a small chubby statuette of Lord Krishna. Earlier in the year, during a tour of Europe behind his new album Rustin’ in the Rain, this Kentucky-born kid took a survey of some noteworthy temples: RadhaKrishna in London, plus Bhaktivedanta Manor and some spots in Dublin and Manchester.

That’s how this reserved individual prefers to spend his time when he’s not playing a show. “Jesus is the dude of my raisin’, but Krishna is my chosen deity,” he said, placing a hand on butterball Krishna. (Krishna later sits atop a keyboard during the show.) Four hours north of Glen Jean is the New Vrindaban Palace of Gold, a gorgeous and uncanny temple near Wheeling, West Virginia. The drive is similarly breathtaking up that way, and while he’s always wanted to go, Tyler has never made it there. We found some New Vrindaban literature in my Papaw Jack’s belongings after he died, so I urged this massive country star to visit in the name of my Papaw. “Hare Krishna,” he replied with a smile.

It’s somewhat surprising Tyler hasn’t been up that way, as he spent his formative years as a musician driving up and down these roads with his bandmates the Food Stamps. The way the rest of the boys tell it, Tyler regularly spent late nights driving to get home to his girlfriend (now wife) despite them urging him to crash on their couches. While the group has expanded to an eight-piece band, the long-running core is a group of guys who graduated high school with me in Ona, West Virginia: drummer Rodney Elkins, bassist Craig Burletic, and guitarist James Barker.

I watched those three guys win a high school talent show playing Skynyrd songs in the mid-’OOs, and now they’re one of the biggest touring bands in the world. “We met in math," Craig said. He remembers a pompadoured Rod saying, “Heard you play bass.” Rod and Craig then briefly quibbled over how deeply thick Craig laid on the Appalachian accent for that impression. It’s a marriage, and they don’t seem to want it any other way. “I’d take a bullet for both of ’em and hope Id make it through just to see ’em again,” Rod said.

Craig said they all got into The Band after high school, and that’s a decent analog for their overall vibe now—this jam-forward Southern music where the drummer sings while he plays. Rod was not shocked to find himself opening for the Rolling Stones, as he seems to have manifested this literally decades ago. “I told myself a long time ago I’m fuckin’ doing this for a living,” he said.

When Rod met Tyler, he immediately knew that’s how he was going to get there. It was a gig at a now-closed bar called Shoop’s in Huntington; Tyler opened, and as soon as he came off the stage, Rod asked him if he wanted to start a band. “I can say this with pure honesty and 100 percent conviction that when he started singing, I had it in my head: Tm going to play with you, because I love these songs so much.’”

At first, everything was a slow burn, as Tyler mostly got his start playing in either Lexington or Huntington—he grew up in Eastern Kentucky between the two hubs. “We looked at our circuit as a rubber band,” Tyler said. First it was two nearby cities, then they stretched that to three, four, and so on. It was a progression he developed with Ian Thornton, who ran a bar in Huntington before convincing Tyler that the singer-songwriter was terrible at the logistics of touring.

WhizzbangBAM began as a tiny DIY operation hinged on making sure Ian’s extremely talented songwriter friend wouldn’t have to work bullshit jobs ever again. “We printed CDs at his house, a five-disc printer and a one-disc label maker,” Tyler said. “So we’d print out five and slowly label each one.” It was a packing party, “heavy on the party.”

Ian remembers seeing Tyler perform open-mic nights in a suit doing Adele and Ray LaMontagne covers. Quickly, he saw what so many others in those early rooms saw: someone undeniable. “We just trust each other a whole lot,” Ian said. “We both come from a hardworking community, and we’re very loyal to the people we work with.” The region’s loyalty transcended the boundaries of genre—locals were stoked whenever anybody was making shit.

Playing in Glen Jean is a reminder of the early days: “This area was one of the first places outside of that Huntington and Charleston area that we got out of and started creating this circuit,” Tyler said. But if there was a home base for Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps during their teenage come-up, it was a bar in Huntington called the V Club. This was where all the city’s musicians converged; crust punks, hustle rappers, and emo kids played on the same bills as a young Tyler Childers. Tyler, Rod, Craig, and James were 100 percent partying underage in that bar.

“That just seems like a wild way to spend your late teens is just to be let loose and practically deciding, ‘I’m going to go to bed now,’ and going and falling asleep in a corner booth and nobody messing with you and everybody taking care of you,” Tyler said. “And the bartender waking you up and being like, ‘Hey, man, wake up, you can crash at my house.’ It’s having a community.” He looks around at his surroundings, the trappings of tour bus life. "This wouldn’t have happened if that hadn’t happened."

“Bartending at V Club and watching him perform and it being an okay crowd to it literally getting sold out every time? It was just insane,” Melanie Walker said. The 35-year-old is one of many faces at this festival who watched Tyler’s early rise. “I would cry every time I was making drinks behind the bar when he’d perform. ‘Follow You to Virgie’ guts me.”

“If you get to pick what heaven looks like, there’s this small side room that’s about the size of the V Club and it’s just that all the time—the way that it used to be,” Tyler said. “I spent a lot of time growing up in that bar with those people.”

As Tyler and Ian stretched the rubber band beyond Huntington and Lexington, entire hubs of musicians seemed to benefit from that gradual expansion. “People that come out of these communities that want to take their music on the road really had to start running from holler to holler playing wherever they could,” said Ben Denny, a 31-year-old here from the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He’s sitting beneath a canopy near his tent. “People who come from that really do a lot to lift everybody that came up with them."

The entire festival is a testament to an “all ships rise” mentality. Tyler’s spotlight bled over onto the other acts. He brings a lot of the Whizzbangers on tour with him, too, though he claims it’s partially a selfish act. “I’m like, ‘What are the shows that if I was to go out, I would want to go see?’ And I’m out anyway, so now I get to see them,” he said. “I want them to do good, and I want to get them out in front of as many people as I can. And who knows, maybe one of these days, I might need an open slot and hopefully they’ll remember me."

Of course, the last time Tyler Childers opened for anyone, it was the Rolling Stones, whom he joined on stage for a performance of “Dead Flowers.” Again, this was just days after he performed with Kermit the Frog at Madison Square Garden. How was it, living through that shit? “Well, Mick Jagger dances a lot better than Kermit the Frog,” Tyler said. “But Kermit the Frog, I did just about cry. There were three movies that I made my mom watch as a kid, and two of them were Muppets: Treasure Island and Christmas Carol.”

Through it all, he had his band beside him. It’s wild that Rod, Craig, and James made it this far together after starting together as teenagers. Tyler, too, is glad he doesn’t have to deal with the Nashville-style revolving door of collaborators. “I wouldn’t be doing this anymore if I went through a thousand bandmates,” Tyler added. “I’d probably have gotten tired of it and I’d probably go home. I really, really appreciate the camaraderie and the ability to pour my heart into it with other people who are just as passionate about pouring their hearts into creating something. We’re not just biding time or playing. We’re creating a sound and cultivating that and watching that grow. I don’t know, man, it’s awesome.”

There’s a part of that inherent growth Tyler does not love: talking to the press. This tour bus chat took nearly six weeks to nail down, and after it finally firmed up, multiple people let it slip that his arm had to be twisted to make this one happen. “Yeah, I don’t like interviews,” he said. “There’s always going to be that one thing—and there will probably be that one thing in this one—where I’ll mumble and you didn’t hear me right, and I could say, ‘I was at the zoo the other day, and I saw this tiger that looked like it had its joy stolen from it.’ And somehow, when I pull it up and I look at it, it’ll say, ‘Tyler Childers Once Stole a Tiger Named Joy From the Zoo.”’ (Take that last sentence out of context however you like!)

Put more simply, this just isn’t his preferred method of communication. “I’m a songwriter, and it might take me three months to write four minutes, and you want an answer right now,” he said. “If you gave me three months, I’d have a really good answer for you." When I offer him three months with a new set of questions, he calls out the truth: “Now you’re trying to get another interview!”

It wasn’t just the artists buoyed by this event; many of the volunteers came from Recovery Point West Virginia, one of the country’s most successful rehab programs. Such a massive site required an army of people in red staff shirts, and this fest sent a clear message: Those in recovery should be looked upon as assets. It’s not us and them—it’s just us. “I’m in recovery, and for the people employing us, this shows them how well we’re doing,” said Cam Harless, 28, who works with Recovery Point. “It shows we’re employable." Jason Jones, 43, was in a bad place back when he literally built out the electrical of the building we’re sitting in right now. “Coming back here sober is just so awesome,” he said. “Arlo and Tyler are two of my very favorite artists. It means so much to me to be here.”

PERFORMING WITH KERMIT THE FROG, I DID JUST ABOUT CRY.”

-TYLER CHILDERS

It’s likely enough that Tyler decided to talk as part of that rising-ships mentality, or maybe he just did it for Ian Thornton. Multiple artists took a moment on stage over the weekend to shout out Ian specifically, calling the Ball a celebration of what he created. “It’s emotional,” Tyler said. “It’s hard work, and a lot of people tried to do it and a lot of people aren’t able to do it. It’s been really cool to see Ian do it.” Ian, wearing a shirt that read “I dig rock ’n’ roll,” observed from the tour bus corridor as Tyler warned of the coked-out manager who dresses like a rock star. “Ian’s in it for the right reasons, and it shows in everything down to his dress.”

It’s tempting to blindly heap praise on Ian and the event, because shit was fun. But candidly, the Scout compound didn’t make for a perfect festival experience. It was way too spread out, there weren’t enough shady spots, the media room was in a building named after ExxonMobil executive and Trump cabinet member Rex Tillerson, and there were all these statues of dusty corrupt motherfuckers hanging around.

But, amidst all the monuments to blood money, there were also lightning bugs and frogs, little kids dancing to country music, music wafting into the nature trails, and an undeniable openness from the people in this crowd. Casey Stockton, 39, was walking his dog Jackson, 13, back to their campsite when I saw that familiar scene of someone excitedly greeting them. He lives four hours away, but his community was there to meet him. I watched Jackson pee on a statue of an old man, former Scouts national president John C. Cushman III; emboldened, I later tossed a little pee of my own at Rex Tillerson. I was emboldened by community.

Most of the shows during the festival were essentially plug-and-play affairs, but Tyler’s set was stadium-worthy, the kind with an elaborate stage set that looks like a living room, a video display that kicks off the show with a countdown, and yes, an enormous live band who ripped through country thrashers like “Rustin’ in the Rain” and “Country Squire.” There’s this long section of psychedelic fiddle jams in the middle of the set that absolutely ruled. He crooned “Lady May” to close, one of a handful of ballads that prompted huge portions of the crowd to sing along. The video screens occasionally flashed over to live images of people weeping.

Addressing the crowd, Tyler spoke about fellowship at shows like this one. He encouraged people to meet someone new, to form a bond based on this moment in time. “A lot of my favorite people came out of scenes,” Tyler told me earlier in the day. “It took a scene, a community of like-minded artists doing really cool stuff, admiring each other, lifting each other up, helping each other out. Not just artists, but the fans and the people that would come out, it’s just as important for them to have a sense of community and create that environment around music. People’s lives are changed by coming out to shows. It’s church in a lot of ways.”

Maybe it’s lucky that Tyler’s set here at this massive camp property happened at all. There was a minute around 2012 when he was seriously finished with music, ready to pack it in and pursue another dream. “I was going to go back to where I was raised on my Papaw’s old farm,” he said. “I was gonna start a goat farm. I went to Huntington, and I was talking with John R. Miller at the bar, and I was going on about all my goat farming schemes.”

“He was just listening like a good friend, and after I gave him a minute to get a word in, he was like, I don’t know, man, that don’t seem like a really good idea,”’ he said. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I’m gonna start a goat farm.’ It kind of hurt my feelings. And I thought about it and I was like, ‘Yeah, John might be right.’”

John, whose set was a major highlight of the fest, remembers that night, though he admits it’s clouded by the heavy drinking the two songwriters were doing at the time. “I think giving him that advice may have been a little bit on the selfish side, because I was just like, ‘Well, dude, if you quit there’s really no hope for any of the rest of us.’”

Something else turned Tyler around toward a life playing music. “Around that same time too, I got hooked up with some old hippies who’d come back from Vietnam and started growing pot,” Tyler said. “And that kind of opened my mind: ‘Okay, music could be my pot patch to pay for my farm that right now I don’t have any way to get off the ground.’ So that’s kind of been my idea this whole time. Music is my pot patch, and one of these days, I’m just going to go off to the farm.” When he talks about fellowship, sharing in a unique moment together, it’s preacher shit, but hearing a crowd of emotional voices mingling in unison together is undeniably tangible. It’s a stretch of time and space to be savored, because there’s no way he’s inviting us to the goat farm. When his set was over, he drove four hours straight back home.