22 of the 24 dates for his Mule Pull ’24 tour, which Ottawa was later added to, sold out immediately.
Let. Them. Cook. I’m talking, of course, about the good folks who organize Bluesfest. I thought that last year’s headliners couldn’t be outdone. Attending a festival with a lineup of Shania Twain, Billy Talent, Weezer, Foo Fighters, Ludacris, and Pitbull, was an amazing way to spend the dog days of summer.
But when organizers confirmed Tyler Childers (pronounced chil-durz) as the first headliner of next year’s festival, I began to think differently. Bluesfest executive and artistic director Mark Monahan seemed just as happy as me to be able to announce Childers, in a statement released Oct. 13. “Tyler has been on our wish list for several years now, and being able to bring him to the festival to perform for his legions of fans here in the Ottawa Valley is a real coup.”
Granted, reactions to the country, folk, and bluegrass singer being announced as headliner were not as positive on social media. But his Canadian fans like me are happy to share our beloved Kentucky-born genre-bender with the uninformed. 22 of the 24 dates for his Mule Pull ’24 tour, which Ottawa was later added to, sold out immediately. The only two locations that didn’t sell out within minutes were in London, England, and Germany. This should give you a good sense of how his fans feel about seeing him live.
It’s tough to explain the passion with which Childers writes and performs his catalogue of songs. And these aren’t songs you’re going to find on most radio stations, which is a key reason why he is widely unknown by country music fans. Some of his most beloved songs, like ‘Nose on the Grindstone’ and ‘Shake the Frost’, haven’t even seen a studio release. But it’s not like he’s some no-name. He boasts 11 million monthly listeners on Spotify. For comparison, last year’s headliner Shania averages about 15 million, and Weezer averages just over 14 million.
Childers broke out in 2017 with the release of Purgatory, which Rolling Stone ranked 14 on their list of top 40 country albums of the year. Record Collector’s Terry Staunton gave the album a perfect five stars, explaining “Childers has a novelist’s eye for detail, as exemplified on the eloquent romance of ‘Feathered Indians’ (“my buckle makes impressions on the inside of her thigh”) and the self-effacing blue collar valentine of ‘Lady May’ (“I ain’t the sharpest chisel your hands have ever held”).”
Childer’s next album would debut at number one on both Billboard’s Top Country Albums and American/Folk Albums. Country Squire included the love ballad ‘All Your’n’, which was nominated for Best Solo Country Performance at the 2019 Grammy Awards. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described Childers on this album as being “a sly storyteller, a gift that threatens to be overshadowed by the robust realization of his songs.”
Childers began exploring different genres in the following years, while also exploring difficult topics such as racism and homophobia. He dropped Long Violent History in 2020 during the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in the USA. Jeremy Ray Jewell of ArtsFuse described its title track as “a sort of Appalachian murder ballad for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.”
In August 2023, Childers dropped a powerful single that would end up being the first on his recently released album Rustin’ in the Rain. ‘In Your Love’’s music video featured a love story – a love story that saw some backlash from some of Childer’s “fans”. The video, set in Childers’ Appalachia, depicted two gay coal miners in the 1950s, and gave much-needed representation to queer Appalachian residents and country music fans.
Childers will perform Friday, July 12 at next year’s edition of the festival. Pre-sale tickets for Friday were released Oct. 17, but don’t fret if you didn’t get them in time. Full-festival and part-festival passes will be released in the coming months and offer a much better value proposition.
