A Banjo, a Bible, and the Road Back home

From The Free Press (abridged by bigsky who is a subscriber and this is in my email box)
By Winston Marshall
Music was my passion—almost a religion. But there’s a reason that a deal with the devil is a rock ‘n’ roll cliché. Whether it’s a one-off deal at a Mississippi crossroads or a thousand little just-sign-heres, the music business has a way of twisting even the most idealistic souls.

I was offered one bad deal too many nine years later, in 2021. Stay in the game and nod along to progressive ideologies, or walk free, and speak free. But that’s a story for another day. Suffice to say, I got my soul back.

Then a few weeks ago I found myself in the forgotten North Carolina town of Spruce Pine (population 2,381) at the Rural Revival Project—a first-time, grassroots music festival that is the brainchild of the Virginia folk singer Oliver Anthony.
It was there, among the 3,500 people who filled Locust Street in Spruce Pine, that I remembered how music festivals, real ones, can fill people—can fill me—with the spirit of God.

When I started out in the music industry I was told not to mention “Christianity.” That should’ve been my first clue. Anthony’s Rural Revival Project blends both seamlessly: a Saturday of music, and a Sunday of worship, sermons, and baptisms. Kids playing in the streets, homemade soda pop vans, and local shops and storm-relief charities for those battered by Hurricane Helene pulling stalls out into Main Street beneath the beating sun of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Anthony, real name Chris Lunsford, cannonballed to fame in 2023 with his viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.” I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere. It was a Rust Belt lament belted at the flyover sky sung by a red-bearded, redneck giant who personified forgotten America. His was not the voice of the voiceless, but the roar of the nobodies.

...His later experiences there remain opaque even to those of us who have closely followed his story. But he emerged teary but clear-eyed in October 2024, announcing in a YouTube video filmed out on his Virginia holler, “I don’t need a Nashville management company. . . I’m looking to switching my whole business over to a traveling ministry.” It seems the devil did not get a deal with this one.

With a burning faith, Anthony chose the narrow path. “I’d rather not have a career than feed those people,” he said. “I want to create a routing schedule that exists parallel to Nashville. Circumvents the monopolies of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.” So he released his debut album, Hymnal of a Troubled Man’s Mind, independently and has committed to putting out a new music video with his buddy and fellow Christian, Draven Riffe. Draven directed the “Richmond” video and launched the YouTube channel, radiowv, that published it.

...There was one niggling issue, however. Oliver Anthony is a star. How can he play big shows without going corporate? Live Nation and Ticketmaster control about 60 percent of American venues and 80 percent of primary ticketing. (They are currently in the pretrial phase of a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit which alleges the company has illegally monopolized the live event industry since their merger in 2010.)

To put it bluntly, getting around such a behemoth is not so simple. “I wanna create, I think, a sanctuary is the word I would use. Create places where good people can gather and do things without the molestation of big companies being involved,” Anthony told me.

...First stop: Spruce Pine, a small town in the “Wagon Wheel” triangle, somewhere between Johnson City, Roanoke, and Raleigh. It is nestled within the foggy mountains of deindustrialized America. Mountains scarred by disused quartz quarries and pockmarked by abandoned gemstone mines.

In other words, Spruce Pine is far enough off the beaten track to escape the Live Nation stranglehold. Not a corporate sponsorship in sight. Anthony’s makeshift stage runs alongside the North Toe River and the train line built to join the coalfields of Kentucky to South Carolina a hundred-odd years ago.
But there is another reason Anthony chose Spruce Pine. Hurricane Helene obliterated it and surrounding Mitchell County, six months earlier, compounding the decimation done by decades of globalization.
“It was like an ocean here,” a local tells me, describing Helene, and pointing up to where the floods rushed. The storm was the worst to hit America since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. More than 240 people were killed nationwide, and North Carolina was the worst hit with 107 dead.
Everyone here thinks the death toll is much higher. That number doesn’t include the communities of undocumented migrants too scared to interact with officials in case they were ICE, or the homeless. Nor does it properly illustrate the extent of the catastrophe. The storm and floods were followed by landslides, mudslides, falling trees, and tornadoes.

The bands at the festival are playing for free and Anthony’s able to keep the ticket price down to $30 bucks a pop—unheard of for a five-band bill. “I make enough from streaming. I don’t need to make money from this.” And just in case the ticket price was too steep, he was hosting no-charge Sunday morning service the following day. Worship and bathtub baptisms. All are welcome.

But the festival was special to me for a reason no one there would’ve picked up on. Since I turned down my Faustian bargain four years ago, I hadn’t played banjo live. In fact, I hadn’t played it live in five years, having played it almost every night the previous 15. “Bring your banjo,” Anthony had said when we’d met earlier in the year. Maybe I’d play a song or two, I hoped. But he wanted me for the whole set.
I won’t lie, my picking was scrappy, trying to keep up with his band—Noel Burton, Peter Wellman, and Joey Davis. Fortunately for me, those lads can play. But when I found the pocket. . . bliss. Not just with the band, but with the audience. I felt engaged. Euphoric. The abandon of thousands, locked into a moment where time feels both infinite and fleeting all at once.

Classics “I Shot The Sheriff,” “Free Bird,” and of course “Wagon Wheel” bring smiles and whoops. But Anthony’s songs stood taller—“I’ve Got to Get Sober,” “Always Love You Like a Good Old Dog,” “Rich Man’s Gold,” “Cowboys and Sunsets.” The unfiltered, unaffected words of the hills.
And then “Rich Men North of Richmond” has the whole town punching at the night sky.

I’ve never been much good at describing music. But that night had all the purity of the London pubs I started at 20 years ago.

The etymology of folk, of course, is volk—the people. Those I met in Spruce Pine are people with “too much culture to make politics their identity,” Anthony observes.

My admiration for Anthony began with his music. But his dedication to his faith—there is a Bible at the ready on the barstool by his mic stand on stage—and his people is more beautiful than any song.
Oliver Anthony—Chris Lunsford—is on a mission to carve his own path through an industry hellbent on carving up souls. If you can’t get yourself down to a show, at least say a prayer for him.
As for me, well, I left knowing that I made the right decision all those years ago. There’s no deal with the devil the good Lord can’t outmatch.

I had to abridge to stay under the character limit. Sorry. A little political, and uplifting message which isn't really an easter message.

...and just to argue with the musician a bit, because we can't all be pickers, we in the flyover country can save ourselves but we do like a good soundtrack to go with it. Also, we'd like to reuse the rock quarries and gemstone mines and abandoned mills and all the other sites where people used to support themselves and their families. Those are scars of abandoned dreams.

and, yep, those hundred little "sign heres"? They're not just in the music biz, buddy. Don't follow the crowd over the cliff and find out, you're not getting any kudos for stickin to your belief system just about everywhere in the new world.

Do any of you guys follow Sean Dietrich? He is a great writher I follow on FB. Anyway, he and is wife are walking as pilgrims in Spain. It is a GREAT Read. I have been following for the past 2 weeks. If you have an extra 5 minutes per day it is worth the time. https://www.facebook.com/seandietrichwashere

I was following his Sean of the South.