New Single ‘Betsy Layne’ Available Now

Our brand new single ‘Betsy Layne’ is now available on all streaming platforms! Check it out anywhere you listen to music:

The Story Behind the Song:

My Gran was born in a very small coal town in Eastern Kentucky called Betsy Layne. As a kid, my family would drive 16 hours from Connecticut to spend the whole week in Betsy Layne at my great grandmother’s house. It was a small coal camp house that was surrounded by mountains.

Even though all there was to do in Betsy Layne was walk down the holler to an old Pepsi machine someone put on the side of the road or go shop at Wal Mart, I loved being there. Mostly because I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins and the rest of my family. I took a lot away from that time in my life, especially the music and stories.

I was really close to my Gran and Papaw, especially as I got older and could appreciate them more. I remember when I first started to learn to play guitar in high school and I got really into Nirvana, as an angry teenager armed with power chords typically does. I loved the song ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ from their unplugged album. Something about it seemed familiar, it was dark, but melodic and different yet traditional, all at the same time. I learned the song on guitar and remember my Gran recognized the song. She knew it as ‘In the Pines’ and it’s been covered by pretty much every artist ever. How did my sweet Gran know this song about murder?

Well, this sent me down a folk music path that lead me to murder ballads. This is real. There’s a ton of old folk songs that almost sound like lullabies, but they are about murdering someone, usually a woman. There’s a lot of them, Pretty Polly (Nirvana also did a take on this too), Butcher Boy, Henry Lee, In the Pines, Stag o Lee, etc. Because of my Gran and Papaw, I started to learn about Folk, County and Bluegrass music. Something I was already familiar with because it was literally all around me, but never really paid attention to. Then, on a road trip through Tennessee with the notorious brothers Joey and Jason Greene, I was introduced to Uncle Tupelo. This blew my mind. It was alternative music mixed with country folk music. I loved it.

I started to change my guitar playing to have more of a twang to it and swapped out power chords for open chords. It came more natural to me, like it was the music I was supposed to play. I would go to Gran and Papaw’s house in Kentucky and bring my computer and burn their large CD collection and convert vinyl records to mp3s. I discovered artists like Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Steve Earle, Hank Williams, Hot Club of Cowtown, Mary Stuart, Ralph Stanley, the Bad Livers, the Carter Family, Bill Monroe and of course Dwight Yoakam. My Gran was actually best friends with Dwight’s mom and they went to Betsy Layne High School together.

This caused me to grow even closer to my grandparents. We would talk about old folk music and listen to Willie’s Roadhouse on car rides. We always talked about how it was funny that they grew up on all of these murder ballads. The songs were so beautiful and melodic but the lyrics were so dark, but you almost didn’t notice.

I got an idea one day to use Betsy Layne as a song title. I had this guitar melody I was messing around with that mixed minor and major chords. It was pretty but dark. I was starting to list out all of the themes from the area. All of Eastern Kentucky was once a booming coal industry. But the coal industry wasn’t thriving anymore and it gave the area somewhat of a darkness among the beautiful mountains. It parallels the same feeling of a murder ballad. I thought it would be perfect to set a modern day murder ballad in Betsy Layne. Once I had the concept down the song just kind of flowed right out of me. It was one of those rare moments for me where the lyrics came pretty easily.

Not many people can say they wrote a murder ballad for their grandmother, but I did, and she loved it.