The first time I heard Tyler Childers’ voice I was riding in the passenger seat of a 15-year-old car late at night through the back roads of West Virginia.

It was 2019, and I was 17 years old. And even though my first encounter with Childers’ music was five years ago, his songs have continued to define my experience growing up in Appalachia. His songs became the soundtrack to breakups, late nights with my friends, road trips and music festivals. And I wasn’t the only one. 

Everyone I knew who knew Tyler equally resonated with how he sees the misunderstood place we grew up in. 

The soul ties we feel to children are deep from childhood. He sings about places that we’ve driven through since we were kids. The songs play in our minds in the most vivid colors because we’ve known those people and we know those places. 

And when Childers began to sing about more serious issues we were the first to recognize that genius, too. 

As one of few mainstream musicians from Appalachia, Childers has a hefty responsibility to represent a wildly misrepresented region. He’s taken on that challenge with pride. Not only has he reformed Appalachians’ relationship with addiction and religion, but he’s re-cast the way the rest of the country views our story too. 

Some of that can be seen through his embrace and openness around his own journey to sobriety.

In April 2024, he took a rare moment during a concert in Knoxville, Tennessee, to talk to a roaring crowd about his recovery. With tears in his eyes, he noted that part of that journey was to relearn how to spend his time. 

“That’s the biggest thing you get back,” he said, “is time.” 

He cleaned his shoes, he played a fiddle, he reflected within himself, and he wrote lyrics that shifted from: 

Get me drinking’ that moonshine / Get me higher than the grocery bill / Take my troubles to the highwall / Throw ’em in the river and get your fill. 

To a sobered: 

I don’t need the pills you take / Just to feel the spirit movin’. 

In addressing addiction, Childers does not just tell a personal story; he reflects a broader narrative of resilience within Appalachia.

In 2018, he headlined the inaugural Healing Appalachia, a concert inspired by a single day in 2016 when 26 people in Huntington died from overdoses. The harrowing moment brought organizers together, wanting to do something that might prompt action toward recovery for Appalachia and reminded the community that, in the words of West Virginia-based music therapist and musician Maggie Moore, “the ground of arts [is] a place to build resilience from.” 

In her journey of recovery at age 21, Moore said she used “music as healing for myself and thought that that was part of what had saved me as a young person.” 

Those are common experiences in Appalachia, where Moore, who has a background in psychology, notes that historical trauma stemming from the region’s extractive industries, poverty and unemployment, contribute to a wider overall reliance on unhealthy coping mechanisms. 

“A person might have trauma and not develop addiction but addiction is an indication of unresolved or unhealed trauma,” she said. 

That’s trauma that Childers frequently references. In “Coal” he sings: 

We could’ve made something of ourselves out there if we’d listened to the folks that knew / coal is gonna bury you.

And in “Hard Times”: 

The sign of the church says I’ll reap what I’m sowing / but I ain’t lost sleep it’ll come in due time. 

This historical trauma not only informs our past but also shapes the present, highlighting the urgent need for healing and understanding in our communities. 

That’s why organizations like the WV Faith Collective work through pastors in that state to address the lasting effects of mining on water supply, the environment and people’s mental and physical health. 

For Rev. Caitlin Ware, a United Methodist pastor who leads three churches in Tucker County and works with the WV Faith Collective in the mining towns in McDowell County, Childers’ music effectively “[touches] on the pain and also the exhilaration of drug culture in Appalachia,” something that’s frequently misunderstood outside of the region. 

Ware discovered Childers while scrolling through YouTube for new music a few years ago.  His sound just clicked with her as a native Appalachian and his understanding and reflection of a deeply stereotyped Appalachia helped her better understand her work in the coalfields. 

Decades ago, when coal companies came into a town they would open up churches of whatever denomination the coal boss wanted. Worshipers went to church each Sunday with a gnawing feeling that the company was still watching them. 

“The mine owner would pay to have a company preacher,” Ware said. “It was a way of getting one more step in on Sunday morning to obey your company and not resist because God will reward you. ‘I know stuff’s bad right now but heaven things will be better.’”

Obeying for the fear of punishment is a mindset passed down from generation to generation in these mining communities. In Ware’s words, many rural West Virginians think “If you behave and obey your corporate masters you’ll reap your reward in heaven,” and they go to the chapel every week to remember that eventual reward. 

She calls this phenomenon “company Gospel,” which Childers also sings about in “Coal:”

Keep on mining boy ’cause that’s why you were born. 

But Ware, and her like-minded colleagues, sing a different tune than the one that was handed down to them for generations. 

Growing up in the Baptist faith, I watched church-going teenagers who worshiped alongside me at camp leave the church as young adults because they felt that their religion revolved around guilt and shame. Many of us realized that our upbringing had revolved around a form of religion that felt heavy with guilt and a need to live in judgment and misery because one day when we died we’d have the opportunity to finally feel at peace or maybe just to be proven right. 

Just as Childers uses his music to address pain and resilience, faith leaders like Ware and self-proclaimed second-career clergyman Brad Davis are working to reshape our understanding of spirituality in a way that fosters hope rather than guilt. 

Davis explains this: “We’re stuck in that very narrow understanding of faith where it’s all about going to heaven.” 

Some call it deconstruction or reformation. Ware and Davis have creatively labeled it “Holler Gospel” in their conversations about the church. To them, the Holler Gospel completely contrasts with the company church culture that dominates central Appalachia. 

Ware explains that “the Holler Gospel says that people laid low will be raised,” and that it emphasizes the destruction of “death-bringing systems.” For her, that means working with the WV Faith Coalition to address the lasting effects of mining on water supply, the environment and people’s health. 

But that also means addressing the harmful narratives perpetuated by traditionalist churches surrounding everything from racism to addiction. 

That’s the same thing Childers is doing as a mainstream Appalachian musician; calling attention to the harmful narratives perpetuated about us or by us. 

He’s pointing out the complicated relationship that Appalachia has with drugs and opioids while presenting his own story as a beacon of hope and performing at a festival whose focus is to destigmatize addiction. 

He even sings directly about our tendency toward religion, acknowledging the beauty of that tradition, while demonstrating how much more expansive that love can be. 

“I view Tyler Childers as almost like a Central Appalachian prophet,” Davis said. “Because the role of a prophet [is to] speak into the grief and the suffering of the people and help people to imagine a new reality and a new world.”

Through his music, philanthropic work and fans, Childers has managed to usher in a new era of Appalachians, – myself and my peers included – unafraid to dismantle oppressive stereotypes and move forward with newfound clarity and faith.