Tyler Childers wants you to rethink BLM and Breonna Taylor as new album is released
Kentucky native Tyler Childers surprisingly released a new album Friday and provided context on a song that addresses systemic racism.
In a 6-minute video he posted that accompanied the sudden release of “Long Violent History,” the country singer spoke to his “white, rural listeners” about Black Lives Matter protests and voting.
He said he is now six months sober and wanted to use his platform “to make some good.”
“We can stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter,” he advises his fans. “If we didn’t need to be reminded, there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, a Kentuckian like me and countless others.”
The country singer said he made the video to add context to a song that could be misinterpreted by some.
Childers calls the title track of the album an “observational piece on the times that we are in.”
“It’s the worst that it’s been since the last time it happened,” the song begins.
He later sings, “Could you imagine just constantly worrying / Kicking, and fighting, and begging to breathe.”
Childers admitted in the video it’s hard for outsiders to see where the “visceral anger” from protesters is coming from and pleaded for his fans to show empathy with other individuals and groups.
“What if we were to constantly open up our daily paper and see a headline like, ‘East Kentucky man shot seven times on fishing trip’ and read on to find the man was shot while fishing with his son by a game warden who saw him rummaging through his tackle box for his license and thought he was reaching for his knife,” Childers said, also mentioning several other hypothetical stories depicting violence from police toward white people.
“How would we react to that? What form of upheaval would that create?” he asked. “I venture to say if we were met with this sort of daily attack on our own people, we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair mountain in West Virginia.”
The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain was between union miners and coal companies and is referred to as “the largest armed uprising since the Civil War,” according to the History Channel.
The Eastern Kentucky native also addressed the upcoming election in his YouTube video. He urged his fans to use their voting power “to get rid of people in power” who allowed systemic racism to go unnoticed.
“Chances are, the people allowing this to happen are the same people keeping opportunity out of reach for our own community that have watched job opportunities shipped out and drugs shipped in, eating up our communities and leaving our people desperate in what some folks would deem a food desert,” he said.
Childers’ new album is his first since 2019’s “Country Squire,” which topped the Billboard Top Country Albums Chart. One of the songs on the album, “All Your’n,” garnered him his first Grammy Award nomination.
In 2020, he toured alongside Sturgill Simpson, a fellow Kentuckian.
