In his 1999 autobiography My House of Memories, Merle Haggard marveled at his stardom, knowing it’d be a pipe dream by the standards of the day. “Can you imagine what would happen today if I were 24, just out of prison, and trying to get a record deal in Nashville?” wondered the working man’s poet, who spent much of his youth incarcerated before becoming one of country music’s most beloved voices. “Today’s sanitized country music is produced by a bunch of artists who sound like each other. No label would take a chance on my sound, especially with my background, if I were trying to start over.”
Twenty-five years later, Jelly Roll’s success suggests that the industry would sooner gamble on the background than the sound. The Nashville native spent his 15th, 16th, and 17th birthdays in juvenile detention and, like Haggard, got his GED in jail. Back then, he was a charismatic freestyler inspired by Three 6 Mafia and 8ball & MJG, but over time, his writing drifted from boilerplate trap music toward intense Southern rock songs about sin and salvation. The rapper’s reinvention as a country balladeer has coincided with his rise as one of the 2020s’ biggest breakout stars, particularly since the release of last year’s Whitsitt Chapel—his ninth studio album, but the first one billed explicitly as country. “There is something poetic about a 39-year-old man winning New Artist of the Year,” he said in his acceptance speech at last year’s CMA Awards, his voice trembling with fire and brimstone. “I don’t know where you’re at in your life or what you’re going through, but I want to tell you to keep going, baby. I want to tell you success is on the other side of it. I want to tell you it’s gonna be okay.”
In Jelly Roll’s music, a few things are understood: that heaven and hell are places on earth; that within each human being is the capacity for evil; and that while no man is beyond redemption, it’s also a slippery slope. His biggest hits (“Son of a Sinner,” “Need a Favor”) counter the popular notion that we are infinitely perfectible, that all that stands between us and felicity is therapy and self-care; certain scars, these songs suggest, were never meant to heal. There’s no doubt Jelly is currently at the peak of his career, but the 22 tracks of his 10th album, Beautifully Broken, give little indication that life is good at all, love of his family aside. What kind of asshole would he be to suddenly start flexing for his mostly working-class fanbase, for whom he is not just a hero but an ambassador?
Instead, he begins Beautifully Broken at rock bottom—sweating in a church basement with his hands shaking, wishing he was anywhere else. “I haven’t touched a drop in seven hours, three minutes/Hardly sobered up, already want to quit quitting,” he sings on “Winning Streak,” ashamed to admit his failings to a room of strangers until he meets a man 20 years clean. It’s poignant songwriting, despite a few clichés. Then the chorus hits—a stomp-clap/gospel moment that spells “triumph over adversity” in flashing neon lights. Same deal with “Heart of Stone,” a desperate singalong (“Dear Lord, can you help me? I’ve fallen out of grace/I’m crawling back to heaven from this hell on earth I’ve made”) jacked up with the full Imagine Dragons treatment. There’s no shortage of big build-ups and “whoa-oh-ay-ohh”s, and though Jelly once declared his sound “somewhere between Hank, Three 6, and Kid Rock,” here it’s closer to the intersection of Twenty One Pilots and Gnarls Barkley.
It’s been said that the experience of a Jelly Roll concert is something like an evangelical revival, but his frequent invocation of heaven, hell, and fallen angels isn’t out of place in mainstream rap and R&B, where haunted young bluesmen have been warbling about their demons to a degree of commercial success that is almost alarming. Themes of trauma and addiction saturate the charts, as pain rap’s luminaries release essentially the same record over and over again. Surely somebody somewhere—maybe millions of somebodies—needs to hear Jelly Roll singing, “I’m not okay, but it’s all gonna be alright” over pedal steel and fiddle on lead single “I Am Not Okay,” which soundtracked the In Memoriam segment of this year’s Emmy Awards. Still, a monstrous question lingers: Is it too much to ask that the music meant to salve America’s broken heart also be good?
But then there’s “Hear Me Out,” which opens with a missed call from a friend. The guy’s been in and out of rehab, and Jelly hasn’t seen him much since his mother passed. It’s late, but Jelly calls back anyway. “Hear me out,” the friend pleads. “Tell me how I always feel like something’s missing/I’d make a sound, but what’s the point if no one’s listening?” Herein lies the crux of Jelly Roll’s creative mission: to give a voice, a soundtrack, and some cachet to Americans as often disregarded by our cultural institutions as by our governing bodies. His efforts extend well past the realm of music: In January, he sat before a Senate committee to testify for sanctions to stop the fentanyl supply chain. “I understand the paradox of my history as a drug dealer,” he said. “But I think that’s what makes me perfect to talk about this. I was a part of the problem. I am here now standing as a man that wants to be a part of the solution.”
There is nuance in this speech, straightforward as it may be, that Beautifully Broken begs for more of. (It’s there in “My Cross,” an ode to his daughter: “Your blood is my blood, and poison runs deep/Knowing you’re mine scares the hell out of me.”) Clearly Jelly Roll has stories, the kind whose minor details make for timeless country classics like Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December,” where a laid-off factory worker builds a castle in the sky, or Kris Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” whose complicated poet can’t get out of his own way. As for now, he has the voice, the pathos, and the charisma required of an American folk hero. Now all he needs are the songs.
