Summary
Elvie Shane was clean for nearly a decade before scoring a country Number One with “My Boy” in 2021. He’s not alone in the country world in opening up about addiction. Grammy-nominated singer Jelly Roll explored his past as a drug user and dealer.
Opioids are a particularly acute problem in communities at the heart of country music. Tennessee’s Davidson County was named the second-deadliest metro area in the U.S. for overdoses. West Virginia is worst of all, with more than 75 deaths out of every 100,000 residents.
Tyler Childers, who wrote about the crisis in his ballad “Nose on the Grindstone,” is a driving force behind the Healing Appalachia music festival. The event was established after 26 people overdosed in Huntington, West Virginia, in one day in August 2016.
“People need to recognize that maybe just because just because you do this shit on weekends, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’s have a problem,” he says. “It starts like that for a lot of people.”
