The Honky Tonk Man
Wherein Nashville troubadour Joshua Hedley reflects on the state of country music, sobriety, working with Jack White, and his love of professional wrestling
By Timothy Charles Davis
Alliance
A cooperative relationship developed between two or more wrestlers, whether wrestling as a tag team or in individual matches; The formation of an alliance can be a storyline of its own.
“How’d I meet Jack? Well, I’d known Jack for a bit,” says Joshua Hedley, who is holding court at his local watering hole, Madison’s own Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge. Dee’s is a setting that somewhat mirrors Hedley’s place in country music: unobtrusively homey and worn-in and, if a building can project a soul, it boasts an old one. It’s the kind of place where you can check your pretense at the door, along with your hat. Knick-knacks are few; beer is cheap, tacos are strictly of the hardshell, Old El Paso variety. Like Hedley, Dee’s has managed to avoid the mainstream media spotlight for the most part, and remains a treasured neighborhood trough, a sort of secret handshake of cool for those whose tastes run more towards Schlitz than glitz.
“Jack,” in this case, is Jack White III, famed musician and proprietor of Nashville’s (and Detroit’s) own Third Man Records. Hedley, seltzer water in tow, is explaining to this interviewer how he came to get signed to Third Man, who released his debut LP, Mr. Jukebox, on April 20.
“I had worked with the Third Man crew a couple times on some of their Blue Series releases,” Hedley says. “My best friend Cory (Younts) plays with Old Crow Medicine Show, and they took a break from touring for a while and he started playing with Jack and so I sort of got to know that crew a little better.
“It all came about because I had made an E.P. to sell on an Australian tour. I kind of just decided that I wasn’t going to worry about how I was going to pay for the record; I was just going to book the fucking studio time and get it figured out. And I did it; I borrowed some money from a few different people and made the record. And then I borrowed some more money and pressed it overseas. This was after I got sober.”
Tap out
To submit to a hold by tapping on the mat (or the attacker’s body).
Recently, there have been a handful of country and Americana musicians getting sober — or, rather, somewhat publicly getting sober — which has led, ludicrous as it sounds on the face of it — to some folks on social media positing sobriety as a calculated, almost hip career move in a post-Jason Isbell/Sturgill Simpson country/Americana music landscape.
“Hip” is up for debate, but Hedley says there’s no mistaking that sobriety has been a boon for his career. Like Isbell and others before him, “‘Ol’ Hed” says he’s found that his productivity and inspiration have skyrocketed since 86ing the booze.
“Did Third Man know I was sober when they signed me? Oh yeah. Me being a drunk was not a secret at all,” Hedley says. “So when I got sober, everybody knew about it, and everybody was instantly like, okay, now you know this guy is serious. Before, when I was just drunk all the time, I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to make enough money on tour to cover my bar tabs and pay the rent.
“But when I got sober, that’s when I started getting interest. That’s when New West (Records) hit me up. They had already knew who I was just based on the fact that I had a little bit of name recognition from playing and touring with Jonny (Fritz) and Justin (Townes Earle). So the minute I got sober everybody’s like, ‘strike while the iron’s hot! Get out before it wears off!’
“It ain’t wearin’ off.”
Stable
A team of three or more wrestlers, usually heels, who generally share common motives, allies and adversaries within a storyline (or through multiple storylines). Stables sometimes have several members partake in more separate activities.
Many artists shop demos; half of Nashville probably travels with a stack of CD-Rs in the console of their car. Trading demo discs is as common in the music community as suits slinging business cards. The scourge of slush piles everywhere, they are also the fuel that feeds the Nashville music machine.
Hedley let a lawyer friend hear the Aussie E.P., who summarily sent it to Secretly Canadian and Universal and a handful of other labels the friend thought might be amenable. According to Hedley, “pretty much everybody except Third Man came back and said, yes, they wanted to hear more. Third Man didn’t come back at all! I didn’t hear anything for a bit, until someone allowed how they’d liked the record, and I asked them how they’d heard it. And they said, well, ‘Jack played it for me.’ And so I thought, Jack? Oh…JACK.”
“So, they were doing a book on all the musicians who played on the Blue Series 45s, and I went in to do my photo shoot for that. (Third Man Records co-founder) Ben Swank came over — actually literally ran over to me — and he was like, ‘Jack and I love the record. And can we put it out on vinyl?’ I said ‘absolutely.’ But I told him that I also had more songs ready to cut, if they ever wanted to do anything else. About a month later, Ben said they’d thought it over, and wanted to fold the record into a full-length LP and offer me a recording contract.”
Put Over
An established wrestler behaving in a way so as to make another wrestler look good and/or on the same level.
“I wouldn’t have been able to make the record that I was able to make without Third Man, or make the record that I’d envisioned in my head when I set out to make the E.P. Now the wheels are turning and it’s starting to take off, and it’s wild as hell! I never thought it was going to happen. I thought, well, if I don’t (ever get signed), I’ll just say ‘fuck it’ and tour with Jonny and play Robert’s (Western World) until I drink myself to death or something.
“Why did I go with Third Man? Well, I just saw what happened to Margo (Price). A couple years back, I came and sang on her record (Midwest Farmer’s Daughter), and she paid me and I left. Then, like a year later, I saw that she signed to Third Man and then like a couple weeks after that, she was on Saturday Night Live. And I was like whoa, man. She’s just putting out her second (solo) record, and she’s on a bus already. Like, that’s unheard of. Especially on an indie label. And I just saw what they were able to do for her, and I realized that I’m kind of doing the same thing she’s doing, musically.
“But the biggest thing that drew me to that label is that everyone who works there is an artist. It’s not working for some asshole in a suit who doesn’t know what the fuck is cool. It’s working with a dude who has a really innovative mind, and who has been D.I.Y., who’s been on a major label, and now he has his own label and he knows like what it’s like to bust your ass touring in vans, and he knows what it’s like to get fucked over by a major label.
“They’re just a cool label. Jack is always innovating. I mean, like a record inside a record or like a little hologram that somehow spins over the thing while it’s playing. What the fuck is that? Like, how do you come up with that? I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to work with that. I wanted that guy’s brain behind my career.”
Young boy
A rookie, particularly in Japanese professional wrestling.
Hedley hails from Naples, Florida. It’s a state known for a lot of things, one of those things…not being its contributions to country music (To be fair, it does boast one of Hedley’s favorites in John Anderson, as well as Aaron Tippin, Slim Whitman, and East Nashville’s own Elizabeth Cook.) Hedley, who still loves his home state and proudly flies a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his right forearm, says it was the perfect place to begin his musical education.
“I’m told I asked for a fiddle when I was three,” he says. “My parents got me one when I was eight. Supposedly my grandfather, my dad’s dad, had a fiddle. He only knew how to play like ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on it. I didn’t really come from a musical family, per se. They did listen to a lot of music, though. My dad listened to a lot of soul music, like Otis Redding and the Temptations. My mom liked the Beach Boys and the Mamas and The Papas and that kind of thing. I just sort of found country music on my own after I started playing.
“I got a guitar when I was around 12. And I didn’t really mess around with it too much until I really started singing, a couple years later. I would play until like two in the morning, then get up at 6am to go to school. But I guess when I started singing in public is when I decided, you know, that I should probably learn how to play guitar better. And moreover, learn how to back myself up on it, so I don’t just stand there like an idiot playing fiddle and singing. I try to avoid that Charlie Daniels comparison at all costs. Nothing against him, mind you — it’s just that is not for me. And if you play fiddle and sing, it’s going to happen.”
“The fiddle player Mark O’Connor had a instructional camp, a summer camp out in Dixon, Tennessee. And my folks and I would come up every summer and go to that for a week. And then we would drive into Nashville for a weekend and I would, you know, bring my fiddle around and try to sit in with bands at bars. I was about 12 years old when I started doing that, which would have been…1996? I immediately had this idea that this is where I’m destined to be, like this is where I’m headed. That’s also when I subsequently kind of stopped paying attention in school! It’s like, ‘I’m going to move to Nashville. I’m going to be a fiddle player.’ At this point I wasn’t singing but, I knew, I knew, that I was going to be a fiddle player in Nashville. I didn’t need to know Algebra, you know.
“By the time I was 10, I was already playing in bars. By 12 I was playing and I was like actually a member of a band, a band where everybody else in the band was like 42. I was 12. My first band that I played in was sort of a bluegrass band called Halfgrass. And then from there I kind of started branching out into country music. I played in a band called Rich Country. And really, the first band that was kind of like a thing was when I was about for 13 or 14. I started playing at this place called Porky’s, a barbecue restaurant in Golden Gate. And I played in a band called Hot Country. And that was when it stopped being like, ‘oh, they have a cute 12-year-old in the band,’ and it became more of me being a part of a band.”
Work (verb)
To methodically attack a single body part, setting up an appropriate finisher.
Seven years after his initial, eye-opening trip to Nashville, Hedley again got the itch to visit Music City, and this time he left his parents behind.
“I moved here on Thursday, September 11, 2004 — I rolled into town like 12:30am. I remember that because it was such an instrumental moment in my life. I had a friend who was a pilot for FedEx, and he let me stay in the basement of his house over on West End. He called it the Bluegrass Bunker. I was supposed to stay there for like a couple months while I found a place to live, and I ended up staying there for six months until he kicked me out. I’m 19. I’m just trying to sneak into the bars, you know? Maybe play a few tunes, and try to drink as many Long Island iced teas as I could before they figured out I wasn’t 21.
“Unlike many people that move here, I had a job waiting for me. There was a guy who played at Tootsie’s named Jessie Taylor, and he would let me sit in with the band when I was visiting. He said, if I ever moved to Nashville to call him, and he’d give me a gig. So I moved to Nashville, and I called him, and I think he kind of probably had like an ‘oh shit’ moment, but he stuck to his word. I went to go see a friend who was playing with a group called the Travis Mann Band, and hooked up with them when their fiddle player couldn’t make Fan Fair that year. By the end of that year, I already had my own band.
“This kind of work is a hell of a lot easier to do if somebody can vouch for you. Once you get your foot in that door, then that’s when the other opportunities start coming up and presenting themselves. So you just keep putting your foot in doors, you know?”
Kayfabe
The presentation of professional wrestling as being entirely legitimate or real.
Hedley’s “Mr. Jukebox” nickname came from his near-Herculean ability to not only recall, but also play, seamlessly, songs from most any era of country music — provided that era ended by the time he turned 10.
“I love country music from all eras, but ’94 is like my cutoff, really — ’94 or ’95 or somewhere around there. That’s when it just got too much. But it’s still country in that era — there’s still a lot of pedal steel. There’s still fiddle. Around ’65 to ’68 or ’69 is like sort of my own golden era of country music. It’s right when it was starting to get a little slick, you know, and Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins were starting to put strings on stuff. That real slick sound. I love that. I said something in a Rolling Stone story (“10 New Country Artists You Need to Know,” November, 2016) like “Country music was perfected in 1965 and anything after that was experimentation.” It’s maybe a bit hyperbole. It’s definitely hyperbole. But you could say the same thing about rock and roll with Chuck Berry and it’d be true.
“But I also love, you know, Ronnie Milsap and that 1980s super-shiny production. I love that stuff. It’s just the new shit that gets me. When Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw hit, that’s when it became kind of more about the look, and less about the song. And that’s when my interest kind of wanes. And now it’s just…I don’t know what the fuck is going on now.
“It’s reached a tipping point, I think. It’s not even about what I think, it’s just kind of a fact. It seems like people are getting fed up with it. There’s a complete lack of relatable human content. You can only spoonfeed people shit for so long before they’re like ‘hey, wait a minute, this tastes bad!’ You know, it doesn’t matter how much chocolate syrup you could put on top of that, it’s still shit. And once the chocolate starts to wear off and people start to realize that — wait a minute — every song is the same and it’s all about mud and girls’ butts and Coors Light, well, people start to get fed up with the lack of artistry.
“Chris Stapleton is on the top of the heap right now with no radio play. None. No mainstream radio play. And it’s sort of like the scales are starting to tip. I had a conversation about it with Jonny Fritz years ago about this, and I said I wished that what we were doing was as popular as the stuff on the radio. He said, just as soon as this kind of stuff catches on, record labels are going to start signing acts like us. He totally called it, six years ago.
“I mean, I’m not going to call anybody out by name or anything, but there’s definitely some totally record-company-created, shiny new Americana acts. As soon as Sturgill (Simpson) started, as soon as ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ started getting popular, I knew it wouldn’t be long before Scott fucking Borchetta was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’”
Signature move
A move a wrestler regularly performs, for which the wrestler is well-known.
“My biggest inspiration songwriting-wise was just listening to classic country music. You know, there’s just certain themes, drinking and the heartbreak and stuff like that, that are just classic. It’s like a good suit. Classic never goes out of style. People are never not going to want to hear songs about heartbreak and love. So listening to that and really studying it was how I learned the ins and outs of writing. Like, ‘How did Tom T. Hall write like that? How did Roger Miller write like that?”
Despite his youthful rush to get out of school and get into Nashville, Hedley says his real education — studying, pen and pad in hand, guitar on his knee, the songs of his idols — was just beginning.
“I learned that it could be fun,” he says. “Those guys weren’t dour. That early stuff had humor in it, too, and not a little wit. Roger Miller had a big humorous streak and and Tom T. (Hall), he’s like my number one. He has this uncanny ability to say so much with so few words. It’s not easy to do that and make it sound important and poignant and honest and intelligent. Those are really important things in country music. It has to be relatable. It has to be meaningful. It’s for the 9 to 5er out there. Not everybody wants to sit down and try to decipher ‘Visions of Johanna,’ you know? You don’t have to write a fucking thesis on what it means. You don’t have to sit there and listen to it a hundred times to figure it out. Just say what you mean. That’s that’s what music is to me and that’s what Tom T. and Hank Williams knew instinctively. Listening to that kind of stuff, when I eventually did pick up a pen, that’s just what came out.
“You can write about your personal experience at the same time. You have to. Every song on this record is about the same woman, and it’s about experiences that I’ve had, you know? But you have to convey it in a way that’s universal. I can’t just say her fucking name in a song. Nobody gives a shit about my relationship with my girlfriend. You got to put it out there in a way that’s for everyone. It’s got to be therapeutic for you and relatable for everyone else.
“Justin Townes Earle told me something one time, and it always stuck with me. He said, ‘If you say that her lips are red, you don’t have to say that her eyes are blue and her hair is blonde.’ Keep it simple. I work very hard at doing that.”
Main event
The most heavily promoted, typically final match on a card.
Outside of making music, Hedley says that he spends most of his available down time indulging in his near-fanatical love of professional wrestling (see sidebar) and working on his sobriety. They both have lessons to teach, he says, and he’s even noticed some overlap between the two seemingly dissimilar pursuits: namely, the importance of above all else putting in the work, and, moreover, putting your faith in the idea that good things will come from that work. Still, Hedley is human, and says after years playing the heel, he’s ready to be a “face”: in wrestling terms, a heroic figure booked to be cheered by those in attendance. Having paid his dues on the smaller circuits, he says he’s excited about the call-up to the big show, but says he knows he must keep the delivering the goods both musically and in his personal life to stay there.
“There’s anxiety, always,” Hedley says. “The big anxiety for me is that there’s a lot of people doing the classic country thing now. But they’re all kind of harkening back to the outlaw era and sound: real acoustic-driven stuff, maybe a Telecaster with a phase shifter. Real personal storytelling. That’s really popular right now. But what I’m doing is different. There’s hardly any electric guitar on the new record at all. It’s almost all either acoustic guitar or high-strung acoustic. Nobody else is doing that 60s sound, and my anxiety lies in whether it’s cool that I’m the first person to do this, or am I going to find out really fast that there’s a reason why nobody’s doing this?
“Right now we’re in the process of deciding what the singles are going to be. I mean, does it even really fucking matter what the single is? It’s not going to get played on the radio? All I care about is if I get to play the Opry and it’s on (WSM) 650 AM. Like if Eddie Stubbs spins my record and says it’s good, that’s enough for me. I can retire right then and there.
“Although I reserve the right to change my mind.”
AFTERWORD:
“It’s Still Real To Me, Damn It!”
If there’s anything Joshua Hedley loves more than listening to and playing classic country music, it’s watching professional wrestling. A self-proclaimed “mark” — a term which used to describe a wrestling fan who believed that the sport’s activities were all real, but now has expanded to include anyone who eats up wrestling content without question or fail — Hedley is an enthusiastic advocate of the “squared circle.”
“Wrestling entered my life as a kid. I was a Hulkamaniac, 100 percent — every kid was at that point. I loved Dusty Rhodes, The American Dream. He had that shirt that said ‘The American Dream — Son of a Plumber.’ I just got a shirt a guy made for me that says ‘Mr. Fucking Jukebox’ on it, done in the Dusty Rhodes style.
“People used to just ostracize you, seeing wrestling as like this common man’s pastime. Now it’s it’s so popular again, you don’t hear that as much anymore. There’s another wrestling boom happening, and indie outfits like Lucha Underground are more relevant than they ever have been. It’s not as taboo to say that you are a wrestling fan anymore. It’s changing. People get the draw of it all, and they’re not so hung up on it ‘not being real.’
“I mean, Donald Trump saved Vince McMahon’s head on live television. Of course it’s fake. It’s just amazing that that was the biggest thing that people had against it, that it was fake. Alice Cooper used to get his head chopped off by a guillotine on stage every night too. It’s entertainment. Every time somebody brings up the fake thing, I’m like ‘it’s a fucking television show.’ What are you watching, Master Chef? They’re all fake. Survivor? There’s a camera there. With wrestling, the least you can say is that these people are out there busting their asses. They’re jumping from on top of 30-foot cages to the ground, which is maybe covered in an inch or two of foam. I like the athleticism of it. I like watching people who are good at what they do. They do stuff in that ring that I could never do. I like that they travel from town to town, like a troupe. I really like the storytelling.
“I don’t know, man. It’s just cool to me. I watch wrestling probably five days a week, six if there’s a pay-per-view. It’s all I’ve done lately. I don’t drink anymore, so I’m not going out, really. My girlfriend’s out of town, so I’m not hanging out with her. I’m just watching Lucha Underground on Netflix and trying to do my thing. There are worse habits.”
