One of Leslie T’s favorite websites to visit is Saving Country Music . And when she saw the great article on Chris Stapleton’s album “Traveler”, she knew she needed to share it with you. Enjoy a look back and a milestone in country music.
There are just a few landmark records that you can point back to in the history of country music and legitimately claim they revolutionized the genre in fundamental ways. They might not be your favorite records, and they might not be the greatest selling records. Or maybe they are. But there was country music before their release, and country music after.
Chris Stapleton’s Traveller is one of those records, released on May 5th, 2015—ten years ago today.
Traveller wasn’t the beginning of the country music revolution we’re currently in the midst of. It was simply the culmination of work that had been put in by others over many years. But unlike its predecessors, it didn’t just burst through to tickle the mainstream, it would go on to positively dominate it in a manner that is still very much reverberating to this day.
Here on the 10th anniversary of the album’s release, Traveller still sits at #13 on the Billboard Country Albums chart, meaning it remains one of the most popular titles in country music at the moment, and has never really exited the public consciousness over that time. Stapleton’s cover of “Tennessee Whiskey” originally written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove currently sits at #21 on the Country Streaming Charts. That, ladies and gentlemen, is long-lasting impact.
It was Sturgill Simpson recording his magnum opus Metamodern Sounds in Country Music with his road band, and with producer Dave Cobb specifically that inspired Stapleton to approach the recording of Traveller like he did—also with his road band all live in the room, with Dave Cobb behind the console.
Stapleton was also inspired to approach the album in a new way after the some major life changes. Previously he’d tried to launch a career in the mainstream in a more conventional manner. He sang backup on countless records, and had written songs for numerous performers including George Strait and Josh Turner, and even big pop country stars like Luke Bryan. Arguably Stapleton’s biggest claim to fame was writing a song for Adele at that point. But his career wasn’t really going anywhere.
“I lost my dad in October 2013 and did a little bit of soul-searching,” Stapleton explains. “My wife was kind enough to buy me an old Jeep. We flew out to Phoenix and drove it all the way back to Nashville through the desert. I thought a lot about music and my dad, and the things that he would have liked that I should be doing. Out of that, I actually wrote the song ‘Traveller’ driving down Interstate 40 through New Mexico. That became the cornerstone for the record and wound up being the title track.”
If you regard Chris Stapleton and the release of Traveller right now, you might misremember it as being a big moment, rocketing Stapleton into superstardom off the strength of “Tennessee Whiskey.” But that’s not what happened at all. Traveller enacted a slow, smoldering burn … until it erupted.
Chris Stapleton was much more well-known in independent circles at the time than he was in the mainstream. He was even interviewed here at Saving Country Music. He’d fronted the hard charging bluegrass band The SteelDrivers. He’d toured with the Southern rock band The Jompson Brothers.
Nashville insiders knew of Stapleton through his songwriting credits, but that’s about as far as it went. Traveller was being ignored by mainstream country radio of course, and sales were perhaps spirited for a non-radio release, but completely under-the-radar.
But people up and down Music Row loved Traveller, as did Stapleton’s fellow performers. And when it came time to vote for the 2015 CMA Awards, they all punched the tab for Stapleton, resulting in him receiving nominations for New Artist of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, and Album of the Year for Traveller specifically heading into the CMA Awards in November.
We thought if Stapleton could win New Artist of the Year, it would be a big win for the good guys. When he won in all three categories, it was a shot heard all around the country music world, and beyond. Nobody expected him to win two of the evening’s biggest awards. At that moment, most country music fans didn’t even know who Chris Stapleton was. But they were about to find out.
Along with the big, unexpected wins, Chris Stapleton also performed “Tennessee Whiskey” on the CMA Awards stage with Justin Timberlake, and the rest is history. It arrested the entire American consciousness, and ten years later, “Tennessee Whiskey” remains one of the most popular songs in all of music—a 40-plus-year-old country song originally recorded by George Jones and David Allan Coe.
What was the magic sauce that put Chris Stapleton, “Tennessee Whiskey,” and Traveller on top? Remember, this was at the height of Bro-Country, and country music was at a crossroads. Would it be Florida Georgia Line representing the future of country music, or would it be the emerging Kentucky and Appalachia resurgence, spirited forward by the likes of Sturgill Simpson and others, and brought to the mainstream by Stapleton? CMA voters made their choice, and time has proven they made the right one.
Of course, there is plenty that is polarizing about the album, and Stapleton. Is it really legitimately country, or more soulful Americana? Why did he spell “Traveller” with two L’s instead of one? As we see all the time in independent/underground country music, as soon as Traveller became popular, it also became extremely polarizing. It was the pop country world co-opting the Kentucky resurgence, some surmised.
Chris Stapleton might have lost his street cred, but he also created a strong counter-balance to Bro-Country. He created a conduit for popular country fans to eventually discover artists like Sturgill Simpson, and later Tyler Childers and other Kentucky insurgents. Stapleton would go on to book artists like Brent Cobb and Marty Stuart as openers on his massive arena shows. Chris Stapleton and the success of Traveller was a catalyst for so many positive developments in country music, it’s hard to enumerate them all.
But unlike some other historical retrospectives, you really don’t need to sell the public on the significance of Traveller. They’re still feeling it. It’s still at the forefront of the American consciousness. Even here a decade after its release.