Poor Men West of Richmond

Our first night in eastern Kentucky, a storm seemed hammered to the patch of sky above our little rental house, throwing down six hours of sheet lightning, sheet rain, and sheet thunder in a steady, unabated roar. I spent much of the night wandering from window to window, waiting for the tornado to hit.

The morning pretended that nothing had happened, with all the greenness of May lighting the hollows, and every creek running cocoa brown about an inch below its flood banks. Our weather had been merely the leading edge of a huge front moving northeast at high speed. The tornadoes were spawned along the trailing edge of the storm, with one big EF4 tornado killing nineteen people some two hours southwest, around London and Somerset. Local residents went on about their business with no mention of the night, and so did we.

Our business was to spend some time in Inez, ten miles west of the West Virginia border. Friends who knew my husband Jason’s and my shared passion for roots music had called our attention to the Rural Revival Project Street Festival Series, founded and hosted by Chris Lunsford and team. Lunsford – stage name (and grandfather’s name) Oliver Anthony – the Virginian who rocketed to fame in August 2023 when his "Rich Men North of Richmond" hit social media and blew up in all directions, is the first artist to independently record a song and go directly from no-name to multi-week Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper. He explained it this way:

I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’re being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar.

Oliver Anthony in concert, Spruce Pine, North Carolina, April 2025. Photograph by Oran O’Carroll. Used by permission.

Anthony reportedly walked away from an eight-million-dollar contract with the music industry, wary of turning onto a one-way highway with no off-ramp. His goals diverged from Nashville’s in a way that must have puzzled the agents salivating to sign on this very tall man with a very orange beard. “So many views!” one can imagine them calculating. “Such charisma! Let us help you get to where you want to go!” As it turns out, he didn’t want to go anywhere:

If I deleted all my social media accounts, and I just wrote songs and uploaded them, and hid out in the woods for the rest of my life, just the interest off the money I’ve made already would at least buy my groceries and keep my family comfortable, and that means a lot to me… To not owe anything to a bank or to another man, to just have my land and a house with a roof that doesn’t leak, and a place that I can grow a garden, and raise a few cows and sheep, and be alive. To try to live my life the way my grandparents lived their lives… I despise the way this world’s headed. And I want to be out here, away from it. 

“Out here, away from it,” may be south of Richmond in western Virginia to Anthony. It could as well be eastern Kentucky – part of the Ohio River Valley territory violently contested in the French and Indian War, then annexed by governor Patrick Henry as a county of Virginia in 1776, in time to join the Revolutionary War. There are descendants here who can trace their heritage back to those musket-toting times.

A visitor might be excused for thinking that no one in 250 years could map these endless green hollows and ridges. But people here have always known this landscape like they know the contours of their gunstocks. They know where the coal mines are closed over; they know whose house was uprooted by mudslides and slung into a gully this last March. They know the jeep trails, the deer trails, and the dead-end gravel roads that just disappear into forest. They know the big four-lane highways that lead up to their small towns, and right past them. 

Now there is sparse traffic; the occasional quad cruises through, slaloming between lanes. Coal trucks used to run these roads at speeds that didn’t acknowledge the validity of a stop sign; people still remember coal chunks flying off the top of the loads fast enough to crack a windshield. But then coal went, and nothing replaced it.

At the concert, I bumped into someone – literally – we jostled shoulders in the crowd, and it turned into friendship at first collision. After shouting an opening round of questions, we traded numbers so as to catch up later, in a more audible setting.

Monica told us she has been an EMT and first responder for fire and water rescue all her adult life, in and around the border town of Louisa. But there came a time when she could not face the urgent calls to the same sad addresses, to administer Narcan yet again to the same sad souls. She calls her region one of the hubs of the opioid epidemic.

There's needles in the streets, folks hardly survivin’
Sidewalks next to highways full of cars self-drivin’
The poor keep hurtin' the rich keep thrivin’
Doggonit.
—Oliver Anthony

Monica said she flamed out for a while – it’s hard to pick up your own hope every day in the face of relentless hopelessness. Now she’s putting herself back through school, studying for a degree in Theology with a focus on biblical counseling in Appalachian ministry. “I’m working on making a different type of difference these days.” The day after the concert, she took us to her energetic nondenominational church in Louisa, and then all around the surrounding countryside, occasionally rerouting for downed trees or rock-falls spilling over road shoulders. Under one cliffside, a rock big enough to pancake a pickup casually reclined on the verge. Five small traffic cones surrounded it, a sort of pitiful “Warning: Contents may settle.”

Road damage caused by February 2025 flooding. Photograph by Maureen Swinger.   

Nearing her house, we noted what looks like a large truck fender twenty feet up in a tree. A creek curves around the back of her home and a pond waits just on the other side of the road out front. She and her husband are quite used to having their small hilltop turn into an island every now and then. They are equipped for at least some days of isolation and powerlessness. She was nonchalant: “So many people have it worse.”

Much of Oliver Anthony’s upbringing was a stark reminder of the people who have it worse: childhood post-hurricane memories include driving to a gas station to pick up gasoline for their generator:

There were literally people out fist-fighting over a gas pump, a line wrapped all the way around the building, and I realized then… that our society is so fragile that we can go two days without gasoline, and people are willing to fist-fight at the pump over it. Imagine if you don’t get groceries for a week, or if the power grid goes down.

But it doesn’t take a hurricane to tip the system. In July 2022, this part of Kentucky was hit by a “thousand-year flood” (one in one thousand chances of occurring in any given year). Torrential rain raised the rivers while simultaneously causing flash floods in strip-mined, shallow-soiled gullies and washes that became rivers in their own right. The roads run in tandem with the creeks, constructed long ago along the path of least resistance in this hilly terrain. They were inaccessible in the space of a day.

The executive director of the Housing Development Alliance reported: “creeks that normally run a few inches deep were thirty-five feet deep and raging, which was enough force to carry an 1100-square-foot house down the river for about a quarter mile and set it on top of a bridge.” Entire communities were swept away; the death toll was the highest documented in the area in almost a century.

Two years later, families were still displaced and wreckage still being salvaged when Hurricane Helene lumbered through with high winds and heavy rain, sending trees into power lines and cars into creeks. 

Then, this February, a winter storm dumped more than a month’s worth of rain in twenty-four hours onto semi-frozen ground. Martin County news reported over 200 people stranded in two housing complexes, waiting to be ferried out by helicopter and boat. More than 300 roads were out of commission, and ten bridges were reported completely washed away. Then a second storm bestowed a layer of snow over flooded homes and towns without power.

From our country’s great capital, these Kentucky counties are all but invisible, except when an occasional magnanimous gesture is called for. The town of Inez was once blessed with a historic presidential visit when Lyndon B. Johnson’s helicopter landed in an abandoned mini-golf course just out of town. It was 1964, and he was here to garner support for his new initiative, the War on Poverty.

Local reporter Lee Mueller noted that the “locals didn't know their role in this new, domestic war.” But the White House needed a face for their agenda, and Martin County was it. In the ’60s, this coal-mining area had a poverty rate of 60 percent. But then, LBJ was gone, and the county remained – and still is – one of the poorest in the country – a green and beautiful Appalachian food and employment desert. 

Inez’s city commissioner Jennifer Wells loves her town fiercely. Even though its population hovers around 500 people, it is the county seat, and she’s proud of its survival strength. In later conversations, we hear about the systems Inez has set in place to mitigate opioid suffering – “The rationale behind these measures is harm reduction – we can’t make people stop using. But we can protect them and our community in the best ways possible, by offering needle exchanges to prevent infections, providing safer waste management, and free Narcan in efforts to reduce overdose deaths.”

Jennifer has worked with the Rural Revival Project team to launch this free concert, a prequel to a bigger RRP event they hope to host here in the near future. By noon, folks are unfolding lawn chairs in front of the sound stage set between the handsome old Martin County Courthouse and the high waters of Coldwater Fork, not exactly meandering through town.

A crowd begins to gather for the free concert in Inez, May 17, 2025. Photograph by Maureen Swinger.

As the first local musician of a long line-up steps off the stage – his parting words, “Love your neighbor; watch for deer,” – Jennifer takes time to walk us through the worst of February’s storm, and the National Guard’s efforts to fly stranded residents out of local housing complexes to safety. While the next singer strikes up a jaunty tune (the only person I’ve ever heard fitting “methamphetamine” flawlessly into his lyrics), the commissioner comments that townspeople and other Kentuckians turned out in greater force than the National Guard. In fact, they helped rescue a Guard’s jeep that had flipped in the flood. Savage Freedoms Ops were doing airdrops, and a local equine therapy farm sent its staff on horseback into hard-to-reach hollows.

Jennifer is called away, so Jason and I grab another water – it’s ninety-two degrees on the tarmac now – and cheer the banjo player from the next town over, who musically informs us that he’s “at peace with Mother Nature and in trouble with the law.”

RRP’s project developer and cofounder, Brian Prentice, joins us for an hour, describing the beginnings of the Rural Revival Project and Anthony’s goal to use Richmond money to benefit the people who populate his songs. Buying several abandoned farms in Virginia, the team is working to convert them into places where, as Anthony envisions:

…people can learn to can food, to raise animals – people who have just gotten out of rehab, vets with PTSD, people who are depressed and suicidal, can come and get reconnected with nature… learn how to exist outside of a system that’s been placed on us as a generation.

Brian described these farm beginnings as one of three facets in RRP ventures; another is the commitment to bring music and action to forgotten towns, and the third is the celebration of faith. And that part is the job of itinerant pastor Michael Moore, a big, jovial presence who has joined the Oliver Anthony band in gatherings such as the recent concert and celebration at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, attended by 3500 people. Pastor Moore’s job is to find a local church for the Sunday sermon, and remind concert-goers that prayer, music, faith, and action go together. He told us that the Spruce Pine service was rousing, including an altar call and multiple baptisms.

Oliver Anthony Concert, Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Photograph by Oran O’Carroll. Used by permission.

The Rural Revival Project is seeking out what some might consider unusual concert venues. In Anthony’s words:

We’re going to do these shows in towns that have not had music in them in a long time, in towns and cities and counties that are in a financial deficit, a population deficit. My goal is to bring positive economic impact to rural parts of this country that desperately need it, where traditions still exist, where normal people still live…

For these normal people, tickets are (as of this writing) thirty dollars each; no charge for children. The Oliver Anthony band made a conscious decision to dodge the likes of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, with their (often) 75 percent service charge over the price of a ticket:

We’re just going to go set up… maybe on a main street, maybe in an old factory parking lot. We’re going to have local vendors, and local musicians opening the show. It is going to be a communal event… I don’t want you to pay twelve or thirteen dollars for a beer. I don’t want you to pay twenty dollars to park. I don’t want you to deal with some rent-a-cop asshole kicking you out of a show because you were dancing too much or singing too loud.

The crowd at the Inez concert looked to be about 1000 people, sprawled in lawn chairs, perched on curbs, standing packed at the back. After eight hours of local music, the Oliver Anthony band hit the stage, and the energy amped up a few hundred joules. I was near the front, hit by the full blast of both band and crowd. We got furious songs and sly comic ones, songs drowning in drink and songs (true, in Anthony’s case) about getting and staying sober. Some of these songs were written from a place of despair, and some from almost unreasoning hope – or perhaps not so unreasoning if God shows up in the lyrics.

I’m just an old soul stuck livin’ in the new world
And I know there’s still a whole lotta people like me
And I pray to God up above and hope He’ll be comin’ soon enough
Savin’ old soul stuck livin’ in the new world. 
—Oliver Anthony

Someone who quotes Ecclesiastes between tracks isn’t doing it for effect. He’s daring to put some trust in one who will be coming “soon enough.”

It’s also apparent who this songwriter doesn’t trust. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have tried to lay claim to one song or another in Anthony’s repertoire, but he has been adamant that he approves of neither red nor blue:

It seems like both sides serve the same master, and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.

Valley outside of Inez, May 17, 2025. Photograph by Maureen Swinger.

Offstage or on, Chris Lunsford/Oliver Anthony doesn’t try to cultivate a glamorous persona or cater to the ratings. He’s very honest about his failings, his faith that has faltered at times, his struggles to live honorably and truthfully. It’s disconcerting, in our culture, to encounter a celebrity who doesn’t go in for self-celebration. 

If I’m gonna make this money off of "Richmond"… and I don’t have any dumb shit to spend it on like a Lamborghini or a big boat, or a house in the Bahamas or any of that crap, then I might as well spend it to try to do some good, try to create something that exists long after I’m gone.

If there’s anything that exists after a man is gone, it’s his music. I think of Woodie Guthrie’s "Pastures of Plenty, Deportee", and the one most familiar to Americans – "This Land Is Your Land" – although most performers conveniently drop the verses that allude to our land’s problems head on:

By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

Around 11:00 p.m., most of the concert crowds were gone, and the band members were leaning up against the edge of the stage, passing drinks around.  Chris’s big black dog said "hi" first, and then he did, so we ended up talking music for a while, while some of the other band members (Joey Davis – guitar, Peter Wellman – bass and keyboard, Noel Burton – drums) added their thoughts and passed around the Why We Make Music issue of Plough.

I said it’s been a long time since we’ve seen someone reclaim the storytelling power of roots music, folk songs, and the way they tell stories about us: the good times, the hard times, and what to do about it all. So much of what currently passes for music on the airwaves is reductive, even petty, in its self-absorption. Both genres are called music, but why do they – and their composers – seem to occupy alternate universes?

Chris thought for a moment, and came back with:

We’ve got to try to get all the commoditized stuff out of the middle of it. Right now, music has become a big marketplace… everyone listens to some kind of music. There’s an example I’ve heard people give that I like: any of these uncontacted tribes that people meet and research have a rich history of song from their beginnings. So, music is something that’s a part of us, just like breathing. It unlocks parts of our brains – you can listen to a song, and it unlocks these memories you would never have remembered. It’s a lot deeper than surface-level entertainment, like modern pop. I think reclaiming it is just giving people the idea that music is an important part of our psychology and our existence, not just a thing to make money, or to be famous.

Some may call Oliver Anthony a reluctant hero, or an angry one. I believe that any kind of hero at all is the last thing he wants to be. When the words first hit the paper and the fingers hit the strings, they were amplifying the voices of thousands – millions – of forgotten people, the “nobodies” who have been invisible for so long, they can hardly see themselves anymore. 

I won’t soon forget the sound of the entire audience, down to the five-year-old falling out of his chair behind me, shout-singing along to "Rich Men North of Richmond." Every last word.

It's a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me, people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is oh, it is.
—Oliver Anthony

This is where the corporate music industry gets it wrong. It’s programmed to train a spotlight on the giant with the fiery beard: he’s different, he’s distinctive – look at all those likes and shares! But do they ever ask themselves why these songs resonate with so many? To shine a spotlight on just the one man is to automatically send all those nobodies back to nowhere. 

Oliver Anthony Concert, Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Photograph by James Luke Barber. Used by permission.

We’ve gotten used to the myth-making machine which so efficiently turns a person into a product. The pedestal is just wide enough for one person – The Voice, singular; American Idol, singular.

The voice of an idol doesn’t call for anything more than worship, but voices of people – strong, faltering, determined, human – are capable of generating action.

Whether we hear these voices on YouTube or on a small-town stage, the message doesn’t change. There’s so much in this country that needs fixing. Worshipers may not be aware that there’s any work to be done. Workers see something broken and know it’s on them to fix it.

Learn more about Oliver Anthony Music, the Rural Revival Project, and its accompanying Leave It Better initiative.