Songs about Real Life: "Charleston Girl"

Appreciating a gem from Tyler Childers

Tyler Childers in 2016

Tyler Childers, who has become extremely famous in the last few years due to TikTok, is one of the best songwriters working today. He’s a down-South genius who comes from real down-South stock; his father worked the coal mines in Eastern Kentucky, a subject area that Childers mined to great success in his earlier work. His oeuvre—which is wide-ranging, with tremendous peaks—deserves a fuller treatment from me at some point. For now, I just want to talk about one song: “Charleston Girl,” from 2016.

Like many of Childers’ songs from the era, this is an up-tempo country song with a driving bluegrass beat & injected with a good bit of free-wheeling Appalachian folk sound. It shares more than a little DNA with the music of another, less-famous country artist: Sierra Ferrell. I mention Ferrell for a reason: this song is about her.

Charleston girl in a darkened room

And you don't know her like I do

We took the fire escape to her room

And got stone-raging blind

When Childers wrote the song, he was on the verge of releasing his breakout album. He was also active in the Charleston country-music scene, performing shows and drinking with the raucous crowds. Ferrell was active in the same scene; she was also from Charleston, born and raised, and had an apartment with a fire escape nearby the Blue Parrot music venue.

I don't know if it's the wine or the coke

That makes her sound like her jaw is broke

She's working hard to make some sense

But she ain't got a dime

Childers and Ferrell were drinking, doing drugs, and then the night took a turn for the worse. It’s unfortunate that she had to be written about like this, a drive-by victim of some casually cruel lyrics in a phenomenal song. But such are the risks of hanging out with songwriters. Some of the bite is taken out later in the song, when he makes her sound quite beautiful.

Charleston girl with raven hair

Bloodshot eyes and skin so fair

I believe if I could find my keys

I'd try to drive away

I never planned to leave so soon

If you get over the references to substance abuse, you realize that Ferrell is being portrayed here as something more than a drug user. She’s a force of nature, a whirlwind of beauty and freedom and bad decisions. And she’s terrifying.

All I know is that when I am good and sober

I am leavin' West Virginia for a while

Don't know why but every time I cross that river

Lord, there's somethin' tears me up, makes me wild

The chorus of this song is what truly elevates it to greatness. Childers takes on a soaring, wistful tune; his stretched out, Southern phrasing makes “a while” go one for—well—a while. It’s so anthemic, so touching, that a relatively mean-spirited song—in which he writes about wanting to get away from a drugged-up girl who can’t talk straight—is rescued, transformed into something deeply empathetic and true. Ultimately, we realize that this song isn’t about Sierra Ferrell.

It’s about Tyler Childers, a boy from Kentucky, who, when he wrote this song, was about five years into a brutally difficult, non-lucrative career as a country artist and struggling with addiction. “That river” refers to the Big Sandy River, which runs along the border between eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. And that border reflects the border between Childers’ two lives at the time—the rowdy country singer in West Virginia, and the sober, hardworking boy from Kentucky. This is deeply Isbell, deeply Zach Bryan, deeply Townes: geography as moral dichotomy. The self as something torn.