Like the prophets of biblical times, music artists have often found it hard to gain acceptance in the places they came from. There is a heartbreaking scene in the documentary Every Night’s A Saturday Night: The Bobby Keys Story where the sax player famous for his time in The Rolling Stones sits outside his former high school, unable to bring himself to go to his old classmates’ reunion decades after leaving his small town of Slaton, Texas. Another example is my home town’s native son, Don Gibson, who left Shelby, North Carolina being thought of as pretty much a nobody that dropped out of school in the second grade before he went on to become a successful artist and one of the most celebrated song writers in country music history.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd could be the exception that proves this rule: she left her homeplace (which is even smaller than both Shelby and Slaton) and went on to make her first album while residing in Brooklyn, New York, however this success is celebrated rather than ignored back home in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. This experience, along with the loss of family and friends and her own struggle to come of age in a world where optimism is hard to come by provides the backdrop for her country and Americana based album Loose Cannon.

In this episode you will hear Olivia talk about her intriguing backstory and how she finds herself thriving in a much different place than where she grew up while she still embraces her homeplace, how she has a knack for bringing our worst impulses to life in a song, and much more, including music from her album Loose Cannon.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy this episode and will tell someone you know about it. You can follow this series on most every platform where you can find podcasts. And once you do, it helps even more when you give it a good rating and a review. Spreading awareness by giving this series a top rating, and even more so with a review, will make Southern Songs and Stories and the artists it profiles more likely to be found by more people just like you. Southern Songs and Stories is a part of the podcast lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available here. You can also hear new episodes of this podcast on Bluegrass Planet Radio here. Thanks to Corrie Askew for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng, who wrote and performed our theme songs. This is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it. - Joe Kendrick

Songs heard in this episode:

“High & Lonesome” by Olivia Ellen Lloyd from Loose Cannon

“Sorrow” by Olivia Ellen Lloyd from Loose Cannon, excerpt

“Emily” by Olivia Ellen Lloyd from Loose Cannon, excerpt

“The West” by Olivia Ellen Lloyd, from Loose Cannon