“All Your’n”
Tyler Childers
Written by Tyler Childers
2019
As the first single from his Country Squire album, “All Your’n” made it clear that Tyler Childers wasn’t going to be bound by anyone’s expectations. He’d cultivated a sizable following in the wake of fellow Kentuckians Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson with his straight-from-the-holler brand of country, and then he went and busted out an arrangement that sounded like it was pulled from the Stax vaults.
The southern gospel piano licks and the heavy Hammond organ are a far cry from Childers’ earlier records, but he and Simpson, who produced the album, understand that country, at its best, is also a form of soul music. The production immediately pissed off genre purists who were so incensed by the instrumentation– not to put too fine a point on it, but the throwback production sounds like what would’ve charted on the “Race Records” charts– that they missed the single’s deep connection to country conventions.
Childers’ inimitable singing style finds him wailing and hollering about how, “I’ll love you ‘til my lungs give out,” with such gusto that it sounds like he’s actually trying to get his lungs to do just that. And there’s simply no songwriter to emerge in this era who’s better at deploying the idiosyncratic syntax of the “hollers” of Appalachia. He might sing about “fried morels and fine hotels” here, and he might throw in some show-offy internal rhyme (“Goddess in my Days Inn pen / The muse, I ain’t refusin’”), but Childers is never more than a line or two away from code-switching back to the vernacular of his birthright.
Not that “authenticity” matters, but it’s his masterful use of language that proves how Tyler Childers is always true to himself, no matter how far he is outside of Louisa, Kentucky, and no matter if he’s courted an audience that counts the likes of Olivia Rodrigo among his devoted fans. There’s rarely been a more perfect hook in a country love song than his simple, “I’m all your’n, and you’re all mine.”
Additional Listening:
Three more essential singles by Childers
- “A Long Violent History,” which sets an empathetic take on the Black Lives Matter movement to a traditional folk song structure
- “Angel Band,” a purposeful– and misunderstood– tribute to the life and music of “Doctor” Ralph Stanley.
- “In Your Love,” Childers’ second-best love song.
Country Universe: A 20th Anniversary Retrospective
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