“Y’all that rock n’ roll band with that blasphemous name?”
“I guess so,” I muttered as I pushed my amp into a bar that looked like it was only for fighting and crying, not a six piece loud rock band with lyrics about keychains trivializing 9/11 and messiahs dressed in drag. With my back to him, I heard the baby boomer reply, “Yeah, I was raised Pentecostal before I got wild.” Without turning around I said, “Well, I was too I guess in some ways.” “No, sh*t?” “Yeah, my dad preaches and my mom teaches Sunday school.” “Well…. sh*t. Ain’t that some kind of mess.”
I wanted to write about this some kind of mess called The Holy Ghost Electric Show, about our next album, and our place in the south. We’re a band from Oxford in Northeast Mississippi, a small college town tucked away in the last bumps of the Appalachians. It’s the home of The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), William Faulkner, and an obsession with a certain gas station’s chicken on a skewer. It’s where a young black man named James Meredith entered the university while the white populace protested and rioted. It’s a place where Confederate symbolism and romanticism are justified and a part of daily life. It’s where we call home and have tried to carve out a place for our music. I love where I’m from very much, and I will be the first to stand up for it in a conversation. I proudly wear my home and accent, yet I’m at odds with my home more than I am not. If the subject is brought up, I’m told to leave if I want to change my home even though I love it. Everyone in the HGES feels this way so we have a dream to make an album about what we think it means to be from the rural south in post-9/11. To live in a time that is so connected to everything yet in a place so isolated from everything. More about that later, I want you to get to know us better before I preach to you.
“We can’t afford it, Cody. We can’t really even afford New York.”
Austin shrugged. I thought about the lost colony as we argued in Roanoke, Virginia, and I wondered if our journey was as foolish as theirs. We were on our way to Woodstock, New York to record a few songs with Simone Felice. We were going to walk on hallowed ground. Would we slowly disappear leaving our clangs and rhymes behind to be our “Croatoan”? We both have been clanging and rhyming together a long time. Holy Ghost Electric Show started in a cabin on my parents’ property. My dad started building this cabin for my mom the day after they were married in November 1979. My wife and I later lived our first year of marriage in this cabin. It was a simple 2 room cabin where the band hid from the world and started making sounds until they took some shape that we liked. We started on the streets when we wanted to start playing live. Playing in front of malls, in parking lots, houses, and in parks. We knew how to go into “Amazing Grace” or “Glory, Glory” quicker than you could blink if we caught a whiff of a police officer. Most of the time they assumed you were “doin’ no harm” if they heard church songs. We got gigs at actual venues every once in awhile in those early days but we spent most of our time in that cabin enjoying our music carefree and without judgment, away from the world. How long ago was that? It felt like a lifetime ago that night in the 10 degrees of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I have watched my brother in blood, Jake, my brothers in arms, Will Shirley, Dylan Van Zile, and Connor Wroten grow, toil, and sacrifice so much along with Austin and me. We aren’t special for suffering. Many, if not most, bands do. Like the apostle Paul wrote to the ancient Corinthians “love suffers long…” sometimes it feels longer than other times. I thought about these things while I looked at my frustrated friend and it filled up my heart. We both left that conversation where we found it and went to our room. It was New Years Eve and the next day was the 18th anniversary of Townes Van Zandt’s death. We rode over the Virginia state line earlier to “For The Sake of a Song” by Van Zandt. Part of me viewed it as an omen of sorts. As I laid down on the blessing of a bed, I thought about that song. I thought about the sake of a song and what that truly meant. What have I done for the sake of a song? What have I asked from those around me for the sake of a song? My wife lay beside me already asleep. She met me at a show in Tupelo, Mississippi where I got in the crowd singing at the top of my cracked voice and blowing on the harmonica. She’s been beside me ever since. That was five years ago. I’ve told her we aren’t getting groceries a few times in those five years. I’ve told her we can’t pay bills more than a few times in those five years. I wondered if she thought about these things as much as I did.
Van Zandt killed himself for the sake of a song.
What were we sacrificing for the sake of a song?
In that moment of questioning everything I said in a whisper, “Happy New Year from Virginia and this 40 dollar hotel room everybody.”
No one replied. Everyone was already asleep tired from driving all day I suppose. As I lay there with no reply I thought about why I do this if it causes so much frustration, strain, and confusion to everyone, including myself. Why do I sing songs? I thought about all the powerful songs that made me feel something. It shook me to my core to think about all the wonderful albums and artists that inspired me and gave me hope and hard truths. Those were things I needed so desperately when I was just a boy in the country with no real direction in my life. Songs gave me belief. That’s why I sing songs. The south may be the Bible belt, but outside of God and hell, there isn’t much room left for belief by most. That’s when the core concept of our next album hit me as the wind did when I got up to write in my notebook in the van with the idea racing through my brain. I scribbled “belief” and “the south” in my notebook and hurried back inside.
Belief. That’s how, that’s why, and that’s it.
I welcomed in the New Year with my own personal revelation.
Most southerners live in defeat. They have since the Civil War.
It consumes everything from the car tags at flea markets that picture the old confederate saying “Forget? Hell!”, to the us vs them mentality preached by our elected officials. Everyone’s dad is a confederate reenactor and the newspapers always have a “This Day in History” section that is just history from the Civil War. The past, defeat is ever present from the delta to the capitol building, yet the future is nowhere to be found. This overwhelming fog in the southeast mixed with the fundamentalism idea of sin, Satan, and hell ingrained into our culture creates a place where anything new, foreign, or not easily understood is a sin or agenda while the past is glorified. Stubbornness doesn’t attract jobs, art, literature, good politics, and the others things that sustain a culture. The youth are told that they are corrupt, that they are the sinners, that they are the troublemakers and are hassled whenever they try to make fun in a town with nowhere for them to be young. They’ll wander the Wal-Mart parking lot for hours at night waiting for something interesting to happen. Many become self-fulfilling prophecies. The young either leave because of this culture, get trapped, or stay and hope. That’s why belief is so important in a place like Mississippi. That is why those songs that gave me belief are so important. This is where the heart of this next album lies and what makes it important. Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers, The Duke & The King) will be coming to Mississippi to produce this next record. It’s really surreal to have one of your heroes in the world of music want to be a part of your music, much less believe in it. We are going to say the ugly truths and the beautiful truths in that studio. The grey area between the wine colored, tear stained pulpit and the bar stool covered with stickers from out of town bands.
As you can imagine, such an endeavor is not cheap so we are trying to raise funds. I’m sorry to tell a story and throw out my hand to ask for money, but please believe me when I say I hate every second of it. I hate asking for money from friends, family, and strangers. I hate begging on social media. I hate when people cannot donate, but want to because that makes them feel guilty. I hate when people do donate because it makes me feel guilty. No matter how many rewards we offer or promises we make, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. With that being said, we have no idea what else to do other than ask for help. We are now two weeks away from this album and we still need help. We are not some spur of the moment college band made after we left home built on a trust fund. We are a six man rock band made up of friends mostly from the country with empty pockets trying to share what makes us feel and what makes us believe.
My name is Cody Rogers and I cut my teeth on the Tishomingo rock. I was shaped by the red clay mud. I’m the son of a crooked letter turned preacher and a mother that kept a quiet pride and loud heart. I could not be more thankful for my upbringing, my surroundings, and the people that are a part of where I come from. There are beautiful people, places, and things in the south every day waiting to be discovered, but it’s hard for most people to look beyond where they currently are. I refuse to accept the chains my ancestors chose or the grudges they passed down. I do not fear the boogymen made up by the governor, the media, or the pulpit. I believe in a better South. This next album will be a proclamation of that. A proclamation to remind myself what I believe and why I write songs. A proclamation to all the bullies and money for the old south. A proclamation that will hopefully inspire someone like I was to believe.
Long live never ending porches and never ending brotherhood.
Long live word dripping with accents and hearts dripping with love.
Long live The South.
Long live Holy Ghost Electric Show.
ramblingsofrogers 
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