Accepting the 2018 Americana Music Honors award for Emerging Artist of the Year, Tyler Childers used the microphone to declare himself a country singer and call the Americana label a costume and a purgatory. This episode unpacks the conviction behind that moment, starting in Lawrence County, Kentucky, where he was born in 1991 to a coal industry father and a nurse mother, endured surgeries for clubfoot as a small child, sang in a church choir, and wrote his first song at 13.

We follow him from Paintsville High School and a short college run through the Lexington and Huntington bar circuit, the 2011 debut Bottles and Bibles, the Red Barn Radio sessions, and the 2017 breakthrough Purgatory produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson. Then the harder chapters: 11 years of drinking and drugs on the road, his last beer the day before a Febru ...