Singing with the Angels
Tyler Childers’s newest album builds up a joyful noise with multiple versions of old classic hymns, original songs, and the songwriter’s own hillbilly universalist perspective.
Review by Joseph Collum
Dogs don’t go to heaven. At least not according to Thomas Aquinas. If Aquinas is right about the canine afterlife, then there’s one old boy who needs to start loading his dog box up and heading straight the Other Way.
On his new album Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?, Tyler Childers places coon hunting, New Orleans jazz, holiness worship, trap beats, and Thomas Merton all right up next to each other. By some miracle, it works. These disparate pieces join into a pawn shop orchestra of Americana (in the truest sense of the word), backing up Childers’s always honest and often profound musings on the afterlife.
Kentucky singer-songwriter Tyler Childers has been threatening an epic like Hounds since at least 2017, when he broke out with Purgatory, an album of drinking songs, love songs, murder ballads, and, in the case of “Born Again,” redneck musings on reincarnation (in the artist’s words). Since Purgatory, Childers released the follow-up Country Squire and, in the fall of 2020, Long Violent History, an album of Appalachian fiddle music setting the sonic landscape for the title track, a sympathetic analysis of the racial reckoning of that year from the point of view of a white Eastern Kentucky native. Throughout all his work, Childers is after truth. Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? brings that search for truth into the forefront and even comes up with some answers.
Hounds is really 2.5 albums. It opens with a straightforward six-piece band recording of the eight tracks, a replica of the Tyler Childers and The Food Stamps live show. He calls this first version the “Hallelujah Version.” Next comes the “Jubilee Version,” a reimagining of the Hallelujah recordings with added strings and horns. “Hallelujah” and “Jubilee” make up the first one-and-a-half albums. The second full album is the “Joyful Noise Version.” For “Joyful Noise” Childers teamed up with Huntington, WV, based deejay and producer Charlie Brown Superstar to create remixes of the “Jubilee” version. These tracks are less remixes than complete reinventions, unrecognizable under mountains of trap beats and audio archives.
In interviews, Childers has said he wanted this version to feel like a holiness Baptist worship service, a style of worship in which folks holler out their prayers, one on top of the other, crying out to heaven like Old Testament prophets. Many of the archives in “Joyful Noise” are old field recordings of these services. Many, but not all. Childers also includes Mississippi funny man Jerry Clower saying, “And we hollered three or four times and they started huntin’,” and, if you listen very closely, Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton says “maybe we can go get a Coke together” at the close of a lecture. The cacophonous result of “Joyful Noise” sounds like Childers trying to break down the walls between heaven and earth, so that the angel band he hears can come right down and go hunting with him and his hounds.
It’s a straightforward laudation, calling for the Lord to use the singer for the Great Commission and then calling for it again.
The songs themselves on this album, while not exactly gospel songs, are certainly a little more than Christ-haunted. Childers was raised holiness Baptist and has said that Christianity is still the predominant influence in his personal theologies of the afterlife, the primary truth explored on Hounds. He opens with the Hank Williams standard “The Old Country Church,” but, as he puts it, “funky.” The song’s narrator recounts the “precious years of memory” spent in a little country church, probably not unlike the one Childers first experienced holiness worship in as a boy. The Booker T and the MGs-influenced clean electric guitar opens the next track, the title track “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?” “Hounds” has been a staple of The Food Stamps live show for years, but here Childers cleans it up, changing some lyrics with the move from the honky tonk to the church, and once again following his guiding command of “but funky this time.” “Hounds” tells the story of a man whose wife has told him that if he’ll quit drinking and hunting with his good-timing buddies he can live forever. The man responds, “Well all that’s fine and dandy…. There’s just one thing I need to know before I settle down: can I take my hounds to heaven? Can I hunt on God’s ground?” Childers follows up this question with another story of the rewards of a reformed life in Christ, a rendition of the Baptist hymnal number “Two Coats.”
Up to this point, Childers follows the standard salvation terminology he grew up with, that is, certain admittance into Heaven based on the acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior, and certain admittance into Hell under any other circumstances. On the track “Purgatory,” Childers explores other possibilities. He admits that he’s been known to “drink and love and smoke and snort” his fill, but he (or the character) hasn’t altogether rejected Christ as savior. He looks for a middle ground, and he finds it in the fictitious “Catholic girl” who just might get him into this crazy place called Purgatory. “Do you reckon he lets Free Will boys mope around in Purgatory?” he asks, then hollers, “Catholic girl, pray for me, you’re my only hope for heaven” on the chorus—a much simpler plea than Dante Alighieri’s, but no less sincere.
Following “Purgatory,” the album returns headlong into the holiness Baptist tradition with “The Way of the Triune God.” Of the originals on the album, this track has the best case for inclusion in a hymnal. It’s a straightforward laudation, calling for the Lord to use the singer for the Great Commission and then calling for it again, but this time in a round, with his bandmates singing different praises on top of his. He wrote the song, he says, a cappella, basing it off a Bobby Lomax recording of the black gospel group The Georgia Sea Island Singers. By the time it reaches its completion on the “Jubilee Version,” it’s far from a cappella, with a horn arrangement that would be well at home on the New Orleans second line.
He’s a true confessor, a man working to find his own path to eternal life.
Childers closes Hounds with the traditional “Jubilee” and another original, “The Heart You’ve Been Tendin’.” “Jubilee” acts as a meditative mantra, looping the same musical pattern over all four minutes of the song. “Swing and turn, jubilee, live and learn, jubilee,” the lyrics go, asking the congregation to turn towards praise and gratitude in every moment of their lives. Childers follows “Jubilee” with the slow-burning reminder that “all that you take” into the Heaven the album has been contemplating “is the heart you’ve been tending.” Tending like a garden, a thing of beauty, a thing that cries out to praise.
Before the two final tracks, Childers rolls out the closest thing to a thesis statement Hounds has in “Angel Band.” The first two verses of this track describe an old man praising in the pew and a young girl screaming and stomping and also, in her own way, praising, in the aisle. In the third verse, he brings these two and the whole world together in his hillbilly universalism. “There’s Hindus, Jews, and Muslims and Baptists of all kinds,” he sings, “Catholic girls and Amish boys who’ve left their plows behind. They’re up there in the choir singing side by side, wondering why exactly they’ve been fussin’ the whole time.” These people all singing together is Childers’ view of Heaven. Everyone who has reason to praise and the humility to do so all praising at once, shouting over each other but together just the same, truly making a “joyful noise.” “I was blind, but now I see, and I’ll jump right in amongst them, when I reach the glory land,” Childers professes. In Hounds, he creates a complete vision of the afterlife, centered in his Christian upbringing but extending beyond it both in his sound and in his philosophy. He’s a true confessor, a man working to find his own path to eternal life. And he might make it. He’ll just have to convince St. Peter to let a couple of coonhounds in alongside him.
Joseph Collum is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master’s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph’s University.
Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? was released on September 30, 2022. You can purchase a physical or digital copy from the artist here.
