{"id":7611,"date":"2023-01-23T16:43:07","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T16:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=7611"},"modified":"2023-01-23T16:43:10","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T16:43:10","slug":"can-i-take-my-hounds-to-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/23\/can-i-take-my-hounds-to-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Singing with the Angels<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Tyler Childers\u2019s newest album builds up a joyful noise with multiple versions of old classic hymns, original songs, and the songwriter\u2019s own hillbilly universalist perspective.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Joseph Collum
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Dogs don\u2019t go to heaven. At least not according to Thomas Aquinas. If Aquinas is right about the canine afterlife, then there\u2019s one old boy who needs to start loading his dog box up and heading straight the Other Way.<\/p>

On his new album Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?<\/em>, 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\u2019s always honest and often profound musings on the afterlife.\u00a0<\/p>

Kentucky singer-songwriter Tyler Childers has been threatening an epic like Hounds <\/em>since at least 2017, when he broke out with Purgatory<\/em>, an album of drinking songs, love songs, murder ballads, and, in the case of \u201cBorn Again,\u201d redneck musings on reincarnation (in the artist\u2019s words). Since Purgatory,<\/em> Childers released the follow-up Country Squire<\/em> and, in the fall of 2020, Long Violent History<\/em>, 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?<\/em> brings that search for truth into the forefront and even comes up with some answers.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>

Hounds <\/em>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 \u201cHallelujah Version.\u201d Next comes the \u201cJubilee Version,\u201d a reimagining of the Hallelujah recordings with added strings and horns. \u201cHallelujah\u201d and \u201cJubilee\u201d make up the first one-and-a-half albums. The second full album is the \u201cJoyful Noise Version.\u201d For \u201cJoyful Noise\u201d Childers teamed up with Huntington, WV, based deejay and producer Charlie Brown Superstar to create remixes of the \u201cJubilee\u201d version. These tracks are less remixes than complete reinventions, unrecognizable under mountains of trap beats and audio archives.<\/p>

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 \u201cJoyful Noise\u201d are old field recordings of these services. Many, but not all. Childers also includes Mississippi funny man Jerry Clower saying, \u201cAnd we hollered three or four times and they started huntin\u2019,\u201d and, if you listen very closely, Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton says \u201cmaybe we can go get a Coke together\u201d at the close of a lecture.\u00a0 The cacophonous result of \u201cJoyful Noise\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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It\u2019s a straightforward laudation, calling for the Lord to use the singer for the Great Commission and then calling for it again.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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<\/em>. He opens with the Hank Williams standard \u201cThe Old Country Church,\u201d but, as he puts it, \u201cfunky.\u201d The song\u2019s narrator recounts the \u201cprecious years of memory\u201d 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 \u201cCan I Take My Hounds to Heaven?\u201d \u201cHounds\u201d 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 \u201cbut funky this time.\u201d \u201cHounds\u201d tells the story of a man whose wife has told him that if he\u2019ll quit drinking and hunting with his good-timing buddies he can live forever. The man responds, \u201cWell all that\u2019s fine and dandy\u2026. There\u2019s just one thing I need to know before I settle down: can I take my hounds to heaven? Can I hunt on God\u2019s ground?\u201d Childers follows up this question with another story of the rewards of a reformed life in Christ, a rendition of the Baptist hymnal number \u201cTwo Coats.\u201d<\/p>

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 \u201cPurgatory,\u201d Childers explores other possibilities. He admits that he\u2019s been known to \u201cdrink and love and smoke and snort\u201d his fill, but he (or the character) hasn\u2019t altogether rejected Christ as savior. He looks for a middle ground, and he finds it in the fictitious \u201cCatholic girl\u201d who just might get him into this crazy place called Purgatory. \u201cDo you reckon he lets Free Will boys mope around in Purgatory?\u201d he asks, then hollers, \u201cCatholic girl, pray for me, you\u2019re my only hope for heaven\u201d on the chorus\u2014a much simpler plea than Dante Alighieri\u2019s, but no less sincere.<\/p>

Following \u201cPurgatory,\u201d the album returns headlong into the holiness Baptist tradition with \u201cThe Way of the Triune God.\u201d Of the originals on the album, this track has the best case for inclusion in a hymnal. It\u2019s 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 \u201cJubilee Version,\u201d it\u2019s far from a cappella, with a horn arrangement that would be well at home on the New Orleans second line.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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He\u2019s a true confessor, a man working to find his own path to eternal life.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Childers closes Hounds <\/em>with the traditional \u201cJubilee\u201d and another original, \u201cThe Heart You\u2019ve Been Tendin\u2019.\u201d \u201cJubilee\u201d acts as a meditative mantra, looping the same musical pattern over all four minutes of the song. \u201cSwing and turn, jubilee, live and learn, jubilee,\u201d the lyrics go, asking the congregation to turn towards praise and gratitude in every moment of their lives. Childers follows \u201cJubilee\u201d with the slow-burning reminder that \u201call that you take\u201d into the Heaven the album has been contemplating \u201cis the heart you\u2019ve been tending.\u201d Tending like a garden, a thing of beauty, a thing that cries out to praise.<\/p>

Before the two final tracks, Childers rolls out the closest thing to a thesis statement Hounds <\/em>has in \u201cAngel Band.\u201d 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. \u201cThere\u2019s Hindus, Jews, and Muslims and Baptists of all kinds,\u201d he sings, \u201cCatholic girls and Amish boys who\u2019ve left their plows behind. They\u2019re up there in the choir singing side by side, wondering why exactly they\u2019ve been fussin\u2019 the whole time.\u201d These people all singing together is Childers\u2019 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 \u201cjoyful noise.\u201d \u201cI was blind, but now I see, and I\u2019ll jump right in amongst them, when I reach the glory land,\u201d Childers professes. In Hounds<\/em>, 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\u2019s a true confessor, a man working to find his own path to eternal life. And he might make it. He\u2019ll just have to convince St. Peter to let a couple of coonhounds in alongside him.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Joseph Collum<\/strong> 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\u2019s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph\u2019s University.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?<\/strong> was released on September 30, 2022. You can purchase a physical or digital copy from the artist here<\/a>. <\/em>
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Tyler Childers\u2019s newest album builds up a joyful noise with multiple versions of old classic hymns, original songs, and the songwriter\u2019s own hillbilly universalist perspective. 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