MEET BILLY STRINGS, THE BLUEGRASS REVOLUTIONARY WHO SINGS “ABOUT METH, NOT MINING”.
IF IT’S 10am in Pittsburgh, then it must be breakfast bong o’clock. Tousle-haired bluegrass sensation Billy Strings lights a cone, coughs a first-of-the-day cough, and tells MOJO all about his childhood growing up in a crack house.
Strings’ father William died of a heroin overdose when Billy Jr was two, he smoked his first joint – stolen off his grandad – when he was eight, and the first time he tried crack was with his mother, Debra. Debra and his stepdad Terry, a fine guitarist, liked to party and in the tiny rural town of Muir, Michigan, the party was usually at their house.
“I grew up with tweakers crashing on the couch and getting hauled off by police the next morning,” the 29-year-old says without judgement. But he also grew up playing guitar to get attention and respect from his parents, picking to anything on the radio and learning bluegrass from Terry. It was around a campfire that the then-William Apostol was dubbed Billy Strings by an honorary aunt. “I was maybe 10, sitting on a cooler at the fire, playing with the others, she just looked over and went, ‘Well look at Billy Strings’.
When I started playing open mike nights I thought I needed a stage name to put on the blackboard.
Didn’t occur to me Billy Apostol was already a pretty good stage name.”
As a teenager, the family’s lifestyle swallowed him too – “Heroin, crack, pills, I didn’t really care” – with a dead end of couch surfing, truancy and drugs the keynotes to his likely short life. Encouraged by a schoolfriend’s mother, he got out and eventually landed in Nashville.
Other than his astonishing, breakneck playing, Strings’ reputation rests on his willingness to undermine bluegrass traditions. Hence songs’ Black Sabbath-style riffs and pop structures, and a collaboration with OTT hip-hopper RMR . But his true subversion is more subtle. For instance, Dust In A Baggie, about a friend who got 20 years for meth possession, sounds traditional, but it’s a very modern parable.
“I’m not a miner’s son and my family don’t come from West Virginia. Sorry, but they’re tweakers from Michigan so I’ll sing about meth, not mining.”
Renewal, the follow-up to his Grammy-winning second album Home, continues to evolve the recently-betrothed Strings’ music with a new tenderness and optimism. Where he previously sang of living in extreme jeopardy, now he’s looking forward. As an extension of his new-found purview, Strings returned to his old elementary school in Muir recently and gifted a guitar to every pupil, his first step towards a possible future charitable foundation.
“Y’know,” he says, sucking in a final cone, “if one of those guitars helps just one of those kids get out from the kind of cloud I was under, then that’s redemption right there.”
“These Bluegrass Boys were thugs, they looked fucking gangsta.”
BILLY STRINGS