On a sultry Monday evening in late June, about 100 or so people congregated at the White Water Tavern. The evening marked nearly 13 months to the day since Emily Fenton moved back to Arkansas from New York, and she stood on a stage in front of a room filled with family, friends and admirers, playing a double handful’s worth of new songs being recorded live that night for an album. Her band included her new husband, Marco Samour, on guitar, as well as another recent transplant to Little Rock, Annie Ford, on fiddle.
It felt like the ending of a romantic movie, a movie that started several years back when Emily got a scholarship to Ithaca College in upstate New York to study musical theater, dabbling in writing and performing her own music, and eventually moving to New York City to focus on stand-up comedy. “I was doing a lot of irreverent comedy that I wasn’t good enough to be doing,” she said. “And I realized how thick-skinned and rigorous that environment is. And I was like, ‘I don’t really want to do this.’ ” Getting paying gigs, either as a comedian or musician, was a constant struggle.
“It felt impossible, especially in New York,” Fenton said. “The only way I could get a substantial cut was by bringing X-amount of people through the door. It was so much self-promotion and so much hustling just to get people to come to a show. … I started making a little bit of money as a musician the last year I was there. So I told myself, ‘OK, I’m a songwriter. This is what I can see myself doing. This is what I need to build upon. But it didn’t become feasible until I came here.”
It’s a counterintuitive notion that it might be easier to make music when one’s living in a nonmusic-industry town. Dreams of stardom fuel ambition to follow in the footsteps of one’s favorite musicians who “made it,” shaking off the dust of their hometowns in search of fame and fortune in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville or Austin. But the music business landscape looks very different than it did decades ago when “big break” ideology reigned supreme. The business changed even more in the wake of a worldwide pandemic, and performers were hit especially hard. “Making it” in times like these means that the “it” changes from wealth and celebrity to a steady income that pays the mortgage and the light bill and puts shoes on the kids’ feet.
Fenton started thinking about moving back south when a dog she adopted in New York, Frango, was injured. Surgery would run thousands of dollars cheaper in Arkansas, even factoring in the cost of Frango traveling from New York to Arkansas. Frango convalesced at Fenton’s parents’ house, where there was a large yard. When he got back to Brooklyn, Emily said, Frango was depressed. “Maybe I need to make a change,” she remembered thinking. “If it’s not good for Frango, maybe it’s not good for me.” She intended to move to Nashville, but the moving company lost all her belongings, so she came home to Arkansas to recalibrate. “I drove home with just what would fit in my car,” she said. “Ten days after I got here, I met Marco.” She has been here ever since.
***
Little Rock-based musician Nick Flora also took a hiatus from his hometown, moving to Nashville in 2007. His wife at the time had accepted a nursing job in the city and Flora saw it as an opportunity to build on his work promoting shows, playing in bands around Central Arkansas and touring regionally.
Another Arkansas native, Jessie Ott, moved to Nashville a few years later and started making dreamy alternative-pop records under the name Whoa Dakota. Both of them say Nashville in those days was close-knit but welcoming, even nurturing, to newcomers with talent and professionalism.
Ott described it as a double-edged sword. “The great thing about Nashville is that everybody does music. And the horrible thing is that everybody does music. It’s hard to find an audience, but it’s easy to find collaborators and supporters.”
Flora said that when he got there, he thought Nashville would work more or less like where he had come from. “My goal when I moved there was to do what I did here,” he said, “which is play every venue in town, get to know every booker, and just become big in this city. I didn’t realize you can’t do that there. Everybody there is a musician. Everybody watching is a musician. Your barista is a musician. The bartender is a better bass player than everybody you know.”
But the character of central Tennessee changed dramatically in the time that he lived there, Flora said. “More fashion people moved there, and tech people moved there, and restaurateurs moved there. To me it was still very small and ‘countryish,’ and not even as in the style of music. The pace was just very slow. It’s the South, you know? I felt that shift and that change and it was exciting at first. But you get to a point where 80 people a day are moving there for a good seven or eight years straight and you start to feel the claustrophobia. Everybody’s there trying to ‘make it’ in music until there just wasn’t a way to stand out.”
Ott noted that Nashville was starting to become more like Austin, or Los Angeles, or even Las Vegas. “You can’t get a cocktail for less than $8,” she said. “Rents are incredibly high. All of the things that are bringing revenue to that city are not really catered to musicians. They’re catered to people who have a lot of money — musicians who are trying to make it generally don’t.”
She said while she always loved Nashville’s energy, “I can’t afford to own a home here unless I get famous real quick.” Then the pandemic set Ott in a different direction completely. “Just before the pandemic,” she said, “when stuff started to get squirrely, I thought to myself, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to write a 1-4-5 country song. It can’t be too hard.’ I always knew it would come naturally to me, which is why I resisted it, because I’m stubborn. I always want things to be harder.” And “Waitress in Nashville” was soon delivered. “It plopped right out,” she said. “No big deal, in maybe 45 minutes.” Before long she had written and recorded a seven-song album that she released on streaming services the same week she moved back to Arkansas.
“When I first moved there, Nashville reminded me of Little Rock, but just a little bit bigger and a bit more going on,” she said. “Now it’s a very different situation. I got the idea to move home because my family is here. And I got the idea, ‘What if those of us that left come back and bring with us something we learned about being in an artist city with that energy and that insight?’ ”
Since returning to Little Rock in the spring of 2022, Flora has yet to go back on the road as a touring musician, but has found a niche for himself, gigging around town in less glamorous, but often more lucrative venues — restaurants and lounges. “I never thought of the middle-ground, working-class musician as anything but a success,” he said. “And I got to do that for a very long time, literally right up until COVID. That’s when everything shifted for me.”
***
Austin, Texas, boasts its own robust roster of musicians. But compared to Tennessee’s “Music City,” a working-class musician stands a better chance of getting paying gigs in local venues and attracting a local following. That’s what drew Bonnie Montgomery down to the Texas capital in the middle of the last decade. Matt Ford, her touring guitar player, lived in Austin and invited her to spend a month in the city with the promise they’d play a gig every night. “And we did,” Bonnie said. “We played the Hole in the Wall and The White Horse. We were just on this honky tonk merry-go-round the whole month. It was wild, and beautiful, and blurry. After that I was like, I need to be in Austin. I need to go where the universe is giving me a lot of work,” she said.
The band of musicians Montgomery put together in Texas were all full-time musicians, which afforded her the luxury to gig around town and even tour. Not long after, she started earning accolades — an Ameripolitan award for best female Outlaw Country performer, a tour and duet with country legend Dale Watson, a recording with Western swing icon Rosie Flores. In the midst of all that, after spending “too long,” Montgomery said, staying nights on friends’ couches and relatives’ spare rooms, she took up permanent residence in a cabin situated on a 12-acre plot of land in Wimberley, Texas, about an hour southwest of Austin.
“The minute I drove into Wimberley,” she said, “I was like, oh my God, I have to live here. … It looks a lot like the Ozarks. It’s green. It’s the Hill Country. Certain times of year it looks a lot like home. I had all these wonderful feelings of familiarity. But there’s also some desert vibes there, too.” Wimberley’s membership in the Dark Sky Society prohibits light pollution, and for Montgomery the night skies and natural beauty were inspiring, the rent was affordable, and the relative solitude fueled her productivity while leaving her close enough to the action in Austin.
Montgomery said she had a “beautiful” time getting to know the “old school” Austin, but saw its culture disappearing quickly. “While I was there, I got to know the people who started the old Armadillo Club. I sang at the closing of Threadgill’s,” she said. “Everybody was saying farewell, and I thought, ‘This needs to be a revolution! Why isn’t the city fighting to make this into a museum?’ It’s really sad because these cities have built their identity around the arts and the music, but it’s the classic tale that the artists can’t afford to live there anymore once everybody discovers what they’ve contributed to make these cities so beautiful.”
When the pandemic hit, Montgomery spent her “reclusive” period on a number of creative pursuits. “I was suffering because my livelihood was gone, and my collaborators were gone. It was devastating,” she said. Despite all that, she said it was a fertile time for writing without the distractions of making a living at making music. “I didn’t have to answer any emails or plan any tours or get the van ready for going across the country, nothing,” she said. “Our minds were clear to just be artists, finally. It was hard, but it was also freeing.”
She wrote a lot in the early days of the pandemic when everything was locked down, especially classical music. She composed a complete string quartet she hopes to debut soon. She also wrote and recorded an album with her longtime steel guitar player, Kevin Skryla, at his home studio filled with vintage analog recording equipment and instruments, that she plans to release soon.
“During the pandemic it was just me and Kevin,” she said. “He can play the drums and bass and guitar and the steel and piano. Plus he runs the board. We would just be on our own time and go as far as we wanted and take as much time as we wanted.
“With most studios,” she continued, “it’s off the charts expensive. You’re counting the hours and you’re counting money, and it’s this weird rush. But you leave that experience thinking, ‘How much would we have done if we weren’t in a rush?’ ”
As sessions for the new album were wrapping up, Montgomery got opportunities to play the occasional live show again, and made several trips to Northwest Arkansas to work with House of Songs, an organization that works to nurture songwriters and foster collaboration. That relationship bore many fruits, including Montgomery co-writing a song called “On The Run” with Ashtyn Barbaree that appears on Barbaree’s new sophomore album.
Montgomery also benefited from the Life Works Here grant from the Northwest Arkansas Council, a grant designed to attract remote workers, entrepreneurs and the self-employed to Arkansas, and enabled her move from Texas to Fayetteville. “I had a meeting with a group of people who got [the grant] at the same time as me. I was the only musician [among] a lot of crypto currency and blockchain guys. I don’t think artists are the majority of those getting these grants, but it does work for us. If you’re a remote worker.”
Her dream during the pandemic was to develop a classical music showcase for Northwest Arkansas that could function as an “ ‘in-between’ — not New York City and not Little Rock,” she said. “Working with House of Songs I realized there’s all these new venues up here, like The Momentary and Crystal Bridges [Museum of American Art]. During the pandemic, I wrote a lot of classical music that hasn’t been premiered. One of my big reasons for moving up here was to try to get a classical showcase going on.”
***
A couple of time zones over, musician Nick Shoulders lived his own version of the solitary creative. “I moved into my van in my mid-20s, went out west and busked on the streets of California, Oregon and Washington,” he said. “I lived by the ocean with my big dog in this vehicle. I definitely tried out the other way of living music outside of home, which is permanent transience.”
As he encountered others on the road living the same way, he started to realize this world of permanent transience — streetside busking for a living — had a home: New Orleans. “I became aware that was a place you could do it and there were a lot of like-minded folks you could hang out with doing the same sort of stuff. So I gravitated toward that neo-traditional country, Cajun and rhythm and blues music scene, and I loved it.”
As a native Arkansan whose family has roots in the state going back to the 1840s, Shoulders considers himself in the tradition of musicians branching out from the state to make their name in more populous regions of the nation. “I call it Johnny Cash syndrome,” he said. “People say Johnny Cash is from Arkansas, but there’s a dot dot dot, Tennessee. The Sister Rosetta Tharpes of the world, the Sonny Burgesses, all of these people had to get at least regionally out of the state because of the inevitable cap of resources we have. That has been a trope and something that has to happen for Arkansans to get known.”
At the time of the lockdown, Shoulders lived in one room of a three-room shotgun house in New Orleans’ Holy Cross neighborhood with two roommates. As businesses began to shutter, Shoulders was looking at the prospect of a long, hot summer in the city with no work and no creative outlet. He decided it was a good time to go up to the Ozarks and have a “quick vacation.”
“As much as I wanted to stick with New Orleans until the bitter end,” he said, “I was very aware of what happens to that place in disasters. I was witness to battles over toilet paper in the parking lot. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just get a couple of weeks ahead of this thing and see what’s going to happen.’ ”
Over the next few months, he said, he moved four times, staying with different family and friends until he eventually landed at his uncle’s house on the Buffalo River. “I’m grateful,” he said, “I was able to get back to the woods and get into an environment that is conducive to my mental health because everybody was suffering and going through all sorts of craziness. That had my hackles down while everyone else was kind of stressed out.”
During the long spell when venues were closed and bands couldn’t play live, Shoulders became a living showcase for Northwest Arkansas, at least virtually. The roots music website Western AF filmed videos for Shoulders (and Willi Carlisle, Dylan Earl and others) performing mountain folk music in the woods, on cabin porches, and even in cavernous storm drains. The videos, in Shoulders’ words, “went kind of nutty for us during the lockdown.” He and his crew seized the opportunity to galvanize that attention and pour it into their own DIY operation to make and merchandise their own records and merchandise. “We are so unbelievably lucky and it was such a turn of fate,” he said. “I know so many people who are so talented and deserving of the same attention who are just not riding the same curve of luck that we caught at that moment.
“During lockdown I got thrown straight into the turmoil and was kind of struggling with how to react. The most logical discourse, I thought, was just to write more weird songs.” “Home on the Rage,” Shoulders’ “lockdown record,” was released in April 2021 and Shoulders said he has been in constant motion ever since.
“Music is my entire employment,” he said. “We released that album and just blasted into touring. Some of that has been good. Some of that has been really trying. Some of it has been profoundly rewarding. This whole meltdown is experienced so much more acutely by those who are out there on the interstates seeing the Hoovervilles get bigger and gas prices climb, and people who live in their vans because they couldn’t get a third job.”
***
Arkansas musician Jonah Thornton and his wife packed up their belongings in 2020 to move from Northwest Arkansas to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a new job opportunity. Though Jonah’s indie-rock band Willowack had seen some success in recent years, Thornton started to focus more and more on Kin & Company, ostensibly a solo project in which he wrote and recorded all the music alone or with invited collaborators, including members of his former band. Willowack officially called it a day when Jonah left Arkansas. But as Kin & Company Thornton has remained prolific, releasing more than a half dozen EPs and albums since just 2019 that range from intimate and lush folky-pop songs with nods to soul, psychedelia, and indie rock.
Thornton said that it was strange going back to the ground floor, starting over from scratch in a new city with a new musical identity. “Willowack was not a huge band, by any stretch,” he said. “But we’d gotten used to a certain number of people in the crowd. It was weird going back to the drawing board. I enjoyed it because it let us try things we’d never tried before. It’s much easier to take risks sonically in your performance when there’s 20 people there instead of, you know, a couple of hundred. It was a fun way to totally wipe the slate clean.”
Finding opportunities for Kin & Company to play has been a challenge since Thornton relocated to Springdale from Cincinnati. “We’re having to re-establish ourselves here in what we consider our home town,” he said. “We’re coming back with a different name in a climate where most of our contacts have either left, or most of the spots we knew to go to are gone. These new spots are cool, but they’re outdoor venues. Two shows we had scheduled, one of them was canceled because of a thunderstorm. The other happened on a 97 degree day, and our people didn’t turn out.”
Thornton said it’s getting harder than it used to be to get booked as a local band. Some venues only book genre-oriented music, like bluegrass, or techno. Most of the dive bars on Dickson Street have shuttered and most DIY spaces and house shows have been shut down over noise complaints.
“There’s not a lot of places for small bands to play to get some kind of number following they can quote to these larger venues,” he said. “They’re going to ask, ‘How many people can you pull in?’ If you can’t give them that number, you don’t have that show. A DIY space like Backspace would be perfect right now. That’s totally what’s missing. The spaces are there, we just need an investment.”
***
In late 2019, performer and producer Dazzmin Murry was poised to become one of the next Arkansans to become better known beyond Arkansas’s borders. Recordings with bandmate Brie Boyce were featured in two Tyler Perry movies, and a chance meeting with a producer at an Arkansas Cinema Society event in Little Rock sparked plans for a trip to LA. Though she’s a portrait of showmanship onstage, Murry says talking to people she doesn’t know isn’t always easy, even if that conversation could lead to record deals and music work. “People assume that I’m extroverted. Which, with people I know, I am,” she said. “But with new people I’m super shy. It’s always awkward as an artist introducing myself as an artist.”
Those challenges aside, introductions were made, conversations took place, meetings occurred in fancy offices, and by the beginning of 2020, Murry found herself situated in a studio apartment overlooking Hollywood’s Sunset Strip that, according to other residents in the building, had once been occupied by viral YouTuber Logan Paul. Soon she was doing session work for film and TV as well as working with an independent label known to “upstream” artists to major labels.
Murry said she keenly felt that stress living alone in Hollywood. “My family was so worried about me,” she said. “I got to a dark place, I was so sad. It was a typical artist’s story. To see what that looked like, I’m sleeping on an air mattress. My rent was $2,100, and that was without utilities, without groceries, for a studio apartment.”
A trip home to Arkansas began to set the stage for her more permanent return. “We came home for a show that we had scheduled,” she said. “And the day before, we canceled it because we didn’t want to be responsible for a super-spreader event.”
As COVID-19 took hold, Murry launched her pandemic project, an artist mentoring and development nonprofit called Creator’s Village, aiming to help fill the voids that often keep artists from success. Opportunities had come up for her in nearby cities, “but it was two or three hours away. For an artist, it’s like, I need gas money, three hours away, one way, round trip that’s six hours, I need somewhere to stay. I experienced that a lot, where it became a missed opportunity.
“Creator’s Village is my baby.”
It was birthed to fill a need to help form an inclusive and intentional community of artists capable of supporting each other and cultivate talent. Murry spent a lot of her pandemic downtime figuring out the 501(c)(3) world, learning what she could and couldn’t do, and making some “ridiculous” asks for support.
“I didn’t know what would happen,” she said, “but I got over my rut, and got over myself, and got the framework. COVID gave me the time to hash out all those details.” Creators Village has produced a wide array of programs from virtual songwriting and networking workshops to block party-style artist showcases.
And Murry stayed busy as a musician. Dazz & Brie continued to perform and write new material, including some ridiculously catchy themes and shorts for Arkansas PBS children’s programming, earning the duo a regional Emmy nomination. But their pace has slowed a bit, as Boyce splits her time between Arkansas, Georgia and Texas. When she is not in town, Murry has focused on studio work, producing other artists, writing scores for a couple of documentaries, and debuting a new “solo” musical venture, King Honey, on stage and streaming services.
Murry said writing and recording songs as King Honey was the first time she got to create music without outside influences or collaborators. “This has been the first project where I’ve been able to have my thoughts and see them fully formed before they’re influenced by someone else.” she said. “It’s been a pretty cool experience.”
***
The drive to write songs and make music is a craft that is as often solitary as it is collaborative. For Fenton’s part, she said that returning to Arkansas has given her a greater sense of herself and what it means to have a community behind her.
“The biggest thing I have relinquished,” she said, “is this fear of success. Because I had relationships that I felt thrived off me being unhappy, I made a vow that I was going to pursue my own well-being and whoever gets lost by the wayside in that, I have to cut those losses. I didn’t think I had anyone around me who was excited for me and proud of me. I found so many people here who are so proud of me. I kind of have imposter syndrome about it. It’s that ‘Woo Pig’ mentality, you know what I mean.”
Her decision to live in Arkansas has led her to a way and a place of living that she said nurtures her best self. “I’m a theater person,” she said. “I grew up with the mentality that the most important person is the person onstage next to you. Learning to trust people with something that is so personal to me has been huge. Learning how to lead a band has taught me about communication, and grace, and forgiveness. I’ve learned a lot about embracing imperfection, and about feeling worthy of being able to play with very talented people.”
Bradley Caviness is the music programmer for Shoog Radio, the all-Arkansas musician radio show heard Tuesdays at noon on KABF-FM 88.3 in Little Rock.