Album

Mama Calhoun is the fifth record from Dixie Deadshot, and the most intimate thing she's made. Built on acoustic guitar and strings, with parts recorded at the actual kitchen table that's sat in the Calhoun homestead since 1943, it's a ten-track portrait of the seventy-three-year-old grandmother who raised her, a steady, unsentimental woman who says "I love you" by leaving the kitchen light on and asking if you want coffee. As Raelee puts it, a song is just a coffee that lasts longer. It's a legacy album about the women in one Appalachian family line and the records they've kept: a great-grandmother's history stitched into quilts, a grandmother's decades of notebooks documenting a county no one else wrote down, and now a granddaughter's songs. At its center is the hardest question in the catalog, the mother who left and the grandmother who stayed, and in "She Left," "She Stayed," and "For My Mother," Dixie refuses to make either woman the villain or the lesson. It closes with "The Next One," a letter to whoever sits at the table after her, ending on two words: I'm staying.