Album

Route 119 is the second record from Dixie Deadshot, and where Three Warrants told her story, this one turns the camera around. Built around field recordings of creek water and ridge wind, the album is a documentary portrait of Pike County, Kentucky, told through the road that follows the creek through it. Across eleven tracks of Appalachian outlaw rap, Raelee Calhoun introduces the people who hold the place together: Bernadette Slone, thirty-eight years behind the county market counter; Mrs. Dalton, the music teacher the school board cut and who still teaches piano for twelve dollars an hour; the diner owner who opens at six because she's been deciding to every morning for sixteen years; and Old Man Combs, watching the road from his porch on Gravel Fork. It's also a record with teeth. "The Creek (Contamination)" and "School Board" follow the money and the paperwork with the same precision that got her a warrant, while "Hollow," "Before the Republic Had a Name," and "Since Before the Maps" step back to the four-hundred-million-year view of the oldest mountains in the world. Refusing both poverty tourism and easy nostalgia, Route 119 sets out to get one place exactly right, and closes on a quiet question: what do you owe a place when you put it in a song?