Bowling Green-born Nappy Roots brings hip-hop to Kentucky-flavored MMF

Jul. 15—When Nappy Roots takes the stage at around 6 p.m. tonight on the Horse Soldier Bourbon Stage at Master Musicians Festival, they'll have something in common with that sponsor brand.

Horse Soldier was famously founded by a U.S. Special Forces unit that decided to get into distilling bourbon after their time in the service was over. And following their heyday in the 2000s, members of Nappy Roots, the hitmaking hip-hop act out of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, got into the beer game.

"Currently, we have a full-fledged craft brewery," said Ron Clutch of Nappy Roots — that would be Atlantucky Brewing, physically located in Atlanta, Ga. "That's what we've been doing since 2017."

Known for hits like "Awnaw," an infectious 2001 single from the debut album "Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz" and the Grammy-nominated "Po' Folks," Nappy Roots might have turned their eyes toward potent potables in recent years, but they've never left their musical roots. Tonight, they'll become the most recent hip-hop act — a category that's been rare over the years at MMF — to perform at Festival Field behind Somerset Community College and fit in neatly with the 30th year theme of an all-Kentucky roster for Master Musicians festival.

The Commonwealth Journal spoke with Clutch — a.k.a. Ronald Wilson — this week leading up to Nappy Roots' appearance at MMF. As a founding member of the group, Clutch has seen not only the ups-and-downs of Nappy Roots itself, but considerable changes in the music industry as a whole since the group first formed in the mid-1990s — around the same time MMF itself was born.

"It's been a steep learning curve," said Clutch. "We witnessed different media, from tapes to CDs to records — now everything is fully streamed, so it's like, okay, that changes up the whole game, because folks aren't buying CDs (in this era), they're buying music straight from streaming services, and they want it fast. There's a large segment of listeners that are not even really listening to whole projects, they're just listening to singles, and they're finding those singles on playlists.

"So it's changed our approach as far as how we release (music)," he added. "... When we go into the studio, we're thinking, 'What does this generation want to hear from us, and what do we feel like we need to say so that we're still maintaining who we are, but at the same time staying relevant?' You've just got to stay tuned to what's going on with the music scene. There are so many different avenues of music and so many different artists coming out every day, it's kind of hard to stay abreast to it, but with these fancy phones and notifications, it makes it a little easier."

This won't be the first time Nappy Roots has been to Somerset, according to Clutch. It was hard to say when, but "it was earlier in our career," he noted. "There's a lot of love out there (in Somerset)."

When Louisville native Clutch got to Western Kentucky University in 1993, he met fellow future Nappy Roots member Skinny DeVille and a couple of others who were at one time in the group.

"We were just young college students trying to find our way in the world, and we found ourselves just living life," he continued. "When I heard (Atlanta hip-hop group) Goodie Mob in 1995, they had a song called 'Cell Therapy.' That inspired me to rap. I had never rapped until I got to college. I had never thought about putting pen to pad until I got to college. So in '95, me and Skinny were roommates, and I was like, 'Man, let's start a rap group.'"

Clutch kept his first name and used his middle name for his rap moniker — "Clutch is my actual middle name on my birth certificate, so that made it easier for me," he quipped.

He went into the U.S. Army Reserves in 1997 to help pay for college, and while he was gone, Skinny ran into fellow Nappy Roots member Fish Scales and also met Big V, who was from Bowling Green and was a hot local rapper at the time.

"We ended up bumping into each other and freestyling and stuff at house parties and circles," said Clutch. When he got back from boot camp, another member, B. Stille came to WKU. By 1998, the group that the world would know as Nappy Roots was officially together; "The last member to come to the table was R. Prophet," noted Clutch.

Nappy Roots stands as likely Kentucky's most celebrated entry into the hip-hop genre, and as such is the perfect representative for it at MMF this year, diversifying the offerings available at the festival in 2023. That certainly doesn't mean they're the only ones from the Bluegrass State producing quality hip-hop, however.

"There's a thriving hip-hop scene in Kentucky, but we were the first ones to really make it out of Kentucky and put Kentucky on the map," said Clutch. "We were fortunate enough to go around the world and represent Kentucky.

"I'd say Atlanta was ahead of Kentucky as far as rap (in the south), and then our style of rap, southern conscious. We were in the lane of an Outkast (or) Goodie Mob, and with us being from Kentucky, we didn't really have an identity. We weren't West Coast, we weren't East Coast, or the deep, deep south or up north. We were kind of a combination of all those styles together, and then we added our own southern country twang to it, and you've got Nappy Roots."

Currently, the group's membership consists of Clutch, B. Stille, Fish Scales, and Skinny DeVille. That's the line-up that people will see today at Master Musicians Festival, an environment which excites Clutch as a performer looking for an enthused crowd.

"This is festival season," said Clutch. "It's hot, it's warm, it's coming out of winter, everybody wants to be outside, get you some sunshine. Everybody's happy. Add that to just what we went through with the COVID lockdowns, that was two years of the opposite of this. ... I'm sure there's still a lot of pent-up (energy). Folks are ready to get out."

And with that hot weather, many will also be ready to drink beer — now something else Nappy Roots can offer the crowd.

In 2018, Atlantucky Brewing Co. opened, considered a Nanobrewery — a microbrewery that produces a smaller number of barrels. It's been another kind of success story for the members of Nappy Roots, one that found them somewhat unexpectedly in the course of their music-based travels.

"Around that time, a lot of our shows, a lot of the venues that we were performing at were smaller, more intimate venues — bars, breweries with a nice stage — and after doing so many of those shows, we kind of found ourselves like at a sound check, and we're chilling at the bar, and the next thing we know, we're striking up a conversation with the bartender and ... we're asking them questions about the beer," he added. "... One thing led to another, and we found ourselves in the back of the brewery getting a tour of the brewing equipment. After so many of those tours, it kind of dawned on Fish Scales, him and Skinny DeVille (to start) brewing beer in Scales' garage."

They would go on to make key connections with established breweries that helped get their new initiative off the ground, while Nappy Roots members still in Louisville were trying to do similarly, and collaborated with that city's brewery Against the Grain to create a beer called Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz, the same as the album.

"For this Somerset show, we will have the beer with us," said Clutch. "You'll be able to purchase the beer (at the festival). It will be sold by the can."

Getting into something new wasn't a rejection of music but rather a necessary evolution that was true to Nappy Roots' origins, according to Clutch.

"With the rap game — really, any industry — you've got to figure out how to pivot and evolve and re-invent yourself sometimes," he said. "We all came together in college, and if you know anything about college, it's a lot of beer drinking. So this was kind of full circle, taking us back to our days when we were drinking the cheap (stuff). Once we got a little extra money and once we developed our palate, we knew the difference between a Corona and a Colt 45. Next thing you know, you find yourself drinking some Hornsby's (Hard) Apple Cider or some Heineken, or something fancy."

Even with their brewing business, Nappy Roots has remained committed to the music. Clutch said they're currently finishing up their ninth studio album, "Nappy 4 Life," which should be mixed by the end of the month and hopefully released on September 15 — the day before "Nappy Roots Day," so declared in Kentucky in 2002.

That honor came early in Nappy Roots' career, but it was prescient, as the group's hits have stood the test of time, finding their way into video games, in films and TV shows, and in the hearts of the group's fans, many of whom discovered Nappy Roots when they themselves were college students and are now adults with a fond nostalgia for those songs. That will likely be true of a number of attendees at this year's Master Musicians Festival — and Clutch is ready to make hip-hop magic on Festival Field.

"It's a testament to the power of good music," said Clutch. "Nothing trendy, nothing too commercial or microwave. 'Po' Folks' is a song that 90 percent of America can probably relate to, then and now, just with how the economy's going and everything that the world is going through. ... You might have been poor at one point in time, you might have known somebody who was poor at one point in time. Unfortunately, that's how it is, man. That song is going to be relevant 'til the end of time."