Oliver Anthony brings antagonized folk stylings to Nashville's Ryman Auditorium

On Thursday evening, Central Virginian Christopher Lunsford's Oliver Anthony Music project completed the second of two nights at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

In 2023, the artist released the politically charged, blue-collar, anti-taxation, anti-welfare and anti-Washington-based federal government anthem "Rich Men North of Richmond."

It was among a dozen singles he has released in the past two years.

In August 2023, that song shockingly achieved similar Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart-topping success as Jason Aldean's controversial rock anthem "Try That In A Small Town," Luke Combs' cover of Tracy Chapman's 1989 folk-rock anthem "Fast Car" and Morgan Wallen's soulful country ballad "Last Night."

Thursday night at the Ryman, as evenings often do for many residents of America's rural and suburban areas at their favorite local watering hole or Sunday afternoon at the farmer's market, featured covers of traditional country anthems and rootsy, self-written folk songs.

As well, a smattering of political opinions that painted the United States' history of being governed by a two-party system as wholly irrelevant to modern American society also dominated the latter part of the event.

Here are a few other notable reflections from Thursday night's concert.

America's settler days revived

An Oliver Anthony Music show highlights those at America's sociopolitical fringe-at-present as barrelling back through American history to 17th-century English Quaker and Nonconformist barn-dance culture as the most effective place to re-root our collective national history.

Thus, that notion revives the Ryman as a turn of the 20th-century church suited for Methodist Episcopal Church revivals where folk music is played — rather than the Mother Church of Country Music.

The lack of a drummer onstage for Anthony's set hearkens back to the venue's history as the home of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s.

Dig deeper and the elderly man in the crowd clogging to a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," plus fiddle player, singer and songwriter Hillary Klug buckdancing onstage to Anthony's original song, "Virginia," cues a history that jolts the mind back 300 years before where the Opry reference left it.

It's in that jolting ripple in time where the insertion of how Anthony starts the show — by reading from Chapter 10 of the Bible's New Testament Book of Matthew — resonates deepest.

The show minimally has nothing to do with his guitar. Instead, he's following in the footsteps of Jesus' apostles and testifying about Christian salvation.

Blend that proclamation with the crowd's eventual chants of "F*** Joe Biden," its biting analog "Let's Go Brandon" and Anthony joking about how his fans at a run of European shows turned those jeers into a chant with the same cadence as The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" which insinuates that the current American president is a pedophile.

The message goes from empowering to antagonized.

Mixing in songs like "Doggonit" — a guitar-driven ode with a wailing fiddle added in the live realm — that laments having never seen a good representative of American democracy be a city-dwelling Democrat only tells half the story.

Of course, in Aug. 2023, Anthony stated how he found it "aggravating" to be championed by conservatives and Republicans, too.

An Oliver Anthony Music concert is a wild mess of a night.

On one level, it feels like a blistering dog whistle to many problematic American issues of late. However, if in agreement with the Libertarian-style politics and social views of the largest percentage of those in attendance, the night is two hours of rapturous salvation.

"Simple Man"

Like many Southern, rural-dwelling Americans, Christopher Lunsford is a massive fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

"Free Bird" and "Simple Man" are parts of the Oliver Anthony Music live set.

The former is a pidgin attempt at harnessing the triple-guitar riff-driven Southern rock power of the 11-minute anthem.

The latter, though, when framed in the context of Lunsford's life, takes on a different power that offers greater scope into both the artist and his fanbase.

Lunsford currently lives with his wife of eight years and three dogs in a trailer on a cheaply and Craigslist-purchased, 90-acre livestock farm. Ten years prior, he fractured his skull in a workplace accident at a paper mill. Until eight months ago, he also worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing industry.

To work through the traumatic stress of the past decade of his life, Lunsford's the type of guy willing to self-prescribe himself copious amounts of liquor and marijuana as a cure.

He's also the type of guy who folds his set list into paper airplanes mid-show and throws them into the crowd.

Thus, in his hands, "Simple Man" arrives not as an arena rock power ballad but instead the type of song played late into a substance-addled night for a crowd that responds with deafening nothingness — or, at best, baying at the moon.

It's not soulful at all. It, like his ballad "Always Love You (Like a Good Ole Dog)," arrives touched like everything retro-fitted about the evening as described earlier, as something between a drunken, hopeless and stoned 17th-century European folk ballad and Hank Williams' 1949 top-10 hit "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It."

"There will always be more of us than there will be of them"

"I don't care what the news and social media try to tell you, there always will be more of us than there will be of them," stated Lunsford at the end of his set, following playing "Rich Men North of Richmond" twice.

Read into the performer's statement with liberalized notions and it smacks of a plethora of "isms" and reeks of insidious social division.

However, pull back and dive into data and numbers and something else emerges.

Lunsford's current Farmville, Virginia home? A farm community in a coal country where 7 out of 10 people are of Caucasian origin, earning a median household income of roughly $35,000.

Spruce Pine, North Carolina, where Lunsford received his GED? A decade ago 9 out of 10 people are white, with the same median income as Farmville.

Currituck, N.C., where his renown grew in the summer of 2023? It reflects a population ten times smaller than Farmville's 7,000 residents. Poverty there is also higher than America's current poverty line, with similar racial demographics to Spruce Pine.

At the turn of the 20th century, Farmville, Virginia's population reflected twice as many Black people as white people — but white people owned ten times the value of real estate because Black people owned no land or had inherited wealth.

Eventually, many Black people left the area behind.

By the 1940s, the same grandfather from whom Lunsford took his name as a performer lived in areas like Farmville where the tethering to coal and farm wealth had already begun to fray into what the performer once characterized as "dirt floors and hard times."

Fast forward a century and every word of "Rich Men North of Richmond" hits like John Henry's sledgehammer.

The articulation of legitimate heartbreak at a racially, socially and culturally marginalized dissolution of connection to the American dream leaves traumatized people flailing madly at everyone and everything.

Obese welfare recipients and oligarchical politicians who exist in one percent of America's wealth divide are equally opportunistic in their perceived attacks against Lunsford and his fanbase.

"I'm not trying to go on a bunch of political tangents tonight," stated the singer.

Following pausing after more statements, he added a telling note that felt as disengaged from the concert as it was dead on point to his perception of the era and the flimsily constructed straw man of politicized notions that devolve into a myriad of conversations.

"I miss those days, you know, 10 to 15 years ago...when trucks were made of metal and men were men."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Oliver Anthony brings heated folk stylings to Nashville's Ryman Auditorium