Tyler Childers’ 2024 Tour Is Underway. Here’s Where You Can Catch Him Next
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1991-present
Latest News: Tyler Childers Gears Up for North American Tour
Musician Tyler Childers is just getting started on the North American leg of his extensive Mule Pull ’24 Tour. The 32-year-old kicked off this portion of his concert series on March 14 in Luck, Texas. If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry—he still has 40 scheduled dates remaining, starting April 5 in San Diego and running through September 22.
The “In Your Love” singer announced in September 2023 he and his band, the Food Stamps, would embark on the tour meant to promote his Rustin’ In The Rain album. Childers added 23 dates across the United States and Canada that October.
Lucky for him, the singer isn’t slated to perform on April 7. That’s the night of the 2024 CMT Music Awards, where Childers is a first-time nominee. He’s competing for Video of the Year and Breakthrough Video of the Year for “In Your Love.”
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Who Is Tyler Childers?
Country-folk musician Tyler Childers has received seven Grammy nominations during his career, including Best Folk Album for 2020’s Long Violent History and Best Country Album for 2023’s Rustin’ In The Rain. Born in the country music hotbed of Eastern Kentucky, Childers first gained renown with his second studio album Purgatory in 2017. He has released six studio albums to date and is known for incorporating social issue commentary into his songs, as with “Long Violent History” and “In Your Love.”
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Timothy Tyler Childers
BORN: June 21, 1991
BIRTHPLACE: Lawrence County, Kentucky
SPOUSE: Senora May (2015-present)
CHILDREN: 1 son
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
Where Is Tyler Childers From?
Timothy Tyler Childers, known professionally as Tyler Childers, was born on June 21, 1991, and raised in Lawrence County, Kentucky, near the West Virginia border. His father worked in the coal industry, and his mother was a nurse.
Country music heavily influenced the area where Childers grew up. Nearby Route 23, about 20 minutes away, is known as Kentucky’s Country Music Highway, with artists like Dwight Yoakam, Loretta Lynn, and Chris Stapleton once calling the region home. Childers would eventually add his name to the list of local greats, but his path there wasn’t always easy.
The singer was born with clubfoot, a congenital disorder that caused both of his feet to twist out of shape. He underwent surgeries to correct the condition at 8 months and 5 years old—once spending an entire year in a wheelchair—and had to relearn how to walk. He also attended regular checkups at Shriners Children’s hospital in Lexington until he was 18.
Childers has described himself as a “very sensitive child.” He told The Bitter Southerner that although he was raised with his sister and surrounded by family and cousins, he often felt isolated. He was active in his church group but said the fire-and-brimstone teachings he received caused him emotional stress. “I don’t think my mom and dad… went, ‘We’re going to take him [to church] on Sundays and Wednesdays and scare him to death,’ but that’s what it did,” he said.
Especially during his physical recovery, Childers found comfort in books and initially aspired to be a writer. He was drawn to Jack Kerouac works, in particular, as a teenager.
Musical Beginnings
From an early age, Childers also took an interest in music. He sang for his Free Will Baptist Church congregation, learned to play chords on a guitar from his grandfather, and began writing songs when he was around 13. His favorite genres included classic rock, which his father often listened to, and country, including artists like Hank Williams Jr., Ricky Skaggs, and Alabama.
When he was 15, Childers transferred to Paintsville High School and often played his guitar at lunch to feel more comfortable. His classmates soon invited him to sing at parties and began introducing him to other forms of music. Childers graduated in 2009 and briefly studied at Western Kentucky University and Bluegrass Community & Technical College but ultimately dropped out of school to take odd jobs and fund his music dreams.
Albums and Songs: “In Your Love,” “All Your’n,” and Long Violent History
Childers began writing his own music and released his first album when he was 19. He built a minor following in Kentucky and West Virginia with his band, the Food Stamps, and caught the attention of Miles Miller, a drummer for Sturgill Simpson. The connection proved to be crucial for the next step in Childers’ career.
Simpson served as a co-producer for Childers’ second album Purgatory, released in August 2017. The singer achieved his first mainstream success, as the record debuted at No. 1 on the Heatseekers Albums chart—highlighting new and emerging artists—and No. 2 on the Americana/Folk Albums chart. It stayed on the latter for 261 weeks. As a result, Childers was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the 2018 Americana Honors & Awards.
Country Squire and “All Your’n”
Childers charted even higher in 2019 with Country Squire, his major label debut with RCA. Anchored by the country-soul ballad “All Your’n,” the project went to No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart. The song also nabbed the singer his first Grammy nomination, for Best Country Solo Performance in 2020.
Long Violent History
Despite country’s track record of love songs and party anthems, Childers showed a willingness to challenge listeners by addressing key social and political issues in his next projects. Upon the release of his 2020 album, Long Violent History, and its titular track that addresses racism and police brutality in its lyrics, Childers recorded an accompanying YouTube message. He asked Appalachia natives like himself to empathize with the Black community in the wake of nationwide protests sparked by the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others.
“What can the rest of us who feel seemingly outside of these issues do?” he said. “We can stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter. If we didn’t need to be reminded, there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, a Kentuckian like me, and countless others.”
Long Violent History was nominated for Best Folk Album at the next Grammy Awards. Similarly, Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (2022) confronted religious intolerance through its faith-based songs two years later.
“In Your Love”
Even more recently, Childers showed support for the LGBTQ community with the 2023 song “In Your Love,” which tells the story of a romance between two male coal miners from Appalachia. The music video for the track featured actors Colton Haynes and James Scully, who both identify as gay.
Childers told NPR he wrote the song to honor a gay cousin who was like a big brother to the singer growing up and who taught him a lot about music. “For all the ugliness that it’s going to bring out that just can’t be helped, this video is going to make real conversations possible,” Childers explained. “This is a story of two people sharing their love and living a life together and experiencing loss. That’s pretty powerful. Once you take away the flash card phrases and like the knee-jerk reactions, how does that make you feel?”
“In Your Love” was nominated for three Grammys—Best Country Song, Best Music Video, and Best Country Solo Performance—in 2024, and Childers earned additional nods for Best Country Album for Rustin’ In The Rain (2023) and Best Americana Performance for “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
Wife and Son
While living and working on a Kentucky farm in 2013, Childers met Senora May, a recent college graduate who was cleaning houses in the area to make extra money. Their relationship quickly blossomed, and the couple married in July 2015.
Like Childers, May is a musician; she has released two albums, Lainheart in 2018 and All of My Love in 2021. The couple also started a charity together. In 2020, they founded the Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund, which raises money for causes such as education, civil rights, and addiction recovery.
Childers has credited May for supporting him as he tried to build his singing career. According to People, they moved in with Childers’ family following their wedding to save enough money to purchase property for a home. Once they were able to do so, the couple lived in a camper van as they built their house.
“For a good chunk of it, Senora May’s put up with me and been there for it,” Childers wrote on his website. “And she stuck with me, so it’s really awesome because we told ourselves that if we made these sacrifices, or held off just a little longer and kept at this, maybe one day it might work out.”
In July 2022, May announced on Instagram she was expecting their first child. The following May, the pair similarly announced the arrival of their son on social media. Childers and May haven’t revealed his name publicly.
Sobriety
Now sober, Childers has struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol in the past. He told The Bitter Southerner in September 2023 that he reached his low point shortly before the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when he returned home after weeks of hard partying on tour and could barely function.
“All you can do is just nurse a hangover, and Senora doesn’t even want to be around you… and rightly so,” he said. “If I would continue to drink—especially in the way that I was—she wouldn’t have stayed with me. She shouldn’t have stayed with me. I’m extremely blessed that she had the patience… to put up with my s— as long as she did.”
The singer revealed in September 2020 he had stopped drinking and using drugs six months prior, and he has remained sober since.
Quotes
I’m a dial-up man in a 5G world.
On addressing social issues in his music: People are like, “Oh, you are so brave.” I think it’s sad that’s a brave thing. To me, it’s just about love. And that’s all it ought to be.
My mom loved me to death, and my dad worked his tail off. I didn’t want for nothing. But it came at a price. Time away from family—they worked very hard to take care of us. They instilled in me to work and understand the weight of that.
The problem with country is we’ve turned the props into the play. Let’s not just Solo cup and pickup truck it to death. Let’s handle this in a smart way. Nobody is thinking about lyrical content, or how we’re moving people, or what’s going on in the background of their minds.
I’m getting older. Every day the gravitational pull to the grave is just inevitably getting heavier. I’m trying to be a better person, to grow up.
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