Country music finds its soul on 'Traveller' - Chron.com
Stapleton's gritty, soulful voice is perfectly suited for his rough-and-tumble stories. He realizes the best country songs can work as Southern soul songs and soul sounds good when handled by the right country singer. "My earliest musical memories were of outlaw country," Stapleton says. Soul, country, bluegrass and folk, all those blues-based art forms, they manifest themselves in different ways. Some people call them soul, others country. I think George Jones is a great example of soulful country. True to the album's title, Stapleton took a circuitous route to make it. He moved to Nashville in 2001 after a friend suggested he could land a publishing deal. "I always thought if George Strait sang a song, then George Strait wrote the song. I'd write two or three songs a day, morning afternoon and night. Stapleton wrote country songs by day and played with Henderson in a band called the SteelDrivers by night. They'd perform classic bluegrass fare, but, Stapleton says, "I had all these perfectly good songs sitting around going to waste. " Stapleton left the group in 2010 after five years and started playing rootsy rock 'n' roll with a band called the Jompson Brothers. Stapleton nearly completed a record, but he didn't feel right about it, so he. Source: www.chron.com
