Blaine Bailey’s ‘Native American Country Music’ Tells Red Dirt Stories
Photo: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Written by: Meredith Lawrence
At the now defunct Medicine Stone music festival in Tahlequah, OK, pre-teen Blaine Bailey stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowd, listening to Turnpike Troubadours. It was his first concert, and he fell in love. He loved the sound, the feeling, the songwriting, the connection, and decided right then and there that he wanted to be up there on that stage someday, making the music the crowd sang along to.
“I remember getting goosebumps whenever people would sing songs back to the band, and you could hear the audience singing the songs,” Bailey recalls. “I was like, ‘man, there would be nothing more in this world that I would want than to have an audience sing back to me.’ And that's what started that spark to want to be playing on stage.”
Photo: Britt Phillips (@littlebrittanyyy)
Bailey, now 23, grew up in and around Tahlequah, jamming on Creedence Clearwater Revival and Lynyrd Skynyrd songs with his dad, friends, and family. Before he knew any chords he’d strum rhythm along with the sessions on a child’s guitar from Walmart, soaking in his dad’s lead guitar licks. “I kind of learned backwards,” Bailey says. “I'd learned how to play licks and stuff before I even learned how to play chords.”
When he was a pre-teen, Bailey’s mother introduced him to Oklahoma red dirt country music, including Turnpike Troubadours, Stoney LaRue, and Jason Boland (all three of whom he saw play at that first festival). Their music became the template for what Bailey wanted to play when he started making his own music.
Bailey is Cherokee (Keetoowah Tribe) and describes his music as Native American Country, honoring both his family lineage and the long music history he’s now contributing to. He released his first album, the EP Lost City (named for the Native community where part of his family is from and where he often jammed as a child), in 2021. Composed mostly of songs Bailey wrote as a teenager, Lost City is an acoustic album featuring characters and stories right out of the red dirt canon, including “Cigarettes and Roses,” Bailey’s most-successful track to date.
“It's the story about a musician of my caliber coming from Oklahoma or wherever, going to Nashville to try to make it, but then getting sent home because your original sound isn't country enough for them or meeting with the times…and trying to keep your family together while you're out on the road,” Bailey says. “Another made up story, but that's somebody's true story, somebody lived through that, and they can relate to that.”
“Cigarettes and Roses” has nearly 300,000 streams on Spotify to date and was featured in FX network show Reservation Dogs. Its success helped Bailey score an opening slot for Vincent Neil Emerson at Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom, and a little over a decade after he first saw them live, Bailey opened for Turnpike Troubadours last May.
Last year, Bailey released his debut full-length album, Home (ᎣᏪᏅᏒ in Cherokee syllabary), with full production. On it, Bailey includes a couple rock-tinged red dirt songs, like the gritty “Loblolly Pines,” named for the pine trees native to his home, and “Colorado Soil” through which the American Dream slowly crumbles as a man tries to improve his lot in life by growing marijuana in Colorado. When his supply is stolen, he returns to Oklahoma to try his hand with meth.
As he’s gotten older and prouder of his life and lineage, Bailey’s become more comfortable with his songwriting and telling his own story, too. Near the end of Home, Bailey slips in “T-Shirt” his rebuke to the routine appropriation and tokenism of Native culture and peoples, particularly the use of Native iconography by white bands in the red dirt music culture he loves so much. Bailey initially wrote the song just to share his feelings with family and friends, but realized it carried an important message, too.
“I got older and I started coming closer to my culture and being proud of being a Native. ”
“I got older and I started coming closer to my culture and being proud of being a Native. That was really disheartening for me to realize that some of these people want to put that on their shirt because it looks cool or whatever, but we're actually still here,” Bailey says. “I'm always going to be myself and tell my stories. I'm never gonna waver to be not proud to be Native or whatever. I'm very proud to be a Native, and I'm proud to be a country music artist as well.”
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