He knows and loves traditional idioms enough to hang on to them, to tweak, toy with and talk back to them. A musical activist by comparison, he's often photographed with his banjo suspended from his shoulder by a rainbow-colored strap. Gleaves labors miles away from the country mainstream, inhabiting a world that's both more grassroots and more intellectualized, a world of folk clubs and southern community arts centers.
#AND THATS WHEN IT HAPPENED QUEER AS FOLK SOUNDTRACK LICENSE#
Too often, we'll seize on a figure like Kim Davis - the devoutly religious Kentucky county clerk who'd rather be marched down to the jailhouse than issue a marriage license to a gay couple - to confirm our citified stereotypes rather than make room in our awareness for someone as complex as Sam Gleaves, a Virginia-born, Kentucky-dwelling, 20-something, Appalachian picker, whose vignettes of blue-collar, mountain resilience often have queer protagonists.Ī couple of years back, "Follow Your Arrow," Kacey Musgraves's breezily casual toast to same-sex affection, and the general pursuit of whatever you happen to be into, was dubbed a sign of millennial progressiveness emerging in country music.
Last year, the book Rednecks, Queers & Country Music - a significant, if overlooked work by scholar Nadine Hubbs - drove home just how powerful and pervasive outsider assumptions about the backwardness of rural identities and downhome music can be.