Whitey Morgan Is Country Music's Last Great Honky Tonk Hero

Photo courtesy of Whitey Morgan/Shorefire Media

It’s drizzling on the Lower East Side. The air hangs heavy outside, and I’m squashed into a captain’s chair in the nose end of a hulking tour van, proffering my iPhone to a bearded giant folded into the seat behind me. Outlaw country’s heir apparent, Whitey Morgan, is a big man with a non-nonsense demeanor. He doesn’t crack a smile until later on, once we’ve shared a few nips of Knob Creek—he jokes that he and his bandmates, the 78s, have finally outgrown Jim Beam—and paid our mutual respects to famed Nashville producer Billy Sherrill. Whitey’s gravelly voice is softened by a faint twang, and commands attention; it raises to a booming baritone when he has a point to drive home, and he’s got a hell of a lot on his mind.

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In case you didn’t know already, Whitey Morgan and the 78s are a down’n‘dirty country band from hardscrabble Flint, Michigan. Their last album, a self-titled joint, came out on Bloodshot Records back in 2010, but Whitey himself has been playing in country bands around the Midwest since 2005, and touring nonstop since he met up with the rest of the 78s in 2009. His music is raw, gritty, and honest, tailor-made for the honky-tonks your daddy used to frequent and hewn from the same solid bedrock as Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. His songs about drinking, drugging, womanizing, and regret come layered with wailing steel guitar and crisp acoustic plucking, all set to Whitey’s barrel-aged voice and hard-lived lyrics—“I gave up on Jesus when Mama gave up on me/so much for family life, it’s just me and the whiskey” bounces and jives, burying the depressive truth under a good time beat and outlaw patina. It’s real country, and what’s more, it’s the opposite of the glitzy beach pop that Nashville’s been pumping out. Whitey knows it, too, and had made his position crystal-clear: on this current tour, his merch booth is selling shirts with “Fuck Pop Country” emblazoned in huge letters on the back.

When I crossed paths with the burly five-piece, Whitey Morgan and the 78s are midway through another headlining tour. Things are going well. Finally free of legal headaches from a bum contract with Bloodshot Records, the band is now handling their own distribution for their highly-anticipated new album, Sonic Ranch (out May 19, and replete with a chilling cover of Townes Van Zandt’s immortal “Waitin’ Around to Die“). ”It took me a couple of years and thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to find out what a shitty deal I signed years ago,” Whitey explains ruefully. “In the music business, the music part of it is, like, half a percent. It’s just “business” over here. It’s crazy. But people buy into that shit because they don’t know any better, they’ve never done it themselves.”

Whitey sounds happy (and relieved) to finally be back in control of his band’s destiny and free to carry on along the DIY path he’s followed since his punk rock days back in Michigan. He might not be the last outlaw standing—yet—but Whitey Morgan is doing his damnedest to keep real, honest country music alive and kicking. So far, it’s working.

Noisey: It seems like this tour’s been going well—tonight’s show at the Mercury Lounge is already packed, and you’ve been selling out a lot of other venues, too, right?
Whitey Morgan: The West Coast is blowing up for us. We did this last run over there and a bunch of stuff sold out. We did like four hundred people in Sacramento, sold it out. We had fifty there the time before that. It’s just word of mouth. What we do, the mainstream media masses, there’s no way for them to get a hold of it, or to be exposed to it. So for us, we just tour and tour and tour. There’s that whole thing where you start out with two people that love you, and they tell ten people, and then they tell ten, and then next thing you know there’s this giant crazy audience that you have now.

It’s a punk rock approach.
That’s exactly what it is, which I did for a fuckin’ long time. When I was in my teenage years.

I kind of got that vibe, that you probably grew up with some Minor Threat.
Oh, of course I did. Yes.

So many country dudes have that crossover—heavy metal and punk and country are so intertwined. How did you go from punk to playing this kind of music?
It was kind of a back and forth. My grandpa taught me how to play country music when I was really young. But then when you’re fifteen years old and you have a guitar and an amp, you ride a skateboard and a BMX bike, you live in Michigan and all your friends wanna fuckin’ play punk rock and metal and shit. So that’s just kinda what you do. I did that throughout my teen years, then my grandfather passed when I was nineteen. Basically, I inherited his guitar and all his records and that brought me back to square one again, you know?

Back to your roots.
The stuff that I learned to play, the reason I learned guitar, was because of him. Those songs, it took me somewhere else. I somehow turned playing Jimmy Martin gospel and bluegrass into playing fuckin’ Slayer riffs on ten with my friends at a shitty little all-ages club. It didn’t take long for me to get back to it. I sat with my grandpa’s guitar about a month or two after he passed away and just picked it up and played it. I had never enjoyed that emotion about playing music before. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was his guitar. Those were the songs he had taught me to play when I was a kid. At the same time, it was the fact that I could sit there with just me and guitar and play a song. I didn’t have to have a drummer or a bass player or a singer.

It’s very personal.
You know? Like, people don’t realize that. That’s kind of the big difference between those genres—you can create a great body of work and music with just an acoustic guitar, vocals, and someone who has the heart to write something to them or to other people. Don’t get me wrong, I love metal and punk rock and all that shit but, you’re not gonna sit there with a Les Paul and full stacked Marshall and just get up on stage and sing and play and have it be that meaningful. You need a band to get that point across, to get that energy, which is what that music’s about. To me, that was the first time that light bulb kind of went off. I could sit here and do this, and it sounds good just like this. Imagine if I had a band? That’s when I started putting a band together, when I was nineteen or twenty, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

There’s this stereotype that good country music has to be from the South, but I’ve always just thought of it as the working people’s music. You being from Flint, Michigan, which has such a rough reputation and difficult economic situation, has really got to give you a little more grit than somebody from Nashville.
Oh, big time. The thing is, too, a lot of Flint in the 60s and 70s was full of hillbillies that came up from the south. My grandparents came up from the South; they met in Ann Arbor, actually, before they got married and moved to Flint. They called it “The Hillbilly Highway” for a reason. It literally meets up with Route 75 in Flint, Michigan, twenty yards away from the factory my grandfather worked at. That’s where it kind of stops.

That’s some Robert Johnson at the crossroads kind of shit.
Yeah, it’s crazy when people talk about the Hillbilly Highway. It’s like, yeah I know where it started at and where it ends. I drive by it everyday in Flint. There’s a big Chevy Truck factory that my grandpa worked at for thirty five years.

So how do you feel about fellow Michigan native Kid Rock and his hillbilly act?

You’re clearly not at all down with the modern pop country sound at all, though.
For me, it’s a whole other world. I don’t even consider it to be music. It’s a business, first and foremost. Country music is a business, and that is the biggest problem with it: all the money and lawyers and shit, there’s no room for them in the world that we call “artistry.” You know? That makes no goddamn sense to me. Someone goes up there and paints this beautiful mural, and there’s always gonna be that guy that’s trying to make some money off it.

Charging admission…
Right. Off this beautiful thing that this guy worked on. He’s been working on his craft for years and years. But then there’s that other person, all he sees is dollar signs. That’s what Nashville represents to me. They figured out this way that they don’t even need the painter. They can mock it up with a computer, make it look just as cool, and sell it to the general public who doesn’t know any fuckin’ better.

…And then take out all the soul, sing about short shorts, and make it this misogynistic frat party.
It’s the same thing with my merch. For the most part, all my stuff is hand drawn on American cotton from California. They have my tag in them. That’s how it should be, and no one does that. They claim they do, they put their name in it. But it’s still made in China or, you know, fuckin’ Malaysia or something; as patriotic as they pretend to be, they’re making millions off their Chinese-made merch shirts. It’s just terrible. They’re concerned about their tour bus and their fuckin’ satellite dish working in their tour bus, or whatever, instead of really concerned about the overall look and image of the band. Not like, fashionable image, but when someone mentions our name I want them to know, like I said to you about Kid Rock, I want people to say, “even if I’m not into him, I respect him as a business man.”

So it’s about the work ethic?
“He loves what he does and he loves the boys in his band. He loves country music, and he is committed to doing it the way he wants and being represented the way he wants to be represented.” That’s the biggest thing to me. I feel like a lot of those people, they’ve never spoken those words that I just spoke to you. They have no idea what that even means because they’re whole life has been a sham of bullshit. I mean, how do you go from singing in a karaoke bar to opening for 15,000 people in six months? What does that guy know about the road? What does he know about being a bandleader, or friend? It’s unbelievable to me, the things I’ve heard where these guys get their starts. Some of them genuinely worked their asses off down on Broadway in Nashville for years and years playing five shows a day. Those guys I have tons of respect for. The guys that just pop up out of nowhere who are just good looking enough, and can just barely sing enough where the auto tune can fix it?

That sing about beer and beaches…
Yeah, and they don’t even write that shit.

Sixteen songwriters on a song with three chords.
Exactly. Another thing is, okay, so you don’t write any of your own songs. At least pick good songs. You know? That’s the biggest thing, too. George Jones didn’t have one number one hit with a song that he wrote. But you know what? He knew how to pick a good song. That’s just as important. He also knew how to take something that someone else wrote and created, and make it his own. Make it sound legitimate, and make you believe that it’s coming from his heart. That’s just as fuckin’ hard to do as writing your own song. I’ve done both.

There’s not a lot of engineers left like Billy Sherrill, either.
That’s my dream producer. Why can’t we just get Billy? Let’s just get Billy. We’ll take the time machine back to 1975.

Get back in the Quonset hut.
Yeah! Fuck it, let’s do that. Know what would happen? No one would give a shit, because no one even knows who the hell that guy is.

The people that do know about the genre’s history tend to like your band a whole lot, though, and there aren’t many others who sound like you. It’s almost like this particular country tradition is dying out.
I think the biggest thing is a lot of these guys, the main guy, the bandleader or whatever—they’re real unstable. The guys that should be on top of the world right now, for some reason they just can’t seem to knock off their bullshit and their druggin’ or whatever they’re doing, and do what we want them to do: go record some great country albums so we can all enjoy them. But again, they don’t come from that world. ‘Til I got this dude right here? [gestures to guitarist Joey Spina] I drove every fuckin’ mile when we would tour. Then I started slowly letting him in, like, “alright. You can drive.” Now, it’s flip-flopped. He’s doing 60-70 percent, and I’m down to 30 percent! So who does that? I guarantee all these dudes out here on the road that are claiming they’re—I’d love to mention some names but I’m not going to—they’ve never driven a van, they’ve never backed a van into a venue and loaded out all the gear.

They’ve never parked a van in New York City…
Never parked a van in New York City. They just don’t deal with what a band deals with on the road, you know? Year after year. I haven’t been doing it that long, I think I’m coming up on maybe eight years of really hard touring? The first couple we were just doing weekenders in the Midwest and shit.

People don’t know how hard it is to be by yourself, away from people you love, you’re dirty, tired, you smell awful, you’re hungry. All there is is Taco Bell at the truck stop. All there is is a granola bar.
If Taco Bell is even open. [Laughs]

Everyone wants to give you booze, everyone wants to give you whatever, and you still gotta stay human and practice your craft at the end of the night.
Right. And this is what I’m running into lately. When I try to not drink as much, I feel like they buy me more.

Because they know. They want to see a mess.
Right. Then I feel like, well, there’s eight shots up here on my table. What am I gonna do? They want Whitey from five years ago, which, he would have drank ‘em all and made a shit-show. I would have gotten on top of the van, we would have rolled down the street on the goddamn van like Teen Wolf. That’s what they wanna see. They wanna see that idiot. But there’s just too much to lose. If I fuckin’ fall off and break an arm? In those days, whatever, I’d take six months off and these guys’d go make money elsewhere. Now I have a family, which is these guys; I have a manager; I have bills. I have real responsibilities now, because of this level we’ve made it to from all this hard work. How could I do that to them? What’s Joey gonna do tomorrow if I break my fuckin’ arm and the tour’s over and his paycheck that he’s been getting for two years all of a sudden is gone—he’s gotta go home, call up every fuckin’ dude he knows, “hey, can I get a gig?” I know he can do it, cause he’s that good and knows that many people. But who the fuck am I to do that to him, and to my acoustic guitar player, my bass player, my tour manager, you know? That used to be me. I used to get stupid and unbelievably drunk. Whatever drugs they had, let’s do ‘em. Let’s have fun. People want that, they’ve heard the stories. but that’s not me anymore. I just have too much to worry about in the morning. I get a good drunk on, we have a great time out there, but there’s this switch that I can turn off now. I didn’t used to be able to turn it off.

It takes a while for that to develop. You’ve gotta sleep on a lot of floors.
It really does. But yeah, I’m not fucking it all up for that. That’s idiotic.

It can take time for country music itself to really click for some people, too. It might be awhile before George Jones can make you cry, but when it gets you, it gets you.
It definitely does. But it’s just amazing. I always tell people, “it takes getting your heart broken a few times, and maybe losing a job or a couple of loved ones, before you really understand that these songs are about real shit.” They might sound too perfectly generic to be about real shit, but they actually are. That’s just how good they are. It takes you a little while. Ray Price and Merle Haggard, when they sing those songs, it’s about real life. Nowadays, it couldn’t be further from it. They don’t have real singers. They’re airbrushing photos of all these dudes. It’s like, it couldn’t be less real than it is right now. It blows my mind. That’s what it’s supposed to be about. The word that goes best with country music is “real,” in fucking giant bold letters: REAL. I think about the way we’re going down the road listening to these songs, and a song hits me and I’m like, “I’ve been there.” Or I look at Brett and go, “yeah, been there buddy?” He’s like, “oh fuck, man.” It hits you. It brings you back down to earth. Someone else forty fuckin’ years ago wrote about some shit that happened to you last night, because you were drinking and you weren’t where you shoulda been, maybe you did something stupid you shouldn’t have done. With a lot of George Jones songs, when it hit me, it totally reminded me of this girl, this time, this day. That’s just what it does. Even if he didn’t write it, you know damn well he felt the same way about it, and the reason why he sang it better than the dude that wrote it, the reason why he can sell it, is because he probably had the same experience. It’s all these same memories and experiences that we keep tossing around, all these country guys. There’s only so many of ‘em.

Catch Whitey Morgan and the 78s on tour with the excellent Cody Jinks:

04.24.2015 Fri Toledo OH Frankie’s Inner City
04.25.2015 Sat Pittsburgh PA The Altar Bar
05.01.2015 Fri Flint MI Machine Shop
05.02.2015 Sat Flint MI Machine Shop
05.06.2015 Wed Omaha NE The Waiting Room
05.07.2015 Thu Des Moines IA Wooly’s
05.08.2015 Fri Minneapolis MN Cabooze
05.09.2015 Sat Chicago IL The Bottom Lounge
05.14.2015 Thu New York NY Midtown Live
05.15.2015 Fri Harrisonburg VA Clementine Café
05.16.2015 Sat Raleigh NC Lincoln Theater
05.21.2015 Thu Las Vegas NV Hard Rock Vinyl
05.22.2015 Fri San Luis Obispo CA Slo Brew
05.23.2015 Sat West Hollywood CA Whisky A Go Go
05.28.2015 Thu Bakersfield CA Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace
05.29.2015 Fri Fresno CA Audie’s Olympic
05.30.2015 Sat Santa Cruz CA Moe’s Alley
06.04.2015 Thu Salt Lake City UT State Room
06.05.2015 Fri Denver CO Summit Music Hall
06.06.2015 Sat Kansas City MO Riot Room
06.19.2015 Fri Bloomington IN The Bluebird
06.20.2015 Sat Newport KY Southgate House Revival
06.24.2015 Wed Winston-Salem NC Ziggy’s
06.25.2015 Thu Asheville NC The Grey Eagle
06.26.2015 Fri Knoxville TN The Bowery
07.04.2015 Sat Fort Worth TX Billy Bob’s
07.24.2015 Fri Chelsea MI Chelsea Soung & Lights
07.25.2015 Sat Rock Island IL Rock Island Brewing Company
07.31.2015 Fri Seattle WA Neumo’s
08.01.2015 Sat Happy Valley OR Pickathon
08.02.2015 Sun Happy Valley OR Pickathon