String Episode 377 was partly inspired by what I see as an unfortunate blind spot. While gospel music has earned a lane in Americana through the majesty of the McCrary Sisters, country songwriters who lean into their Christian faith as a mode of navigating the world tend to arouse qualms among secular humanist type fans. The exceptions (Julie Miller, Mike Farris and Phil Madeira come to mind) don’t take many fingers to count. Meanwhile, artists who sing earnestly and authentically about small town life, family and church often strike the liberal fan as code for Republican values. And that might not be fair.
While I’m not a Christian myself, I was raised in the South around many wise and lovely Christian people, and I am devoted to inclusion and pluralism and hearing a wide range of artistic points of view and philosophies. Hence my heightened interest in this week’s guest, Charles Wesley Godwin. His name is amusingly god-fearing, but his devotion to his subject matter and building empathy with his audience is quite serious. Moreover, he’s become one of the most successful emerging singer-songwriters in the grey area between country and Americana. Less than eight years after his debut album, the 33-year-old is playing to thousands per night, including, in mid October, his second sell-out at the 9,500-seat Colorado bellwether venue Red Rocks Amphitheater.
Godwin, a native and proud resident of Morgantown, WV, devoted his 2023 breakout major label debut Family Ties to home and hearth and loved ones. His new one, Christian Name, carries us on a faith journey born of family tragedy, when he and his wife lost their second son to a stillbirth in 2024. These projects could have come off as mawkish and trite, but they’re all the more powerful because they don't. The details and scenarios are deftly chosen. The insights and redemption feel authentically earned.
“I've always just written the thing that's on my heart. Like, it's never been calculated,” Godwin says. “The only thing that got me through - to kind of keep going forward and keep it all together and continue to be stable and functioning for my family, and to show up to work at the next show and and keep getting the work done, was God. I'd always had faith in my life, but it's never been like it is now. So I wanted to make an album that glorified God, where I'm just putting it all out there.”
What works here is that where Christian country music tries to glorify God at us, Godwin’s approach is to share his own story as if it were any other page from his life. The rhetorical strategy leaves us not feeling judged over our own relationship with the divine but rooting for the artist as he climbs a lifeline into the light, as in the opening song “Try Again.”
I think I can try again / Without asking why again
Start me over on top of the ashes, let the healing in
Ready to fly again / Look life in the eye again
Without backing down from what may come around or how it ends
Like his Big Loud label-mate Kashus Culpepper, Godwin came to singing, guitar playing, songwriting and performing well into adulthood and very much by surprise. “I didn't grow up singing or playing. Nobody in my family played, and I just assumed that I couldn't sing,” he tells us. “So I was just a very regular kid who loved sports. I loved hunting and fishing, the (West Virginia University) Mountaineers. It wasn't until I was in college where I picked up a guitar to fill free time. I was trying to find hobbies because I couldn't play football anymore.”
He discovered he had a resonant and relatable voice (“God-given” in his way of thinking). He took the usual path of covering others (Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, and the hugely influential Avett Brothers he says) as he honed his songwriting. He had enough success at the local and regional level to decide to go for it as an artist through a DIY path. And as he says at the outset of our conversation, “The dream was always listening rooms.”
He continues: “The pinnacle, the mountain, to me was like if I could just go around anywhere in the country and play cafe type rooms that fit 100 to 150 people, and I could make a living doing it. Like that would just be incredible, you know? So yeah, I mean, everything in the last five years has just been beyond that, and so that's not something that I've forgotten.”
Godwin is part of a new generation of Appalachian and Southern songwriters who’ve revived the personal narrative and earnest connection in the country/folk/Americana space, including Tyler Childers, Red Clay Strays, and Zach Bryan. Many of them he’s toured with or collaborated with, such as Wyatt Flores and Stephen Wilson Jr., both of whom appear on Christian Name. Whether progressive or conservative by disposition, these acts are offering a unifying and collective experience and emotional catharsis for young-skewing crowds in a bewildering and often discouraging time. That’s something Americana - and America - needs pretty badly these days.
