One of the most underrated artists in country music also has one of the most underrated haunting songs of all time.
Ashley McBryde’s “Southern Babylon,” from her 2018 Girl Going Nowhere album, is just an excellent piece of songwriting.
It show cases Ashley’s knack for stringing lines together and brought out a dark side of her we hadn’t really seen to that point that continued on her 2020 Never Will album with songs like “Voodoo Doll,” “Shut Up Sheila,” and the badass murder ballad, “Martha Divine”.
The song is a blurry, dream-like string of scenes that the narrator recalls after a car-crash. At the beginning it has you believing one thing, but by the end, well, I’ll let you discover it for yourself…
“Somebody said “Hey girl, where you been?
Doncha know I been waitin’ for ya?
Got a band up there been dyin’ to play a little ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’
Rest that trav’lin’ soul, looks like the road was long
Welcome to Southern Babylon”
I just had the chance to see Ashley McBryde from the pit in Orlando a few days ago (she waved to me in the when she saw I was wearing her shirt, nbd…) and let me tell you, she is the real deal.
A complete rockstar on stage with the song quality to take her to the top.
The song is actually about where musicians go when they die:
According to Ashley, it’s gotta be a dive bar:
“And I said, ‘Where do you think musicians go when they die?’
And we got into this weird conversation, like really, what would happen? Surely musicians go somewhere else, they don’t go stand in line in heaven or hell. They go to a bar!”
