“I play a lot harder than most.” Kashus Culpepper’s guitar is a lightning rod for feeling, community and the sounds of the American South
Kashus Culpepper had only stopped in for a beer and something to eat. But, like a lot of people before him, he left the Blue Front Café knowing a little more about the blues. Still in his duck hunting gear, he pulled up a seat at the venerable Bentonia, Mississippi juke joint and scarfed down a fried bologna sandwich while the music took hold. Soon, the old dude pulling licks from a guitar was asking him if he played. “I was like, ‘Yeah, a little bit,’” he says during a Zoom call, fresh from dialling up the 70s cool of Guitar.com’s cover shoot. “He’s like, ‘Let me show you something.’ He ended up doing this weird tuning and playing Amazing Grace in this crazy way.”
Kashus Culpepper on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Alanna Taylor for Guitar.com
Culpepper took that tuning home with him and started writing In Her Eyes, a winding, enticing highlight from his debut album Act I. Its coiled riff wrapped around hot-blooded, conflicted lyrics tapping into classic blues staples: temptation, righteousness, all that good stuff. The song is emblematic of the way the Alabama native is able to turn a fresh kernel of wisdom into something that reflects deep-seated truths about who he is and where he comes from. “I have those experiences every day,” he says. “I’m learning so much about myself, and why I love music the way I do.”
Act I’s simmering melange of soul and rootsy country-rock emerged only five years on from Culpepper picking up a guitar in earnest for the first time, but it feels like the work of someone who’s been living between its notes his whole life. Which, in reality, he has. “I wanted to get the sound of all the artists I love, from the Allman Brothers to Aretha and Wilson Pickett,” he says. “I wanted to stay true to my roots. This is who I am.”
“Growing up, music was everything to me, the only thing that didn’t judge me”
Small Town Hero
Culpepper grew up in Alexander City, a small town close to a big lake in Tallapoosa County. Like so many other kids his age, he played football and wrestled in high school. But music was everywhere – his mother was big into gospel and R&B, while he spent his spare time chasing down the country songs that were ubiquitous in the deli or grocery store.
He sang in church a couple of times a week but, initially, he didn’t seek the spotlight. “We had so many people who had these amazing voices,” he recalls. “I’m doing this because my mom and my grandma want me to. Y’all can perform if y’all want to.”
That feeling would change thanks to an unusual set of circumstances. Culpepper’s road led away from Alex City, his time spent around the ER as a firefighter inspiring him to seek out a nursing qualification. In need of cash to pay for his tuition, he signed up for the US Navy and was posted overseas, winding up in a barracks in Rota, Spain as Covid-19 swept across the world.
Image: Alanna Taylor for Guitar.com
“You go over there and you might buy a microwave or toaster – you don’t take it back with you,” he says. “When the next group comes in, there’s usually a room full of stuff. A lot of people try to get there as soon as they can, to get whatever they can.”
Left behind in the free-for-all when Culpepper arrived was a beater guitar. The pandemic was awfully quiet for long stretches, but maybe he could do something about that. With nothing to go on barring a few chords he’d picked up as a teenager, Culpepper opened a YouTube tutorial and set about learning some tunes.
“I realised music is so community-based and what it can do for a person,” he says. “Growing up, music was everything to me, the only thing that didn’t judge me. I didn’t have to be nobody else around it.”
“I wanted to stay true to my roots. This is who I am”
Heart Of The Action
Quickly, he became the rare person you’d be happy to see pull out an acoustic at a bonfire. He started taking requests, from Sturgill Simpson to Taylor Swift, and his weather-beaten voice, halfway between Bill Withers and Ray LaMontagne, began to resonate with people. The youngster who’d shunned attention in the choir was, all of a sudden, right at the heart of things when others needed him to be.
“I had these grown men and women in the service telling me it was dope,” he says. “I was just doing it because it made me feel good to be playing music, and I saw how it made people feel good.”
Image: Alanna Taylor for Guitar.com
When he got out of the Navy in 2022, Culpepper found himself at a crossroads. Over time, he had started to doubt whether a career in nursing was a good fit. “I know how much they help people but I saw some bad stuff when I was in the fire department,” he observes. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can see that every other night for the rest of my life.’”
For the first time in a long time he didn’t have a plan. But he did have a guitar and access to the bars of the Gulf Coast, where someone with his voice and a handful of well-chosen covers can make bank. “I love people who do the cover band scene – they’re making great money,” he says. “They’re killing it.”
For a while, he had a good time doing it, too. Certainly, he had a better time than the Taylor 110 accompanying him. “I beat that guitar to death,” Culpepper says, on the cusp of laughter as he draws out each word. “The humidity was so bad, I sweat so much, and I play so hard. I was breaking strings every gig. It wasn’t the guitar’s fault. It was my fault. I was like, ‘Maybe I need to change my strings to a higher gauge, maybe I shouldn’t leave my guitar out in the sun while I’m on my break so it’ll rust.’ That was all on me.”
“With a guitar I really feel things. I play a lot harder than most”
Missing Ingredient
Besides the usual grind, Culpepper started earning better money by playing casinos and private events. But between each round of beery applause, it became clear that, in the same way nursing hadn’t been it, the bar scene wasn’t it either. “It wasn’t until I started writing songs in the middle of 2023 that I realised I love the creative side of it,” he says, that spark leading him to embrace both traditional and modern approaches to getting over.
Firstly, he moved to Nashville and started working with a producer, the Lone Bellow’s Brian Elmquist. Secondly, he opened a bunch of social media accounts and started posting covers and snippets of his own work, which bridged the gap between R&B, country and down-home rock with the ease of someone who came up steeped in these sounds.
Image: Alanna Taylor for Guitar.com
“Brian told me it was a mix of a lot of things,” Culpepper says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m not trying [to do that] – these are the melodies in my head.’”
By the end of the year his song After Me? had gone viral, its mix of barrel-chested passion and skipping hooks tapping into a guitar style that Culpepper had developed while crunching through cover sets. Immediately, there was something honest and unvarnished about him that people could grab hold of – here was someone playing songs that he thought might make another person feel better. “I’m a very emotion-driven type of guy, from singing to my personal life,” he says. “Also with a guitar – I really feel things. I play a lot harder than most.”
Culpepper was off and running in Nashville, writing with everyone from Natalie Hemby to Brent Cobb as the songs on Act I began to come together, and making his Grand Ole Opry debut in the winter of 2024. But he also felt the need to close a different loop.
Image: Alanna Taylor for Guitar.com
To deliver an opening statement of intent, he needed to head back to Alabama. So, he rolled up with a Martin D-18 at Ivy Manor Studio in Muscle Shoals, where past glories of the Rolling Stones, the Staple Singers and Percy Sledge hung heavy in the air. “I never knew what they went through to make a record,” he admits. “I was learning the whole time.”
Culpepper’s openness in admitting all the things he doesn’t know is disarming – there’s no bluster to him, just a singer and guitarist who means it, whose songs resonate because they feel human, with all the excitement and hurt and mess that entails.
“I get this euphoric feeling when I listen to music at full volume,” he says. “When I started playing guitar, being able to play those songs for myself gave me an even bigger rush.” So, after so many years spent changing lanes, is he on the right track now, steering straight ahead as the speakers rattle? “I think so,” he says. “I’m still evolving – I’m having so much fun.”
Words: Huw Baines
Photography: Alanna Taylor
Styling: Lakelyn Pounders
The post “I play a lot harder than most.” Kashus Culpepper’s guitar is a lightning rod for feeling, community and the sounds of the American South appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
