I was raised in the North Georgia mountains, on the same gravel road I still live on. My roots run deep — all the way back to my 4x great-grandfather, Johnathan Thomas Nicholson, who enlisted right here in Towns County in 1861, serving as a Rebel soldier in Company D, 24th Georgia Infantry. He fought for the Confederacy while the home front held its own kind of line — one made of land, family, and survival.

His son, Francis Dekalb Nicholson, my 3x great-grandfather, passed down another kind of legacy. He taught my great-grandfather Claude how to make whiskey the old way — slow, strong, and quiet. And Claude didn’t take it lightly. As my grandfather put it:

“Daddy was more particular about his whiskey-making than most women were their cooking.”

It wasn’t just a craft — it was a point of pride.

Claude later passed that knowledge down to my grandfather, but not without a warning:

“I’m not saying you should,” he told him, “but if you ever do make whiskey… don’t sell it local. Some man’ll go home drunk, and his wife’ll get it out of him — next thing you know, here comes the sheriff.”

So they ran it up into Asheville — by the truckload — fast and far from the gossip trails. My grandfather was a ridge runner, driving that mountain whiskey too quick to catch. And truth be told, the sheriff back then, old Harry England, wasn’t too keen on stopping it. He liked a good sip himself — and my great-granddaddy wasn’t about to see the law go without his “good humor medicine.”

These stories — they’re not legends to me. They’re blood memory. And they show up in every note I play. These songs carry the heartbreak, the defiance, the dirt, and the stubborn beauty of these hills. I don’t sing for attention. I sing to keep the stories alive — and to remind folks there’s still power in something real.