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An ode to the red dirt towns across the United States. Some true pioneers of red dirt music are the Red Dirt Rangers. Founded in 1988 in a two-story, five-bedroom, funky old house called “The Farm,” the Rangers have been a staple red dirt band over the last 35 years and have paved the way for many other Oklahoma acts, including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Jason Boland & the Stragglers, Stoney LaRue, the Turnpike Troubadours and many more. The band took a hiatus from recording after their 2018 record, Blue Door Nights, but 2025 was the year they got back to it, releasing a lot of new music this year, including their most recent release, a full-length LP titled Red Dirt Town. The title track of the record is a notable listen off the record, as the legendary red dirt band teamed up with another red dirt icon, Evan Felker from the Turnpike Troubadours. “We’re proud to announce the release of the title track from our album “Red Dirt Town”, co-written by our brother Brandon Jenkins along with John Cooper and Brad Piccolo from the band. Thanks to dear friend Evan Felker from Turnpike Troubadours for adding vocals and harmonica to the track.” The heartfelt tune is an ode to the small towns across America, and the dream that many folks raised in these tight-knit communities dream of something more. However, when you make the leap to go to a bigger city or to leave in order to chase your dream, you miss that “Red Dirt Town” fondly, never thoroughly shaking the roots that raised you. “But the grass didn’t seem as green As it did on the movie screen Those streets of gold  Were boarded up and run down I dreamed about life at home In that red dirt town It’s in your blood, gets on your boots It’s hard to shake the dirt from your roots You can tell by the way I look and the way I sound But I come from a red dirt town” Even if you didn’t grow up in a red dirt town, I think this song is something anyone who moved away from their hometown can relate to. No matter how far away you are from your humble roots, home is always home. The traditional vocals of the Red Dirt Rangers combined with the silky twangs from Evan Felker are a match made in heaven on “Red Dirt Town.” Turn this one all the way up. The post Turnpike Troubadours’ Evan Felker Joins The Red Dirt Rangers To Pay Homage To Small Town Roots With “Red Dirt Town” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

No AI on Songbird, and it was hardly used in the research process. Earlier this month, Shooter Jennings, son of the famed country outlaw icon, Waylon Jennings, released an album called Songbird. The tracklist featured a ton of archival songs that he recently discovered, which were all recorded in the prime of Waylon’s career. It’s the first of a three-part project, and, of course, Shooter produced it at Sunset Sound Studio 3, which Jennings renamed “Snake Mountain,” where he’s currently producing all the music he’s working on. When he initially announced the album, Shooter said they actually didn’t need too much work, but he added some background vocals and other instrumentation to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025. When Shooter Jennings announced Songbird, a number of acts were utilizing artificial intelligence to bring back the voices of other famed icons, like Randy Travis for example, and there was some speculation that Shooter was using AI to make the record. However, that was far from the case. During an appearance on The Drifting Cowboy podcast, Shooter put those rumors to bed, saying he actually went out of his way to do it all as old school as possible and did not use AI for any aspect of the project, including marketing or artwork: “Oh, the AI thing? It’s so amazing that like like right when AI happens, we get a new Waylon record. I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I’m cynical… that’s why we took so many painstaking steps to ensure that… of course, it’s not AI. Like, I don’t even know how to use AI to make music right, and I’d rather think it would be able to do that. But also just as far as everything involved with it, like making sure there’s nothing AI related, or there’s no steps even in the art or in anything. Because I can’t pollute the material. Because the Waylon thing, man, what’s so cool about it is like, if we mixed it, I mixed it on a 1976 custom API in the Sunset Sound using only outboard gear. We didn’t use any kind of digital processing.” He explained how much he went through to ensure the state of the tapes stayed at the highest level of integrity: “I used ProTools to prepare the tracks in the sense where, when they were open, they were exactly as they were put. They were digitized, but they were exactly as they were on those those tapes. So they were like 24-track sessions; the older stuff was 16-track, but most of it was all 24-track. What I didn’t wanna do is do anything that would degrade that, the state of it. So what I did, some of them had like five vocal takes or six vocal takes, so I used ProTools to comp the way I would comp Charley’s records or Turnpikes. In the sense that out of those five vocals, I’ll go through and make a vocal track of the best vocal, which was really cool to do on my Dad, right? Just to hear all the different takes and go through it.” Shooter also explained how the whole process worked, mixing the previous vocals and instruments, each with multiple takes per song, and there were over 100 songs. Respect. During a recent sit-down on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Shooter Jennings again discusses AI and its role in the making of Songbird. Starting this portion of the conversation, Shooter talks about how many of the songs on Songbird are, in theory, covers, since Waylon is not the songwriter on most of the tracks. While some of the songs may never have been released or were shared by small, obscure artists, they somehow caught Jennings’ attention, leading him to record them himself. But Shooter once again reiterates that no AI was used to make the music: “AI is so ridiculous, like I hate it. People ask me all the time, or make comments about how… ‘Oh, the new Waylon comes out right when AI happens.’ You know? I’m like, ‘Dude, if y’all knew like I’m a computer nerd, but I have no idea how to do that.’ Like, make an AI Waylon track? It just makes no sense.” However, he did attempt to use it while researching these unearthed songs, hoping it would help speed up the identification of songwriters on some of these tracks. However, Shooter said he quickly shut the door on using AI because it could not comprehend Shooter’s request to identify lyrics and didn’t provide accurate information: “But what one of the early times I realized how we’re being gaslit about how powerful AI is, is that I would ask it… because I’m trying to find these songs and I can’t find it in a traditional Google. So I would ask it about this song, and it would say, ‘Oh, that’s a song by Crystal Gayle.’ And I’m just making that up because there is a song that Crystal Gayle did on that record. But it would be someone else, and I’d be like, ‘Oh my god! Okay.’ I’d go, ‘What are the lyrics to that?’ And it would repeat back what I asked it. But then it’s not really, at all. I don’t know what it was doing. It was just so confused by me asking for lyrics that I immediately shut the door on that, man.” Joseph Hudak chuckles at Shooter’s story and suggests that Skynet is what he should be using. Shooter jokes that the AI platform he was using had half the brainpower of Skynet, and he doubles down on his little faith in AI’s future. “Well, Skynet was mentally impaired. I have no faith in it, honestly, it’s all bullsh**.” Amen to that. While I don’t blame Shooter for asking AI to help him speed up the research process, this is a prime example of how AI is not all that it’s cracked up to be. I mean, anyone who spends five minutes Googling something should realize that their AI Overviews are downright wrong sometimes… all you kids out there using it to do your homework… I’d really be double checking that information if I was you. I think it’s safe to say that AI won’t be used at all in any of Shooter’s upcoming projects or research phases. Check out the entire interview while you’re here. The post Shooter Jennings Found AI To Be Wildly Inaccurate During The Research Process Of ‘Songbird’ – “I Have No Faith In It” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

Trying to share his love for the outdoors with friends went horribly wrong. It’s no secret that the outlaw legend, Hank Williams Jr., is an avid outdoorsman outside of his music career. From a young age, Hank Jr. has been in the woods, and his love for the outdoors —hunting, fishing, and respect for the land — has not faded one bit as he’s aged. Back in 1992, Bocephus sat down and talked about his love for the outdoors. He shared some stories about the wildlife he’d interacted with over the years. “My life and the outdoors, be it hunting and fishing, was passed down to me from my great grandfather, grandfather, and father. They were all hunters and fishermen; Daddy loved hunting and fishing.”  He talks about how even though Sr. passed when he was three, his grandfather, who lived in South Alabama, would spend time with him in the woods—this time with his grandfather really solidified his love for the outdoors. As Hank Jr. got older, he loved to share his passion for the outdoors with his friends, bringing them along on hunts and allowing cameras to capture him in a tree stand. One of his friends, Joe Nichols, recently sat down with Dillon Weldon on the Drifting Cowboy podcast and shared that he had the honor of hunting one time with Hank Williams Jr., but his white lie of how experienced a hunter he was came back to bite him in the butt big time. “I went to Hank Jr.’s house. First time I’ve spent time with Hank Jr. He wanted to go hunting, he wanted to take me turkey hunting. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, absolutely, let’s go hunting.’ He’s like, ‘Ever been hunting before?’  I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Lie. I’d been hunting before, but I’d never took it serious. I never had a rifle, so I never really got to hunt that much. I was more into fishing. He was like, ‘Yeah, bring your 12-gauge and we’ll go do this and this.’ I’m like, ‘Alright, I’ll go do that.’ I had to go get a 12-gauge…” Joe Nichols was entirely under the impression that he was going to join Hank Jr. for some light hunting and maybe target practice, but that the two men would spend more time writing music, drinking whiskey, and shooting the s*** with each other. “I’m thinking I’m going to go down to hang out with Hank Jr. for a couple of days, and we’re gonna get hammered, and we’re going to play ‘The Blues Man’ and ‘Family Tradition,’ and we’re just going to sit around a campfire and play music. That’s what I thought was going to happen.” Well, that impression of the weekend was far from what truly unfolded: Well, Hank Jr. really meant hunting. CMT came and brought a camera crew down there; they were going to do this show with Hank Jr. called ‘Hank’s Wildlife Adventures,’ or something like that. This was going to be one of the first episodes of this show; he was going to take me hunting for turkeys. He thought I’d been hunting, and it was a trainwreck. It was a disaster! I showed up and I got this gun I’ve never fired before and I’ve got a half gallon of whiskey and I’ve got a guitar, and I’m like ‘Alright, it’s going to be a good time.’ He handed me this turkey call — and it’s a drum. It’s a little drum thing and striker, which I didn’t know what the hell it was. He goes, ‘Here, work on that, we’ll get your gobble whatever right.’ Although Nichols was very surprised to see the camera crew and had to come to the realization that he needed to buckle up, not to make himself look like a fool, all those efforts were right out the window when Hank Jr. handed him a pot call, which is a two-handed friction-based turkey call that can create a wide variety of turkey sounds. Although this kind of call is usually considered easy to use, the odds were not in Nichols’ favor, quickly revealing that he was not the seasoned hunter Hank Jr. thought he had invited to his cabin. “He turns that way, the camera is on me, and I’m like (makes an inaudible noise). At this age right now, I can look back and go, my god, that had to be the dumbest thing anybody has ever done on camera. He turns around and sees me and goes, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Uh, I don’t know how this works. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I think at that moment he’s like, ‘Oh no. Oh god. Okay. He’s never been hunting before.'” Nichols says that the event was just one thing after another, and he was still drinking at the time, which led to total disaster. Of course, all of this was captured on camera for CMT, and it all came to a head when they got into the stand the next morning. Hank Jr kept having to wake up Nichols to take shots, and they finally got one, but Nichols still stands by the whole thing being a disaster. A few months ago, Nichols bumped into Hank Jr. and learned that the country music legend had created a little joke out of the disastrous event. “A couple of months ago, I did a show with him in South Carolina, and we caught up. He started talking about the Joe Nichols blind, and I’m like, ‘The what?’ He said, ‘I never told you I named that blind after you.’ I’m like, ‘You did what?’  He goes, ‘That was such a traumatic, funny, awesome story.’ Because he had way more story about it. He goes, ‘I had named that blind after you. After the disaster that was…'” Nichols laughed it off, saying that having Hank Williams Jr. name a blind after him was an honor yet so embarrassing. Hey, you win some, lose most… What a story. Check out the whole interview while you’re here. The post Joe Nichols Once Went Hunting With Hank Williams Jr. Not Knowing It Would Be Filmed For A TV Show: “It Was Trainwreck” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

It’s being reported that President Trump is considering the release and repatriation of the two survivors of the strike on the narcoterrorist submarine. CNN suggest it’s because of the dubious legal authority . . .