I know what you are sarcastically thinking… “No way? ‘Whitehouse Road’ by Tyler Childers is written about an actual road? The next thing you’ll tell me is that the album ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles is also an actual place?”  First off, that’s hateful. I don’t appreciate that type of condescending tone. Secondly, I just thought it would be fun to explore, right? It’s one of Tyler Childers’ staples, and I don’t know if everyone in the world has ever stopped to think, “I wonder if I could actually drive down Whitehouse Road?” The good news? You can. The bad news? It’s in the middle of B.F.E. in Eastern Kentucky – about two hours east of Lexington, Kentucky. Here’s the Whitehouse Road that we can pretty much confirm the song was named after.   The “Lady May” singer grew up in the hollers of Lawrence County, which is in the Eastern Kentucky Coalfield region of the state. He then moved to Johnson County and lived there, graduating from Paintsville High School. It appears as though he now resides somewhere near Irvine, Kentucky. If you are really interested in geography (free geography lesson from a fellow Kentuckian), Irvine is about an hour southeast of Lexington. How fun is it to learn about Eastern Kentucky, am I right? How can we confirm that’s the very Whitehouse Road that he was talking about in the song? Well, first we can use some geographical context clues. That road pictured above is just across the Johnson County line, so it’s the closest Whitehouse Road that Childers would have known of. Then, you’ll remember that one of the famous lines in the song is “I’ve got women up and down this creek.” Both Lick Creek and Hammond Creek flow under or around the Eastern Kentucky roadway. Got women up and down Lick Creek… I mean, the song practically writes itself. There’s also the Levisa Fork tributary (the river) where these creeks feed out of. But the best proof can be found in this video from a Tyler Childers performance back in 2015. The country artist who had yet to have his big break was playing with his band, Tyler Childers & The Food Stamps at the The Brew Skies Festival at the Timberline Four Seasons Resort in Davis, West Virginia. It was there (while it looks like people were zip-lining above the stage) that he told the story of how “Whitehouse Road” came to be: “After I graduated from Paintsville High School, I spent a little time there and I worked at the local Sears. We were about as big as this stage. We had a couple of tractors, a couple of refrigerators. Most of the deliveries that we did. You had to order online, they came to our store, we brought them to your house.  So I was doing deliveries and we did a lot of deliveries over in Magoffin County, Kentucky. When we’d go there, we would take the longest way around. That’s how you get paid the most for doing the least amount of work. You drive the long way to get there. Remember work smarter, not harder. The guy that I did the deliveries with, he had a lot of tall tales and flat out lies, and I wrote this song for him.” And while many may have thought that the song is about Tyler himself, getting rowdy in the holler with his buddies back home before went on to become a country music superstar, in another interview, Tyler confirmed that he actually steered clear of a lot of the riff raff during this time and that the song was mostly based off some of the wild stories this particular Sears co-worker would tell: “I was just thinking about this dude I worked with – his tall tales and flat-out lies and how much of a wild cat he was. He was an interesting character, but I always tried to steer clear of that when I was living back home, as far as getting into that much orneriness.” Now that you can sleep at night knowing which Whitehouse Road Tyler Childers was talking about, you might as well take in this vintage Childers performance. The post The ‘Whitehouse Road’ That Tyler Childers Sings About Is A Real Place In Eastern Kentucky… Here’s Where It Is first appeared on Whiskey Riff.