How Jelly Roll overcame addiction and prison to become the new (tattooed) face of country

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Jelly Roll has a simple rule — one his team had posted on the walls of Mechanics Bank Arena here on a recent evening — about taking photos backstage at his concerts.

"Before the show, great — whatever you want," the Southern rapper turned face-tattooed country star says. "But you come back after, then we're just chilling, having a good time." He grins. "Ain't nobody need pictures of that."

Business, then pleasure, in other words. And right now business is good.

He performs Dec. 5 at LCA for the iHeart Radio Jingle Ball.

Reclined in a padded chair as he smokes a joint a couple of hours before showtime, Jelly Roll, 38, is hobnobbing with half a dozen of the radio DJs and programmers who've helped drive his songs "Son of a Sinner" and "Need a Favor" to the top of Billboard's Country Airplay chart this year. Between selfies, they talk about Las Vegas and about the fentanyl crisis; one guy offers Jelly Roll an impromptu lesson on the role Buck Owens and Merle Haggard played in Bakersfield's musical history.

"The fact that they're from the same place as Korn is awesome," the singer says of the pioneering rap-rock band, which gets the radio folks (and one of their teenage kids) chuckling. "I wish 2Pac was from Bakersfield too — that'd really be a mindf—."

Beyond his music, which speaks frankly about his past as a drug addict and a convicted felon — and about the faith journey he says took him out of those troubles — Jelly Roll's way with people has helped make him 2023's breakout country act, with sold-out tour dates, hundreds of millions of streams and nominations for five prizes, including new artist of the year, at November's Country Music Association Awards. He's an "extrovert by nature," he says — "the dude in jail who'd run the poker table. I love talking. I love communicating. I love hearing people."

Backstage he can make an industry schmoozefest feel like an intimate hang; onstage, as at Mechanics later that night, he can bring audience members to tears as he locks eyes and bellows lyrics like those in his viral hit "Save Me" about being "damaged beyond repair." His voice is tender yet scuffed at the edges; it's also slightly higher than you'd expect looking at him, which gives his singing a welcome sense of vulnerability.

"I've never seen anybody who by the time he walks out there, before he's even done anything, the crowd's already in love with him," says Eric Church, the veteran country star who invited Jelly Roll to open for him at several gigs over the summer. "I think it's the story and the honesty. There's so many people you run into — I've been doing this 20 years — where part of their shtick is this false humility. But he truly is grateful and astonished to be where he's at in his life. You can feel it all over him."

Jelly Roll's latest achievement, four months after the release of his first full country album, "Whitsitt Chapel," is his status as a front-runner for multiple Grammy nominations, not just in the country categories but for the coveted best new artist award (despite his having released more than 20 rap albums and mixtapes). Historically, Nashville acts have had a tough go in that race; the last to win best new artist was the Zac Brown Band in 2010. But Jelly Roll, born Jason DeFord, has beaten longer odds.

He grew up in Antioch, Tennessee, a blue-collar suburb of Nashville, where he spent much of his teens and early 20s locked up on robbery and drug-related charges. A fan of Southern hip-hop groups UGK and Three 6 Mafia, he started rapping around 2002 and eventually established a solid business as a DIY hip-hop artist. Yet with "Save Me," an unsparing acoustic ballad he wrote during the early days of the pandemic, he began moving toward the type of country music he'd absorbed as a child from his mother (who also gave him his nickname).

"She played me the good stuff: Willie, Waylon, Garth," he says, adding with a laugh: "I can probably sing more Garth Brooks songs than Garth Brooks can." Country music had evolved plenty since then, growing both fratty-er and more genteel, but Jelly Roll can identify specific country songs that made him think a guy like him might find a place in the genre. "The first time I heard Sam Hunt's 'Break Up in a Small Town,' when that 808 drops," he says. "Or 'Cop Car' by Keith Urban. I was like, 'Yo, country dudes are singing about wild s— again!'"

Indeed, "Save Me" — a moving portrait of despair that somehow avoids self-pity — exploded instantly on YouTube, where today it has more than 190 million plays. (It's got another 130 million on Spotify, including those for a new version he cut with Lainey Wilson for "Whitsitt Chapel.") Even so, Nashville insiders were slow to take him seriously. "Anybody in town that says they didn't say no to me is a liar," says the singer, who's been married since 2016 to Bunnie DeFord, a podcaster and former sex worker who goes by Bunnie XO. "They said there's no way that country radio would play an artist with face tattoos. They said I should go by Jason DeFord, as though the town needs another Jason. Somebody told me I was too fat to be relatable. They said it a little nicer. Not much — I mean, it's hard to say that nice."

Jelly Roll resisted the changes being suggested in large part because "I'd already built such a big independent thing," he says. "The YouTube channel had a billion views and was doing $2 million a year, and that's not counting touring, merch, publishing, all that. There was no denying what was happening."

What he wanted was to reach a wider audience with a message he'd seen resonate in "500-cap clubs filled with people bawling" as they sang along with him. "I wanted radio and I wanted publicity," he says. "I wanted to play the Grand Ole Opry."

Jon Loba, president of Nashville's Broken Bow label, was impressed the first time he heard Jelly Roll's music. "But as you dug into his socials, it was the conversations he was having with his audience — the intensity of the conversations — that really got me," Loba says. "It felt like it went beyond the normal music fan, like it was almost life-changing for many parts of his audience." Broken Bow, whose other acts include Lainey Wilson and Jason Aldean, signed Jelly Roll in 2021 and released "Ballads of the Broken" with a mix of rap, rock and country material; a few weeks later, the singer made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, where he introduced "Son of a Sinner" as "music for the soul, from the soul."

"I knew that night that that was gonna be home for me," Jelly Roll says now of the Opry. "When I walked out of the building, I looked at my wife and I said, 'We'll be coming in and out of this parking lot for the next 30 years.'"

Asked why he thinks his country career has taken off so quickly, Jelly Roll says he's part of a new breed of "where-they-are-in-their-life-right-now songwriters" that includes Zach Bryan and Oliver Anthony. "We're not the best singers, you know what I mean? We're a long way from the beautiful voices of Chris Stapleton or Chris Young. It's way more gritty what I do and what Zach does — way more pitchy. But I think it's filling a necessary void."

He even sees a connection to Peso Pluma, the upstart Mexican singer who's among his likely competition for a best new artist nod at the Grammys. "I was watching him on the VMAs, and I couldn't understand what he was saying but I could feel the spirit of it," he says. "I was like, this dude's raw." Jelly Roll's tour stopped in Atlanta a couple of months ago the night after Pluma had played the same amphitheater. "There was red, white and green confetti everywhere, and I was thinking, it's way too early to do a Christmas show," he recalls. "Then it hit me — the Mexican flag." He laughs. "That's how high I was."

For all its grit, there's a craftiness to Jelly Roll's music that reflects his years of experience in rap. "My delivery, the compound syllable rhymes — that's something you don't hear in country music very much," he says. Just last night he and a friend were working on a song that made a rhyme of "noticed" and "sold it." "Nobody in Nashville would do that," he says. "But hip-hop teaches you how to bend words."

As his fame grows, Jelly Roll — who has a 15-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son from previous relationships — has been actively seeking advice from the more experienced country artists he's been encountering, including Church, whose dressing room door he recently knocked on.

"I thought we were just gonna sit and shoot the s—," Church recalls with a laugh, "and he shows up with an actual list of things he wanted to ask about."

"Oh, I ear-f—ed him," Jelly Roll confirms. "It was probably three hours. But it's the longevity he's had that I'm fascinated with. I don't want the Jelly Roll story to be the story of a summer."

He also admires the breadth of Church's following, which spans America's red-blue divide in a way that feels increasingly uncommon in country music. Ditto Bryan, the Navy veteran turned arena headliner whom Jelly Roll hasn't met yet but whom he's certain he'll befriend as soon as he does. "I've just gotta hug him," he says. "As different as our stories are, they're actually very similar. The military is not extremely different from jail in the aspect that you give away certain freedoms, and one of them is choosing who you're around. He never got to pick his squad or platoon in the Navy, and I never got to pick my unit or my cellmate. So we just learned to love people."

Jelly Roll says he's "not a political guy," in part because "my right to vote was taken from me when I was 16 years old" as a result of his felony conviction for aggravated robbery. (He'd used a gun to steal weed and was charged as an adult.) "I have a personal thing with the government," he says. "I don't appreciate the way they treat guys like me, especially after we've been proven to be rehabilitated and become taxpaying citizens. I put millions of dollars back into the community of Nashville."

Yet after his tour he hopes to meet with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and Nashville's new mayor, Freddie O'Connell, to discuss criminal justice reform, particularly for drug offenders.

"Why do we not have more programs focused on rehabilitation instead of discipline?" asks the singer, who says he abused pills and cocaine. "It just shows how bad we've done on educating Americans on the disease of addiction and on what Big Pharma is doing to us in allowing these labs to create fentanyl.

"We've gotten so far away from compassion," he adds. "That's scary."

On the road Jelly Roll has a policy that "two to three days a week, we do something of benevolence wherever we are": a visit to a juvenile detention center, for instance, or a homeless shelter. Tomorrow he plans to sing at two rehab centers in Arizona.

"My thing was, nobody ever came through that I related to when I was there," he says. "So I thought if I ever got the chance, I'd go back so they could see — even if they don't know my music, they don't know who I am — they could see, 'Oh, he's one of us.'

"The stuff I sing about, you gotta back that s— up, man."