If You Don't Know The Name of Up and Coming Country Musician Kashus Culpepper, You Need To Get Familiar
Big Loud Records - Alabama-born country crooner Kashus Culpepper encompasses the sound of the South. A student and reverent purveyor of Southern music – country, soul, blues, folk, and rock – Culpepper’s husky, sandpaper growl bellows like a freight train over self-penned stories that are as raw and real as they are haunting. Finding his voice in church as young as five years old, it wasn’t until 2020’s global pandemic that Culpepper went from listener to performer, picking up a guitar and learning cover songs to play at barrack bonfires in Rota, Spain during his deployment with the Navy. Covers soon became originals, and once he landed home on U.S. shores, Kash played dive bars up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast, making a name for himself with the fresh-yet-reminiscent sound that oozes from his very being. Crashing into prominence now, Culpepper has already sold-out headline club shows throughout the South despite never formally releasing a single song, also opening shows nationwide for sound pioneers like Charles Wesley Godwin, Charley Crockett, and NEEDTOBREATHE. With Nashville taking notice, Culpepper found a musical home at Big Loud Records, and just dropped his first two career singles “After Me?” and “Who Hurt You.”
I used to write these "get familiar" blogs more often. And for some reason I stopped. I met a guy at the Miami airport today who came up to me and thanked me for writing about The Black Pumas way back when, and he asked why I don't write about more up and coming musical artists. He had a great point.
So off the top of my head, Kashus Culpepper is the name I've been telling friends about the most over the last few months. So he's getting the first blog.
The first time I heard him sing, was on his song "After Me?". And the thing that stood out immediately was his voice. It was unlike anything I've ever heard before.
It sounds like if a dusty back-road church and a smoky blues bar had a baby.
The moment I heard that husky growl of his, it was like lightning struck. I instantly went on one of those deep internet dives, watching every video I could find. The more I heard, the more I became a fan.
He also has a hell of a backstory.
Kashus grew up in Alexander City, Alabama, first singing in church at the age of five (already cooler than me at just five, by the way).
Imagine a five-year-old kid giving you the kind of goosebumps usually reserved for sold-out arenas. That was Kashus. Inspired early on by a raspy-voiced deacon who he said practically sweat through his suits every Sunday, Culpepper learned how to inject real passion into every note he sang. You can still hear that sweaty-church intensity whenever he opens his mouth.
In highschool he was a state champion wrestler. After graduating he became a firefighter and EMT before he decided to join the Navy.
Fast-forward to 2020, he’s deployed with the Navy in Rota, Spain when the world shuts down. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, he picks up a guitar, teaches himself a couple hundred cover songs (seriously, hundreds), and starts belting them out around bonfires for his fellow sailors.
Once he returned stateside, the open-mic circuit was calling his name. He began hitting dive bars on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that he used as the testing ground for what he could do.
Pretty quickly, folks realized that this husky, gritty, full-throated singer wasn’t just your typical bar act. The audience response was so off-the-charts that it was only a matter of time before Big Loud Records came knocking. And they signed him to his first record deal.
(I would love the opportunity to interview him and find out how a label like Big Loud caught wind of him playing small dives in Mississippi.)
I can’t stress enough how powerful Kashus’s voice is. It’s the kind of gritty, soulful sound that makes you want to simultaneously dance in your living room and cry into your beer. It's like someone poured country, soul, blues, rock, and gospel into a blender and hit “sublime.”
I love a good jam with emotional depth, and Culpepper delivers exactly that.
One second he’s pulling out a slow-burning heartbreak tune like “After Me?” or “Who Hurt You,”
Advertisement
the next he’s tapping into that gospel fervor he picked up in church. It’s hauntingly beautiful and rough around the edges in all the right ways.
In a world where everyone’s desperately searching for the next big thing, Kashus Culpepper is the real freaking deal. He’s not some cookie-cutter, formulaic industry plant. He’s a blue-collar, Alabama-born, Navy-honed, church-trained, soul-punching country singer who writes straight from the gut.
So trust me when I say you need to latch onto this rocket ship while you can. Kashus Culpepper is surging, and by this time next year, you’re either gonna be bragging about how you were jamming “After Me?” way back when…or wishing you had. Don’t be that person who gets left in the dust. Go stream his songs, show up to his gigs, and get ready to witness the rise of a future star.
and Kashus' people, if you're reading this, we would LOVE to have him on our show Barstool Backstage. - dante@barstoolsports.com
p.s. - his live videos are unreal