By Alli Patton
It wasn’t long ago that Kashus Culpepper was packing venues across the Southeast without ever having released a single, the Alexander City native drawing crowds with his viral soul-flecked slow-burner “After Me?”
Now, with a freshly inked major label deal and a handful of official releases under his belt, the rising country crooner has quickly secured his place among the who’s who of the genre. However, stardom was never the goal for the Navy veteran-turned-musical sensation.
“I thought the world was ending,” Culpepper said.
He was deployed in Rota, Spain when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the globe in 2020, and he turned to music to pass those unprecedented times.
“We couldn’t work. We couldn’t leave the base, so my buddy found a guitar for me,” he said.
It was an instrument he had always wanted to pick up but had never taken the time to do so. Then he found himself with nothing but time.
“I learned my first song, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I can do this,’” Culpepper said.
He said the Ben E. King classic “Stand By Me” was likely the first song he learned; but pretty soon, a cover tune or two turned into hundreds as the budding musician began to share the new hobby with his fellow soldiers at the frequent barrack-held bonfires.
“I kept getting requests for different songs,” he said. “I think by the end of that deployment, I probably knew well over 200 songs just because of requests.”
Then, cover songs quickly became originals, with Culpepper eventually weaving a striking catalog of enchantingly vulnerable work, a songbook he toured in dive bars around the Gulf Coast following his deployment and one he has begun to share sparingly with the world now.
The achingly beautiful “Who Hurt You,” the enrapturing “After Me?,” and his most recent single, the smoldering “Out Of My Mind” – with their fervent lyrics and impassioned sounds, Culpepper’s songs embody something truly singular, something the artist has attributed to a number of things. All of which can be traced back to his very beginnings.
Culpepper first found his voice in church, glimpses of which can be caught in his music. Much of his work sparks with the same passion and intensity that’s often flung from the pulpit, and even his recent music video for “Who Hurt You” unfolds in a church pew. It’s an environment that informed him at a young age and a place he pulls from now.
“I grew up in a church where everybody just sang with this straight-up passion and heart,” he said. “I had a deacon in my church – Deacon McGee – he would always do all the hymns, and honestly, he had one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. He’d be sweating while he was singing, just throwing down towels, and he would just really feel it. From a young age, I felt that. I think that’s something I always go back to, that feeling that I got when I heard him sing.”
It was church that informed his delivery, but it was the soul music he also grew up listening to that schooled his pen.
“They just said what they meant … Like old Temptations, like ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,’ that’s just so vulnerable. They didn’t care if anybody saw them down and out; they just said what they needed to say, and they meant it.”
He added, “That’s what I try to do with my songs, because everything I write, most of the time, I’ve been through it.”
While stardom was never the goal when he picked up that guitar during deployment, Culpepper’s music has certainly placed him center-stage where he can share his uniquely Southern music with audiences.
“I never thought that music could be my career,” Culpepper admitted. “Even when I got into the dive bars and I was making enough money to live, I was like, ‘Oh, I ain’t gonna do this forever. I’m gonna have to get a real job, or something, eventually.’”
“Eventually,” though, hasn’t come just yet. The star is currently traveling the country on his Howlin’ Under The Harvest Moon headline tour and is gearing up to release more music soon. He will be performing a special home-state show at Birmingham’s Saturn this Friday, Oct. 11.