Appalachian folk singer Sam Gleaves offers similar praise. “Karen’s done a really special thing organizing this series,” says Gleaves, who first met Pittelman when he was opening for Karen & the Sorrows during their southeastern 2016 tour.
“There aren’t very many places where I can celebrate my identity as an Appalachian musician and as a queer man, and this is a space to do both of those things. It’s not so much about me as it is about the community and the feeling of knowing that there are other people who are on the road using country music to sing about their identity and our place in the world.”
In his own music, Gleaves excavates untold Appalachian stories and forges new ties across class and gender lines. On Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes, his new album with his musical partner, Gleaves recontextualizes traditional music during moments like “When We Love,” an Appalachian-tinged ballad that turns Donald Trump’s campaign slogan into a prayer for love and compassion.
“When people hear these old sounds, they think of their community, and when they hear the contemporary, political lyrics, they think, ‘What will we do?’” says Gleaves. “I love that.”
On the title track to his 2015 breakthrough Ain’t We Brothers, Gleaves tells the story of a gay coal miner seeking solidarity with his fellow workers. Pittelman can still recall the first time she heard Gleaves perform the song.
“I felt so connected to all the people for whom that’s their song, who never got to have a song before. That’s the whole point of this, to make it possible for people to tell the truth about their lives because we all need songs. That’s part of how we survive this shitty world. When Sam sung ‘Ain’t We Brothers,’ I felt the presence of everybody who, for all these years, have been waiting for that song, and of people in my own life who died for the lack of that song,” she says, before arriving at perhaps the best possible explanation for the precious importance of the Queer Country Quarterly: “It’s a serious thing when you don’t get to see your own life reflected back to you by the art that is meaningful to you.”