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Alabama's Muscadine Bloodline in Nashville opens for Post Malone

Posted on by Kennedy
Alabama's Muscadine Bloodline in Nashville opens for Post Malone

Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton, the Alabama country duo Muscadine Bloodline who open for Post Malone, are on the cusp of stardom.

Eighteen months ago, Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton, the Alabama country duo known as Muscadine Bloodline, had reached around half a billion streams and received critical acclaim from Eric Church and Turnpike Troubadours.

On Saturday, they open for Post Malone, the music industry's mainstream artist, at Nissan Stadium.

If you're just using streams to calculate how wild her positioning is in this role, consider that 18 months ago Malone was about 200 times more popular than Muscadine Bloodline.

As if in a feverish rush, the group's four albums and 50 tracks were paired on streaming platforms with a highly regarded live set based on local and guitar-driven songwriting and storytelling. As 2024 nears its end, they note that the work has brought them a newly released album, The Coastal Plain, and more than two dozen tour dates with Malone.

Building a “fun path to success.”

In an interview with The Tennessean, singer Muncaster notes that the current era of what he calls the music industry's “Wild West” allows him and Stanton to maintain an independent mindset while simultaneously evolving seemingly everything else about themselves and their art .

“We're not the kind of band that ever expects to be the coolest act on Music Row or to be at the top of every CMA Awards list,” he says. “None of this is necessary for us to find an enjoyable path to success.”

Developing unique paths to sustainability outside of the country's mainstream as the genre grows in popularity, acts come from places like Mobile, Alabama, home of Muscadine Bloodline and recent Americana Awards and Honors winners the Red Clay Strays, among others areas such as central and southern Oklahoma. Home to acts from a generation before, including Cross Canadian Ragweed and Turnpike Troubadour), where the path to greater fame in Music City was long considered a dead end.

The duo believes these acts share an organic edginess that goes beyond formulaic expectations.

“Many people prefer authenticity more than they want to hear another 'hit,'” says Muncaster.

Muscadine Bloodline, a short history

A decade ago, times weren't so wild for Muscadine Bloodline. Venues like the 250-person capacity room at Mobile's Soul Kitchen Music Hall were about playing, singing, writing and building one's confidence.

At this time, Muncaster and Stanton, as well as other local artists, were slowly creating a sound that combined working-class aspirations with rustic folk, youthful pop and zydeco soul.

After six years of attempting to create a sound that lacked a direction that fit the arc of Americana and the mainstream rise of country, they found themselves in Nashville making the rounds alongside both scenes.

“We came to Jesus and asked ourselves if we were saying what we wanted to say and if we were being as authentic as possible,” Muncaster says.

Their stubbornness led them to achieve great success with honest, guitar-driven rock ballads like “Porch Swing Angel,” headlining Exit/In in January 2018. Eight months later, they received a standing ovation at the Grand Opera Opry.

Signees poured in from songwriters like Brent Cobb, artists like American Aquarium's BJ Barham and local Alabama to national favorites like Adam Hood.

Two years after they debuted at the Opry and were nearing their peak, they instead released Burn It at Both Ends, an album that withstood the force of their critical boom but perhaps resulted in them trying to capitalize on success rather than achieving steady success, growing a fan base that finally took notice.

Eighteen months later, her album “Dispatch to 16th Ave.” sounds like it has a title. A more focused release, “Dyin' for a Livin'” metaphorically compares her career path to dealing drugs and committing the mortal sin of getting high on her own supply with no hope of advancement beyond that notion.

“The Coastal Plain”

Last year, the band released a message to their fan base saying that “Teenage Dixie,” their release before their current one, saw them as survivors of their “identity crisis” and the “dying on the hill” of their dreams.

For Muncaster, songs like “Low Hanging Fruit” on “The Coastal Plain” embody a mix of her live energy, lThey delve deeper into the roots of their hometown.

The song is a bitter treatise on feelings awakened by sudden heartbreak:

“You better pray to the man above / You find a tree that exposes you / And your low-hanging, low-hanging, low-hanging fruit / You go and pick me up from a branch / There's no chance I'll get up come back to you.

For Stanton, the success of “Daffodils” – a song that explores a couple's painfully mundane moments after a lovestruck romance – comes from pushing back outside influences and letting the band “write what's close to their hearts.”

They reduce their art to the work that marked their earliest days, drawing on psychologist Paul Ekman's mid-1970s studies that identified happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise as the six basic universal emotions became.

Discovering the joy of creating and accepting the parameters of how to most deeply connect their truths have evolved their sound into one that fully embraces the cinematic and literary developments of their sound and style.

“A decade of growth”

“This is the culmination of a decade of growth and evolution in our craft. Now we’ve formulated our best songs at what feels like the perfect time,” Muncaster says of their upcoming performance at Nissan Stadium.

For the duo, performance spaces 200 times larger than the one where it all began are still fresh in their minds, but they're not deterring their passion for success.

“We have no business being in front of this audience, but one of the greatest artists in the world believes in our ability to show his fans what we can do,” Stanton says.

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