Arkansas has given the world some big names in country music: Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash and Tom T. Hall are the first to come to mind. But more recently, Ashley McBryde, Justin Moore, Matt Stell, Joe Nichols, Tracey Lawrence, Adam Hambrick, Shay Mooney of Dan & Shay, and Sherwood up-and-comer David Adam Byrnes have given Arkansas more clout in Music City.
A 37-year-old former oil field pumper and preacher’s son from Zack Ridge, just outside of Marshall, aims to add his name to that stellar list. And this one, Heath Sanders, not only believes he has what it takes to make it in the business, he also believes country music might just save the world.
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In 2017, Sanders was spending 12-hour days driving through oil fields in the Ozarks, checking on wells and keeping them pumping. Four years earlier, he had started his career doing the dirtier, tougher jobs that roughnecks do, but his goal from the beginning was to become a pumper, which he had achieved.
All that time alone in the truck was spent listening to “The Bobby Bones Show” and a lot of music. Sanders did a lot of singing in that truck, at home and when he was younger, in his father’s church at Marshall. Church was where he learned to get up and sing in front of people and until not long ago the only place he had performed. His mama has said she always knew he had a good voice, but Sanders had never thought of it as a career choice. He enjoyed being out and about in the Ozarks, and he loved his job at Southwestern Energy; singing was just something he did while doing other things. The oil field was a grind, but Sanders wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“I’ve always heard the old saying, high-quality fun and low-quality fun. Low-quality fun is fun that you have like riding a roller coaster. But nobody sits on the porch when they’re 80 talking about the time they rode that roller coaster at Magic Springs. That’s low-quality fun that’ll cost you a lot. But high-quality fun is something that makes you suffer for it, something that makes you work for it. And I look back on all those 12-hour days in the rain and sleet and snow and just sucking it up and getting out there and doing it, and that, looking back on it now, you know it was miserable at the time but, man, that was a fun time in my life. That was high-quality fun to me. That’s stuff that I’ll always remember and will always be a part of my life that made me who I am,” Sanders says.
In September 2017, Sanders traveled to Fort Worth to see The Eli Young Band play at Billy Bob’s Texas, and that’s when it hit him. He came back home with a music mission in mind: “That’s what I wanted to do for a side gig.”
In September 2018, having practiced and put together a repertoire, Sanders played his first live show at Ryan’s Main Street Bar & Grill in downtown Leslie. Other gigs followed when he could get them, but the oil field was still job No. 1.
Also in 2018, Sanders sat down and recorded a Facetime video of himself covering Chris Stapleton’s “Either Way.” The next step, Sanders reasoned, was to write a song. While he was writing his first tune, Sanders got a message on his phone that he thought was a prank. It was from someone claiming to be Bobby Bones, the Arkansas DJ with a national radio show Sanders had listened to all those mornings on the job.
Well, it was Bones, Sanders found out, and he had come across the video Sanders posted and called to invite him to be on his show and sing an original song. Only problem was, Sanders had just started writing one. He called his friend Jamie Jones, a singer-songwriter in Dardanelle, to help him finish it. The result is an impressive first effort called “Bloodline.”
The appearance was a success, the song widely praised, and suddenly the pumper from Marshall was signed by The Valory Music Co., and he’s officially a budding country music singer-songwriter living near Nashville in Dickson, Tenn. His first single, “Old School’s In,” was released to radio stations Monday and the EP it’s on, “Common Ground,” was released Jan. 29.
- Time still crawls, the flag still flies
- Mama still cooks and God won’t die
- Dogs still hunt, men man up
- A little bit of red just runs in your blood
- Yes sir, yes ma’am, handshake deals
- Rock still rules, keepin’ it real
- Three chords and the truth ain’t goin’ nowhere
- And I said old school’s still in out here.
- — Heath Sanders, “Old School’s In”
Sanders, who says he had never been “north of Missouri or west of Texas” in his life, was suddenly traveling with his music. Poyen country music star Justin Moore invited him onstage during his tour before the pandemic shut it down. Sanders even traveled to California for the first time, which was quite the eye-opener for the Arkansan.
“California really shocked me, man! Living in Arkansas, you hear about California being some ultra liberal kind of crazy place where everybody dresses wild and is just really hectic and all that. Well, we’ve been to California three times and we’ve flown into Fresno two times and Bakersfield the other time. The first time I got off the plane and walked down into the baggage claim and there was a dad-gum brand new John Deere tractor setting right down there by the baggage claim like as a demo. And I was like, ‘Well, dude, did we land in the wrong state? What’s the deal?’
“After spending some time there I learned that I had no idea how much agriculture and oil and gas was in central California. And it ain’t just a bunch of weirdos. It’s a bunch of hardworking, blue collar, backwoods farmhands just like me and you, man. They’re just as good as gold, man, just good old country folk. Right out there in California!”
Since then, Sanders hasn’t been out of Tennessee much, not even to visit family in the Ozarks, which brings up what he misses most from home.
“I miss my grandma’s chocolate gravy the most of anything. I really do. I just miss it so. I ain’t had a bowl of chocolate gravy in I don’t know how long and she makes the best. Of course, with covid and all in 2020, I wasn’t able to go back and see them. But we’re fixing to change that. I’m fixing to go back home and get me some chocolate gravy I think,” Sanders says.
At 37, Sanders has a seasoned voice (maybe the gravy helped?) and a sort of wisdom that few folks in their 20s have developed yet. He’s glad that he didn’t pursue music when he was younger, because he sees the mistakes that others make because they lack maturity (Morgan Wallen is an example, he agrees). He says he’s thankful for all that time in the oil field as well as all the time spent in a porch swing growing up. You’ll hear references to that swing in the songs he writes, and he chuckles when someone points out his porch swing fixation.
“I told somebody the other day, you’ll know when Heath Sanders wrote a song because it’ll have a porch swing in it probably. It’s so funny you noticed that, but yeah, dude, you know, I’ve still got my grandpa’s old oak porch swing. It’s one of the few things he was able to leave me when he passed away, and looking back over the years, ever since I was born he had that porch swing hanging on his porch.
“There never was a question that went unanswered in that porch swing. I think my grandpa realized that’s what we were there for and so the amount of education that I received just sitting there, swinging back and forth with him, is incredibly invaluable. I don’t think any college or school could ever touch it, because it’s not just education, it was a moral foundation that he laid for me, and he taught me how to be a good man there in that porch swing. It played such a massive role in my life and who I am that, yeah, it gets involved in my songs quite a bit,” Sanders says.
Grandpa is gone, but Sanders still has family in Marshall. His father, Gary, is still pastor of First Pentecostal Church there and sister Talisa, who is five years younger than her brother, has settled in Marshall. Mom Raylene Thompson and Heath’s stepdad live in Georgia, where another little sister, Haley, three years younger than Heath, also lives.
He’s excited about the EP, though it only has four songs on it. He has had a lot time to hone his craft during the pandemic, though, and now has a pile of newly written songs just waiting for an album to fill.
“I’ve written probably another 100 songs … probably 20% of them are worth cutting and putting out. The day we released the EP I ended up calling my label head and I was like, ‘Man I’m gonna send you 12 songs for my next album,’” Sanders says.
He can write songs anytime, anywhere, but what Sanders is really aching to do is get back on stage.
“I’m about to die, brother. I really am, dude! You know, I’ve always had stage fright something awful, even back when I sang in church as a kid and even up until just a couple years ago after the music thing took off, you know, I was still just petrified to get on stage.
“I had just mastered that when the covid thing hit. Like, I was stepping out on the stage in front of 5- or 6,000 people and not a bit of nerves. I mean, it just started to feel right to me and I started to feel like I deserved to be there and started to feel comfortable and then it all got shut down.
“So now even more so I’m just dying to get back out there and really give the performances that I’ve always wanted to give,” Sanders says.
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Sanders’ Nashville team has kept him busy with countless interviews and virtual appearances to keep his name and music in the forefront. Then there are tasks such as his first meeting with a speech pathologist and a vocal trainer, which Sanders says is in no way meant to change his Arkansas accent.
“It’s just for preventive measures’ sake, since I’m jumping into this thing with never doing more than singing in my truck or singing on stage three or four nights a week,” Sanders says, adding that “they don’t have enough time” to change his accent.
“If it ever did leave me, I could just go back home and talk to the folks awhile and it’d be right back.”
Aside from that, Sanders says, he’s doing a virtual radio tour right now, talking to a lot of people who put country music on the airwaves.
“It’s kind of just meeting all the radio program directors and getting to know them and kind of laying that foundation for a relationship with those guys. We have 17 stations slated to play our music. I have a really good team behind me. I’m on Valory, which is under the Big Machine imprint. The team is phenomenal and they believe in me and they love Arkansas folks. Obviously, they’ve had a lot of success with Justin Moore. They love us country boys, man,” Sanders says.
Back in February 2020, Sanders was a guest on the “Whiskey Riff Raff” podcast, which boasts “an unfiltered and unapologetic take on country music.” It was in that interview that Sanders talked about how country music might save the world. What exactly did he mean by that?
“I think the point I was trying to make there is that country music is really the only genre left that really addresses the world’s problems, the world’s issues and how to fix those issues. I honestly do, man, I honestly feel — and I know it’s a long shot — but I just feel like country music has so much to say and has the ability to say it, the platform to say it, that country music would be a great place to start finding some common ground. I think that’s a lot of the problem with blue collar America, and middle class America and even ag-and-farm America, is that people don’t understand us and so we’ve almost been forgotten and kind of pushed back.
“And I don’t think we’re given the credit that we deserve for carrying the nation on our backs … If people fail to understand us, they don’t need to look any further than our music … There’s always gonna be cultural differences and we need to learn to celebrate those differences and embrace those differences and pat each other on the back and say, ‘Hey man it’s OK for you to be different from me.’ It’s about getting the world to understand the silent majority that is working-class America, and I think country music is on the forefront of that and I think it’s our job. I think we’re under an obligation to deliver that message to the rest of the world.”
- ’Cause we’re all on a different journey
- We’re all findin’ our own way
- We’re all livin’, we’re all learnin’
- From the cradle to the grave
- We’re all weak, we’re all strong
- We’re all right and we’re all wrong
- And when time runs out
- We all end up in common ground.
- — Heath Sanders, “Common Ground”
Sanders has found his “common ground” at home in the Ozarks, and he’s planning on using the Justin Moore formula for success. Moore did his time in Nashville, but once his career was established he moved back home to Poyen to raise his family on the land he grew up on.
“That’s exactly my plan, if I’m honest. That is the goal, just to stay here long enough to make it, ‘git ’r’ done,’ and take my butt back to Searcy County. That land, it’s just … you know, that’s been the hardest part of the move, is leaving that geography up there, leaving that land. You know, when you grow up somewhere like that and you get to know the lakes and the creeks and the rivers and the mountains, you don’t realize how truly attached you are, not just to the people, but the land itself. That’s been the most difficult thing for me. It’s all just to get back home for me.”
Get to know Heath Sanders
- “Old School’s In” lyric video: arkansasonline.com/39old/
- “Can’t Undo I Do” audio: arkansasonline.com/39undo/
- “Common Ground” lyric video: arkansasonline.com/39common/
- “Love Needs Makin’” audio: arkansasonline.com/39love/
- Bonus: Hear an acoustic version of “Bloodline”: arkansasonline.com/39bloodline/
- See Sanders join Justin Moore onstage: arkansasonline.com/39justin/
- See Sanders on “The Bobby Bones Show”: arkansasonline.com/39bobby/
- For more information: heathsanders.com