Opinion | Can Jelly Roll Heal the Broken Soul of America?

On this level, Jelly Rollmania makes perfect sense. In a country riddled with crises — the opioid epidemic, mass incarceration, the mental health crisis and gun violence among them — Jelly Roll’s music is an expression not just of musical tastes, but also of a desperate national hunger for healing and recovery.

Disclosure: Jelly Roll’s music makes me cry, too. I am a long-term recovering addict who will never quite heal. I got sober in an Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse in Nashville circa 1990, where people traded aphorisms and wisdom that sound a lot like the lyrics on “Whitsitt Chapel.” Neither my alcoholic father nor my alcoholic grandfather made it to 50. I lost a brother and two stepbrothers to addiction and mental illness: Bob was killed in a drug-motivated shooting in 1984. Adam died by suicide, overdosing on heroin, in 1991. Jim, a teenage addict, was sentenced at 18 to five years for armed robbery (aggravated robbery is also one of Jelly Roll’s convictions), got some prison tattoos himself and started smoking crack when he got out. He died in his 50s, his body compromised by hepatitis, diabetes and heart disease.

After each death, I got a tattoo, to try to permanently mark myself as them. After each, I had a bad descent into drugs and alcohol, in part as an expression of solidarity. I was trying to insist that I was no different from and no better than my brothers and didn’t deserve anything more than what they got. Each time, I stopped thinking for a time that I deserved to be alive. These are the sorts of experiences that Jelly Roll is bringing to the charts: very common devastating experiences of betrayal and survivor’s guilt and despair that, despite their prevalence, are not usually made public. If I spoke of these things in the past, it was most likely in a “meeting,” under an assurance of anonymity.

“Whitsitt Chapel” is an excellent example of how country music sounds now: There are traditional touches in the instrumentation and vocals, but the drum tracks are often electronic and the voice sounds like it could be lightly auto-tuned. It’s the sound that has driven Morgan Wallen’s and Hardy’s records to the top of the charts this year. Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” spent months at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart this year and shares many themes, especially addiction, with “Whitsitt Chapel.”

But Jelly Roll is a completely different kind of artist, a sort that country music hasn’t seen in a long time (maybe David Allan Coe from back in the day). He spent his teenage years in and out of juvenile detention facilities around Nashville. And as the ABC News Studios documentary “Jelly Roll: Save Me” makes clear, he is still struggling. He prays and tries to get better, too. And he connects with addicts, recovering addicts and people who love addicts in a way that, I think, no one in popular culture up until now really has, or perhaps similar to the way Nan Goldin used her experience as an addict to transform the world of high art.