Album Review – Blaine Bailey’s ‘ᎣᏪᏅᏒ’ (Home)

There is a golden rectangle in the northeast portion of Oklahoma that encompasses some of the most fertile ground in the United States for birthing music that matters. It includes towns like Okemah where Woody Guthrie was born, Stillwater which gave rise to Red Dirt, and Tulsa where Cain’s Ballroom resides, along with more amazing songwriters than there’s room to list off here. Zach Bryan is from this region as well.
Tahlequah falls within these coordinates too, and gave rise to the Turnpike Troubadours just to start. Country, folk, and folk rock might be what the region is best known for in music, rivaling most any other region in the richness in contributions to country and roots music over the last quarter century and longer. But this golden rectangle also happens to be in the very heart of the Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee Nations. This is Indian land, and the home of one of America’s most vibrant native populations.
All these Red Dirt legends and folk icons from Northeast Oklahoma are just living on top of a legacy that goes much deeper and farther back in the American experience. It was only a matter of time before these two rich cultures inhabiting the same land intertwined to favorable results.
Blaine Bailey is a Native American of Keetoowah heritage who calls Tahlequah home. He grew up going to musical jam sessions with his dad and other elders in the nearby town of Lost City, playing country and Red Dirt music specifically. By the age of 13, Bailey was playing on his own, and released a four song acoustic EP in 2019 while still a teenager. Shortly thereafter, he assembled a band, and now in his early 20s, he’s looking to become the Native American representative that Red Dirt country rock has long needed.
Blaine Bailey’s debut album Home (ᎣᏪᏅᏒ in Cherokee syllabary) is a bold, auspicious, full, rich, and entertaining specimen to authentic Northeast Oklahoma country rock, reminding you of some of the best up-tempo tracks of the Turnpike Troubadours. If nothing else, this album gratifies with its full tilt attitude, while blazing fiddle and steel guitar ground the music in country roots. As a steel guitar player himself, Blaine insists these country sounds remain essential to his rock songs.

The theme on Home and many of its songs is spelled out right there in the title. This album is about Bailey’s sense of place, about leaving it, coming back to it, contrasting it with the big city, and seeing it through the experiences of visiting other regions. Sometimes you have to leave your home to really discover it, or stay away too long before you can appreciate it. Home is a young man figuring all of this out, while figuring out some things about himself along the way.
Bailey will be the first to tell you that songwriting is not what comes easiest to him in music. Sometimes it’s difficult to pick up on what he’s trying to communicate in his songs, not always because of the writing, but sometimes because his tone doesn’t naturally punch through the music, and the music doesn’t always center his vocals in the mix. But you’re never left wanting because the music always carries the song.
Home only brushes by Blaine’s experience as a Native American, until he gets to the song “T-Shirt” where he uncorks and says his peace, speaking about the broken promises, and bad blood many Native people feel towards the United States due to the treatment they’ve experienced historically.
The FX show Reservations Dogs is not Yellowstone, but it might as well be for the folks in Northeast Oklahoma. Blaine’s song “Cigarettes and Roses” was featured in Season 3, and along with other Native American songwriters from the region like Samatha Crain, it’s creating a conduit of attention to these worthy artists who heretofore have not always been openly welcomed into the Red Dirt scene of the region.
The music of Blaine Bailey could change all of that though. Frankly, Home is served with the kind of punch you often wish some of your other favorite Red Dirt bands would put behind their music, while still exhibiting some upside potential since he’s such a young performer. There is a lot to love about Blaine Bailey and Home, while underscoring how Northeast Oklahoma isn’t just home to some great music, but home to one of America’s most proud Native populations.
1 3/4 Guns Up (8.2/10)
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March 8, 2024 @ 9:46 am
Wow! this is great stuff..thanks Trig.
March 8, 2024 @ 10:12 am
I dig it. Got a style that’s pretty similar to some of what William Clark Green does. Thanks Trigger
March 25, 2024 @ 8:22 am
You know I think it’s mostly just his voice. They’re very similar as I had the same thought exactly: I think their styles are distinct
March 8, 2024 @ 10:40 am
Frankly, one of the most essential parts of real Country Music, both as a cultural art and an institution, is native representation.
From it’s earliest inception, ‘hillbilly’ and ‘rural’ musicians that knew the folk songs from ireland and england and made their own in this country were far away from cities and rubbing shoulders with natives.
Native representation in the one cultural art form that is uniquely native adjacent is arguably more glaring in its absence than the representation of either women or persons of color.
In no small part because women have the pop realm where they tend to gather more organically than country, often a masculine art form about hard drinking, hard work and worldviews that are normally more common among men, and because non-whites have their own genres of music.
There just aren’t many places in greater American culture for indingenous persons, who enjoy some of the worst representation in media.
Even country music often involved characters of native descent more as characters, often stereotyped, that told stories but did little to represent the natives as anything more than characters in fiction, the way we might look at pirates or crusaders, more as storytelling tropes than actual characters with a culture that is real.
The exposure to native persons in rural america often helped shape the best years of country music, but now that country music is made more by suburbanites and people from rural areas are mostly making ‘old-time music’ and ‘americana’ and ‘red dirt,’ and as persons of native ancestry increasingly become ‘modernized’ and more like their white-descended counterparts, enjoying the same media and input, native exposure and therefore representation has decreased as fewer and fewer people know anyone who remains in touch with their native ancestry as anything more than symbolic.
Frankly, more than trains (there are still trains) more than prisons (lots of people go to those) and more than whiskey (readily available) one of the big glaring omissions in country music of the last several decades is native representation.
and this is from an art form that at it’s core shares space and contact with persons of indigenous descent by definition: country music, which in its most authentic form is usually made by folks who live in rural areas struggling with botched urbanization, the ravages of the exploitation of their resources, poverty and social isolation, and these are things that poor whites have historically shared with persons of black and native descent, and part and parcel to the rawest country music experience.
frankly, there should be an initiative to reconnect a part of whichever subgenre of country music in the modern era is most connected to its roots to its shared native experiences.
March 8, 2024 @ 11:08 am
distinctive Texacoma sound. I dig it.
March 9, 2024 @ 12:35 am
What is Texacoma? Is it a typo of Texoma? If so, NE Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation are not on the border of Texass.
March 9, 2024 @ 12:36 pm
sorry , a typo, i meant that Texas/Oklahoma sound…but now that i think about it it’s a good name for a metal band.
March 9, 2024 @ 4:37 pm
: D Hi Daniele,
There’s a Texhoma, Northernmost Texas Panhandle/Southernmost Oklahoma Panhandle.
We used to run with the trains out there, coming and going from Amarillo.
March 8, 2024 @ 11:45 am
Thanks for highlighting this album! Excellent album.
March 8, 2024 @ 12:17 pm
The 2 songs sound ????
Not sure I would have naturally thought of Turnpike though…
March 8, 2024 @ 1:03 pm
Holy this rips. I think his voice and the writing are actually pretty great. Voice sounds a lot like JR carroll who is also from that region. Fired up on this!
Jeremy Pinnell’s most recent full-length album, titled “Goodbye LA”, rips.
March 8, 2024 @ 2:12 pm
Oh, nice! I LOVED Reservation Dogs and absolutely love this. Thanks for the intro, Trig.
March 8, 2024 @ 3:53 pm
My boy Jamie Logsdon is one-quarter Cherokee,his paternal grandfather James Taylor,was the foreman on the ill-fated Will Rogers’ ranch in the 1920’s and 1930’s;Mssrs. Rogers and Taylor were full-blooded Cherokee .(As a lad,I lived next door to some Status Indian paternal cousins.)
March 8, 2024 @ 3:54 pm
Indigenous as well as African American representation,Fuzzy Two Shirts.
March 8, 2024 @ 4:04 pm
Really digging this album. It sounds to me like a mashup of Koe Wetzel and Turnpike honestly. In all the best ways. Actually get a little Red Shahan vibe too. Great find Trigger! Right down the middle of my lane.
March 8, 2024 @ 4:18 pm
How the hell did you type that?
March 8, 2024 @ 4:23 pm
Cut and paste. Luckily my content management system accepted it.
March 9, 2024 @ 4:54 am
Makes sense. Another excellent find, Trig.
March 8, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
Then I’ll find it on Trigger’s recommendation.
March 8, 2024 @ 5:31 pm
Like this stuff a LOT. I live in northeast Oklahoma, and didn’t know of Blaine Bailey. This is why I ‘m on this site.
March 8, 2024 @ 6:54 pm
Sounds great, nice find!
March 8, 2024 @ 10:07 pm
Love this album, loved Cigarettes and Roses on Reservation Dogs. On heavy repeat already.
March 9, 2024 @ 12:31 am
Tahlequah and most of the Cherokee Nation are NE Oklahoma, though it is hard to quality little towns south of I-40 like Gans as part of the NE part of the state. Stillwater is not NE Oklahoma, nor is Okemah. Not to quibble too much, but I grew up just South of the Cherokee Nation, love Oklahoma’s homegrown music, and have an interest in geography.
I’d say most of the good music in Oklahoma has come from east of I-35, but Boland (I believe) is from either Chickasha or Anadarko, and the Cross Canadian guys hailed from Yukon. But they made their way musically in Payne County, so I’ll stick with Eastern Oklahoma as the place. Barf Brooks also came from Yukon, but I’m not counting him.
March 9, 2024 @ 8:31 am
I might have been a little liberal with my geography to make a deeper point. But if you cut Oklahoma into four equal portions, Stillwater and Okemah are both going to land in the northeast portion of the state. They’re also both east of I-35, and north of I-40. But if locals don’t officially consider them Northeast Oklahoma, I will accept that.
March 21, 2024 @ 8:12 pm
Nothern Oklahoma might as well be Kansas
Never go to Southern Oklahoma at night.
March 9, 2024 @ 5:57 am
Love him and he’s a steel player to boot!
March 9, 2024 @ 6:48 am
Nice. This guy wasn’t even on my radar. If the two songs above are any indication, I’ll be listening to Blaine Bailey quite a bit. Good find. Thanks.
March 9, 2024 @ 8:14 am
This has really strong instrumentation. I like how it sounds a lot. Haven’t spent enough time yet to say if I like the songs, but it leaves a good first impression sampling through it.
March 9, 2024 @ 12:13 pm
This kid is going places. Awesome music
March 9, 2024 @ 12:57 pm
So this album isn’t for sale anywhere? How do these guys expect to make money?
March 9, 2024 @ 2:59 pm
“Don’t Waste My Time”. As someone mentioned above, I hear a little Red Shahan in it. I am so excited listening to the first two songs in. Just excited to HEAR PEDAL STEEL AND ELECTRIC GUITARS!!
The steel is JUST DREAMY!!
March 10, 2024 @ 7:20 am
I listened to this yesterday at the gym. The playing is good, I dig the sound. But the songwriting itself is definitely below average. Lots of forcing of rhymes and themes. He needs some help in that regard, for sure.
March 10, 2024 @ 4:37 pm
I think that’s kind of where I am after giving it a full listen. I’ll give it another. There are a couple playlistable songs here and the playing is excellent. But yeah, the songs are as you described, and just missing those memorable hooks and lyrics that take it to the next level.
March 11, 2024 @ 8:08 am
This is the type of music I’ve been waiting for. Like Turnpike, lots of guitar, fiddle and great hooks. Pleasantly surprised. Thanks Trig.
March 11, 2024 @ 4:23 pm
Jeff,
I like hearing the electric up in the mix and the pedal steel. Really enjoying this album.
March 12, 2024 @ 10:28 am
Thanks for this discovery.
Steel and guitar playing is awesome. I poked around to see artist credits but couldn’t find any. I’d like to know who’s playing steel. Based on a few other articles my guess is he’s playing all the lead guitar.
March 13, 2024 @ 8:27 am
Holy shit this is good.
March 17, 2024 @ 5:29 pm
Really good lead guitar playing. Is this also Blaine? Good find.