"Snapping Turtle"

New song and music video

May 14, 2025

“Snapping Turtle” (Official Music Video)

I am very excited today to debut “Snapping Turtle,” the latest offering from my new album Planting by the Signs. I’ve also got a beautiful and miraculous video to share, directed by Elaine McMillion Sheldon. More on that below. But first a little bit on where this song came from…

For some reason, I want to say I was around 14 years-old when I was asked to drive my Daddy’s truck from our house to the Lower Bottoms. The Lower Bottoms is an area of Fulton County, KY that is mostly flat river delta. My family has farmed in that area of Kentucky for several generations now.

Being asked to drive vehicles or farm equipment before you had a license as a farmer’s child, was very, very normal and necessary. Who knows the exact reason I was asked to on the day I am about to describe. It could have been to deliver lunch to the fields, or maybe there was a tool in the truck that was needed. A lot of times it was to help move the equipment from one field to the next. One of your earliest driving responsibilities was to drive behind the large equipment with your flashers on in order to warn drivers that they needed to slow down. I’m not sure what my task was that day.

PRE-ORDER PLANTING BY THE SIGNS

On the way down to the Lower Bottoms, you can take two routes, one of which went through the downtown of Hickman, KY. I always preferred to drive the hills of downtown near the river. On this particular day while rounding a curve I noticed some kids in a gravel lot and what appeared to be a large Snapping Turtle. I knew those kids. The oldest of the bunch was my little brother's age, and he was gathered with his younger siblings around the turtle. They were taking sticks and whacking the turtle’s shell and trying to provoke it into biting through their sticks. It pissed me off.

Now, I would like to give a disclaimer to this next part, which is that I understand that not everyone was raised like I was and this may come as a cultural shock for some. If you lived in Hickman, KY it was not uncommon for ANY woman who witnessed you “acting a fool” to threaten or actually whip your ass as a child. I grew up in the kind of place where if your mother sent you into the store alone, she knew that you were being watched and that she would be notified if you acted out of line in said store. It was just the way it was, and yes, I have been “spanked” and scolded by random women in grocery stores, school, churches, and I think I remember a ball game.

So, when I tell you that I got out of that truck and held a few of those kids by the shirt as I whacked them with their own sticks, understand simply, that it was what they had coming to them. That culturally, at that time in Hickman’s history, it was a very normal thing to do without any fear of questioning.

Long story short, the kids ran off, and I took a mulch shovel from the back of Daddy’s truck and scooped up the turtle. There is a large levee that runs the course of the river for miles, and I stopped to release the turtle on the way to meet my father. That’s one of the true stories in this song. I played god in that story, but I couldn’t in the other.

This “Snapping Turtle” music video is a miracle of sorts. Thanks to this very Substack, a brilliant award-winning filmmaker, Mrs. Elaine McMillion Sheldon, reached out to me about making a music video from some archival footage she was sitting on from her film, King Coal. I am honored she shared her talents with us.

Elaine had this to say about it:

A music video born from the archives.
While making King Coal, we did a lot of test shoots. Just playing around with lenses and visual concepts, not taking anything too seriously. This video was one of those experiments, filmed in the fall of 2020 in Nicholas County, West Virginia, with my cousins’ kids.
We built a fire, dressed the kids up in random thrift store costumes, and projected archival footage from the West Virginia coal camps (some of which actually made it into the final film). Curren Sheldon shot it, Molly Born produced it, and I directed.
Everyone was just having fun, delighting in the randomness of the moment. You might even recognize some of these same kids from the “Summer’s End” music video we made for John Prine back in 2018.
Filmmaking often leads you down unexpected rabbit holes, and this one came complete with a literal rabbit mask (no idea where that idea came from). But I’m glad this footage resurfaced and found its place in S.G. Goodman’s “Snapping Turtle.”
Sometimes our own archives hold more than we expect. As a filmmaker, it's easy to get lost in them but once in a while, something beautiful crawls back out.