“‘Searchin’ for this gold’: Where does an enigmatic country music phenom go from here?” – by Max George – Masterpiece Magazine (December 2024 Issue)
We cruise in his pickup truck along the acres-long property, close-cropped shortgrass, over berms that create immediate horizons, feeling like the end of the earth until we get over them and the ground refreshes itself with a whole new football-field-sized length. We glide; when you blink, you feel somehow like you’re careening in a speedboat, the soft ripples of a calm day’s water stretching endlessly out in front of you like the land does once you open your eyes again. The illusion of frictionless reeling is shattered as the grassy plain — and the truck with it — pitches down considerably, into an idyllic meadow, grass still almost unnatural in its even cut. Billy slowly loosens his grip on the steering wheel, then removes it entirely. I look to the passenger-side back seat to my partner and photographer, Rania, who glances back to me with wide eyes, failing to hide her concern, then back to Billy, whose arms slowly raise up like he’s on an underwhelming rollercoaster. The vehicle approaches the nadir, and I spot out my window, on the upward slope we now climb, a red-lettered, hand-painted sign, arrow-shaped, pointing to the top of the slope. It reads, simply: Air Jessup.
We shift from a slight bump in the incline. Billy grabs the wheel again — just on the edge of control.
“Done this a thousand times,” he says to us over his shoulder. The truck picks up speed.
The souped-up engine works harder, and harder, resulting in this matte-black stallion going faster, and faster.
“Done what?” Rania asks Billy.
I peek ahead; we approach the cusp of the valley top. I realize what the sign means just as Billy says, “You might wanna hold onto somethin’.”
The truck screams toward a manufactured ramp in the earth made of dark beige, smooth, dry, hard-packed dirt. Beyond the bump: only sky. The front end jerks up to an even more severe pitch, and we no longer hear the rumble of the wheels on ground, just the din of the hard-working engine, my own respiratory system, then I hear Rania’s breathing too, as we float in the blueness for seemingly ever. I catch a time-dilated glimpse at Billy’s eyes looking my way through the rear-view; he’s done this a thousand times, but something in the look tells me he wouldn’t mind if this was the last. Finally, mercifully, the steel steed completes its jump by landing onto the flat ground with nary a jostle to one side or the other, but still a considerable jolt to the front end and then the back, like a clumsy bucking bronco, and skids to a stop, kicking up dust from the well-trodden landing spot. I exhale, reorient myself. Rania removes her death-grip from the armrest.
“Sorry y’all, I can’t ever not do that,” Billy says.
“It’s okay,” I exhale, “We had fair warning.”
I glance back at the handmade sign, just barely visible down the slope behind us. Rania twists around and snaps a shot of it.
Billy guns it. We scream again across a new segment of rural plain. He screams internally, maybe, then he lets out a “WOO!”, a vein in his forehead swelling as he pushes his voice.
Billy Jessup wants to feel the paradoxical weightlessness of being at the top again.
Billy parks the truck about a hundred feet from a power line corridor seemingly acting as the property line: another well-maintained strip of wild grasses stretching, in one direction, to the road; and in the other direction a long, long way, through woods and past fields and fields; holding these frozen metal giants with concrete shoes. In the truck bed, Billy loosens a heavy canvas strap that did its job well of holding down two large camping backpacks and a hard-sided cooler. He shoulders the one backpack with relative ease; he picks up the other one and hands it to me by a strap.
“Got it?” he asks.
I handle it. It’s heavy. “Yeah,” I say.
He hands the cooler to Rania. She handles it.
“Why are they here?” I ask as we approach the tree line before the corridor.
“Whaddya mean?” he almost pauses his walk.
“Oh no, I mean, like, physically.”
“They picked this spot,” he says.
We get to the corridor, seeing for the first time the spread of clapboard, mono-pitch-roof “tiny houses”, by my count ten of them, five in two rows neatly between two of the concrete bases. Billy takes the lead, taking off the pack as he greets one of the residents: a petite young woman named Sydney. She says hello to Billy as he hands her a small fuel tank; she spots us outsiders approaching, meekly smiles and nods before stepping into one of the houses. I take off my pack; there’s an insulated box with two of the same kinds of tanks. I take them out and hand them to Billy. Sydney comes back and takes two more tanks. Billy says something nice to her, then she walks down to a couple houses farther down the row. I look further into the bag: dry and canned and dehydrated foods, and under those a vacuum pack of what looks like clothes. As Sydney returns, in tow are five more people emerging from three cabins. Their names (for the purpose of this article) are Marty, Thelma, Pete, Salina and Todd. Billy gathers the food from his and my bag, lays it out on the base, and the gang of six pick and choose with little tension — they aren’t desperate — and return their haul to their respective homes.
“Thanks, Billy!” Salina says over her shoulder as she heads back to her home.
Billy bristles shyly. “No problem,” he mumbles.
He opens the cooler: two six-packs of ice cold beer. He takes up one of the sixers and hands it to Pete as he comes back, and Pete cracks one off the pack for himself before passing it on to the rest. We stand, talk idly, and drink beer. A few of the residents don’t drink, so they hold their own personal containers full of whatever they enjoy. Billy tells us that he told — perhaps forewarned — the residents we would be coming to do an article about him. They more or less agreed that they did not want to be specifically profiled.
Billy winds down our visit — we are just that, visitors, neighbors, and we do not want to impose, as is natural. We help out those with need, but that never gives us license to dominate any part of their lives. Even so, I have to ask if they want any particular message “out there”.
Marty, a slight man with short gray hair, a trimmed white beard, and glasses, says this: “You know, a lot of people think of us as trash. Well, they’re entitled to their opinion, but take a look around… it’s pretty neat!”
And it is.
After saying our goodbyes, we head back to the truck and stand there drinking the rest of the beer — well, Billy drinks a couple, Rania and I sip one each. Billy talks a bit about the property. As he does so, he clears his throat excessively. He notices me noticing it.
“Problems with it, still,” he says.
He’s got a well-worn ball cap that hangs from a carabiner that hangs from the left-hip belt loop of his jeans. He has not worn the hat since the moment we arrived in his driveway, where he hurried to take it off at the sight of our approach. Something about it suggests a Midwestern custom when one has company. I want to tell him, you know, you can put the hat back on, but suspecting the ingrained manners are why he did so, I leave it alone. His head of hair is that of a frequent hat-wearer: a weathered forehead with a soft, shinier spot just below an eroding hairline.
“Why the bowler?” I say nearly out of nowhere.
“The hat?” he follows me, “Yeah I dunno, I think I just wanted somethin’ different. I dunno if it did anything, like, made me more popular, less popular, stand out. Who knows with any of that.” He grins and half-chuckles. Above all, he does have a baseline sense of humor about all that happened. But his answer betrays an artistic awareness as a curator of his own little brand that became Big, if fleetingly.
So much of this was fleeting.
Among the bits of talent in the code of it all, in the increasingly osmotic way we receive and consume culture, lay clips of festival performances, one-amp coffee shop gigs, and all in between, with Billy at center stage: a brown bowler hat on, sometimes tilted down almost over his eyes, sometimes to the side; a light stone denim shirt tucked into blue jeans; and light brown moccasins on his feet. A truly vintage chestnut brown acoustic guitar at his waist.
One “viral” piece of this digital tapestry shows him deep in the instrumental breakdown of his hit song “This Gold”, taking in the hysteria of a crowd of thousands, smiling sheepishly at first, then letting it go, beaming, his mouth framed by a finely trimmed beard. ‘This is for me.’
It certainly was.
We stand with our cream-and-gold cans of beer; the multinational brewing concern had outfitted Billy with, besides a pile of merch and money, fridgefuls of their product.
At present, Billy wears high-top work boots, loosely laced; the blue jeans, appropriately tattered; and an acid-washed black sweatshirt. He sports a bit of a gut, and everywhere else seems bulkier than what I, and we, had seen, or had previously imagined to see, in those widespread pieces of media (including a critically acclaimed, fan-favorite concert film). The camera can do strange, decidedly non-intuitive things to the human form. His hair is grown out a bit wilder than in those videos, wavy curls past his ears, thinner on top, and the beard is patchier, more unkempt. He still pulls it off… not that he seems to really care if he does Pull It Off. It just strikes me, the normality of it, of him, of where we are. Suppose it’s all relative.
I’ve met plenty of musicians, performers, artists of various ilks; you observe them ordering a drink at whatever place we’re in to have our chat, and you can just tell it’s something that has actually been rehearsed, literally, the ordering of the drink, the way they look up, pondering before speaking, clipped, and the way the syntax wanders and then arrives at its point, all in just a few words. Though, here I am, speaking through my fingers in much the same way, rehearsed even if I don’t think it is.
But this feels nice, normal, steady, right. Billy doesn’t feel the need to invite the tiny home people over to hang out more — we’re all just hanging out in our own self-determined crews — and I get the sense that Billy doesn’t want to make it seem contrived more than it already may appear to be: ‘Country music star builds homes for homeless on back of sprawling estate’ or something to that effect. I learn that this characterization is not entirely false but not wholly true. Some of the shed-sized homes came pre-fabbed, all they needed was transport to the site, which Billy arranged and did drive the truck-and-trailer for one such home shipment.
“Nah, I’m not much of a builder,” he tells me, plainly, “I can put somethin’ together need be, but nah…” He looks off, glugs the beer.
“Broken outta this mold
I never thought I’d be gettin’ this old
…
Reachin’ for this goal
Searchin’ for this gold”
The audience sings along with him in the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the site of One Night with Billy Ruhl, the concert film that came near the tail end of the nine-month run of “This Gold” at the top of the country single charts. Nine months for a single for a singer apparently plucked right from a coffee house stage, to birth him — it seemed like at the time — a long and fruitful career in the industry.
“I read somewhere that your hero was Hank Williams,” I say.
“He’s an influence, for sure,” Billy says, still looking off, then engaging a bit more, “Dead at twenty-nine, it was just like, ‘whoa’, like, I don’t wanna be that without nothin’.”
“I never thought I’d be gettin’ this old…”
“So, Nashville…” I lead him a bit.
“Yep, why I did that at the Ryman,” the host venue of the storied Grand Ole Opry, to which Williams contributed for years until his untimely death.
“Figured you would’ve stuck around there.”
“Nah,” he looks off again, “not my scene.”
Billy Jessup, better known to his fans and the wider music-consuming public as Billy Ruhl, never really plugged himself into the mainstream music environment of his chosen, or assigned, genre, neither physically nor artistically. Instead, we are paying this visit to a family property in southern Nebraska, a farm maybe in name only, as we do not observe any formal livestock or crop, sitting on the edge of financial precarity. Billy’s paternal grandfather bought the place in the ’60s, but his sons — Billy’s dad and uncle — wanted little to nothing to do with the whole deal, his uncle now popping in sporadically to check on things, as his name remains on the title after Grampa passed away some years ago. Billy spent some of his younger years in north Florida with his dad, who moved there when his marriage to Billy’s mom dissolved.
“Where did ‘Ruhl’ come from?” I ask. “Is that your mom’s maiden?” I drop the word “name” from my question for some reason.
“Nah, that’s my aunt’s… on my mom’s side.” I try to work that out in my mind before Billy helps me. “She wasn’t my blood aunt. She was my mom’s best friend.”
“You were close.”
“Yeah, we were close.”
“Where is she now?”
“My aunt?” Then, before I can say yeah, “She’s gone.”
“What about your mom?”
“Ran off years and years ago. So, dunno.”
He gently downs the last mouthful of beer, tosses the can in the truck bed. He leans back a bit, looks off. Rania snaps a photo of him reflecting on something, appearing lost in thought. Then, perking up, still looking out at the field, his stare grows intense.
“You okay?” I ask.
“See that?” he half-whispers, glancing at us for a microsecond then right back to the field. As he eyes something out there, he snakes toward the front of the truck bed to reach a long metal box. He unlatches it, opens it up. He slides back out of the bed, rifle in hand. He kneels beside the tailgate, elbow resting on it, preparing to shoot a seemingly unsuspecting creature.
As he bows his head to look through the sight, he turns his head. He clears his throat, quietly. And again, loudly — a tragic compulsion. The deer scampers off. Billy hangs his head.
****
It was not, to be sure, a lack of talent that caused the “downfall”. Nor was it, in any large part, the alcohol which flowed so ubiquitously in industries of all kinds, among other vices. It was, to diagnose the possibly undiagnosable, a cascade of stimuli overwhelming the nascent hit-maker — the people, the sights, the people shoving him in this direction and another, in front of other sights and people — bombarding him backstage at an awards show. He was there for the first time, for his first-ever single, having just made it past Hank’s twenty-nine a few days before the ceremony. It all hit him, as it does during an attack of that sort — the concentrated moments of extreme self-awareness and vulnerability, leading to a search for escape, the feelings of what we might call “imposter syndrome” rushing at a high rate, the nobody really there beside him, the solo of his presence — and he went down — literally — gradually then suddenly, hitting his throat on a metal railing, his head then bouncing off the cold linoleum floor of the backstage lounge, his body limp and unnoticed for considerable moments before people came to his aid.
As they announced his win for Breakout Artist of the Year, Billy was being wheeled into the ambulance, regaining some kind of consciousness among the strobing red and white lights.
The medical professionals certainly observed and recorded the damage to his larynx; they also found, from talking with Billy and conducting simple tests, that he was now having trouble swallowing, a known and fairly common sign of a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
The award’s presenter, network-TV actress Tori Kitrell, stood there awkwardly for moments before a program assistant with a headset mercifully ushered her off stage, and the PA announcer said that Billy Ruhl was not in attendance, which was only partially true.
Billy was given a bottle of high-dose Tylenol, told to follow up with the doctors, and flown back from L.A. to the Jessup Farm in Nebraska, where has remained since the “incident”. No shows, no social media posts, no quiet releases of new music, though he’s been writing.
“Always writing, one way or another.”
****
We three stand in the kitchen of his barren, off-white-wood-surfaced house. The fridge is full of beer. Billy breaks open a pack of dried venison sticks, he offers it to us. Rania takes one; I’m hungry enough to eat deer, unfortunately, so I take one too. He chomps on one like a cigar then puts the pack back in a cupboard stacked nearly bottom to top with the same packaging.
‘Another sponsor,’ I think until Billy explains: “Old fella down the road found out who I was, came over, gave me a bunch that he made. Liked my music… I did a little show at a party he had at his place.” He chews, looking downward. “He said he wished he could sing like me.” He chuckles. “I’m just tryin’ to be as good a hunter as him.”
He says he’s given plenty of the meat away to the tiny home folks. More than he could eat in his lifetime, he estimates.
The brown bowler hat sits on the top of a coat rack by the front door, and the denim shirt, jeans and mocs hung and placed there too, looking untouched since that return trip from the West Coast. Billy tells me he still wears the mocs from time to time: “They’re so dang comfortable.”
****
It could be assessed that maybe I haven’t adequately done my job for this story, but what is perhaps omitted from it, or just not present in it, was not stressed by my subject. He was not scandalized by a singular figure of power; conversely, he did not take advantage of a newfound power imbalance, get caught and called out for it, and bay the loathsome cry of a victim of “cancel culture”. He also maintains that he was not bilked financially. Well, not to speculate too much on the economic particulars of his deals, but between agents, managers, publicists, A&Rs, engineers and producers all taking off the top, all in a machine, big or small, one could contend that he has not — or, if his whole Music Career ™ is over, had not — gotten a remotely fair return on value added. One might conclude that a gaggle of shameless automatons striving for some mythical Big Boss position is more insidious a business structure than the ruthless Big Boss themselves; a million paper cuts versus a knife to the gut.
****
Rania and I wind down our visit, standing at the doorstep. Billy looks pleasantly glad that we came, though his soft, neutral face possibly betrays a sense of overwhelm, a deep need to recharge. I ask him something I had hitherto forgotten: whether he remembered anything from the fateful night at the awards show. He says he remembers nothing from the show itself, but could not forget someone who helped him at the hospital: an x-ray technician named Jeni. He says she personally called him for a follow-up a week later, then they began corresponding regularly, and now, “We’re talkin’… I think we might be steady. Long-distance, but you know, makin’ it work.”
Rania and I say that’s great, and we’re happy for him.
When we next visit the Jessup Farm a few months later, its front gates have heavy chains across it, secured by heavy-duty padlocks to make sure no vehicle enters, and extensive signage every thirty feet or so along the fence line reading either:
Private Property
No Trespassing
KEEP OUT
Or a more elaborate, flowery notice of eviction of the now-former owners with some paragraphs about the State’s “land reclamation efforts”, all of which reads as cover for a bureaucratic land grab, most likely at the behest of one corporate power or another.
After observing the aftermath — parking beside the power line corridor gate, seeing no sign of the residents or their homes — we meet Billy at a Comfort Inn in town, no more than ten miles down the road from the estate. We have late breakfast at the hotel’s ground-floor diner. He has held onto the pickup truck; it sits in the parking lot with camping bags and some small furniture framing and insulating a lone crate of beer in the middle of the truck bed. We have bacon, sausage, eggs and pancakes. I ask him what happened with the property. He is not super clear on the details. We eat and drink, unconsciously listening to the music on the tinny sound system hidden in the ceiling and walls. I ask him about the tiny home residents: where did they go, who took their homes away, how did they move, or did they get “removed”?
Billy slows his movements a bit as he metabolizes my questions. In a soft, plain voice, he says, “They went — I don’t know about all of ’em, unfortunately…” he searches for words to describe the developments, “Yeah, I gave Pete and Salina and, uh, Sydney…” he seems lost for a moment, “I was able to give ’em some money.”
He says little else about it; I read this not as a calculated withholding, but a person still catching up with all that has happened and is happening. A partial mental paralysis.
We move on to his plan going forward. Why is the truck all packed up? He tells us, a cautious smile emerging, his former x-ray tech from L.A., Jeni, is going to nursing school.
“Nice,” Rania says, “In California?”
“She’s goin’ up to Portland,” he says.
“Sweet. Didn’t figure that to be your scene, though,” I say.
He shrugs, “I think it’s love… And I hear they got coffee shops out there, too.”
Billy mentions his love of the work of Elliott Smith – which he wants to stress is longtime, genuine – and his delicate, double-track vocals; then, of himself, wanting to adapt and reinvent, sonically and otherwise. We sit under the osmotic waves of audio streaming past us and everyone else. He sips an orange juice. His grin fades.
“I’m a coward,” he mumbles, then clears his throat.
We know that is not true, and I want to tell him so or just reach over and pat him on the back. But I don’t in an odd effort to maintain a kind of impartiality. A bit later, we settle up and head out to our vehicles.
We see Billy Jessup off, known to most as Billy Ruhl, on the run again from some possibly unnameable thing, into the arms of same, though mercifully he has someone waiting for him within it. Heading West, where that new horizon drops off, and the other side of it reflects an often volatile sky.
And he glides.