Corey Smith, the fan-made man, has sold over 1 million concert tickets, 1.5 million digital singles and over 220,000 albums.  Smith has amassed an unfailingly devout fan base, not only in his native Southeast region, but all around the nation, simply by telling it the way it is.  He has released 10 albums—including 2011’s Top 20 release The Broken Record.  Corey has written every word on every album himself and he produced 9 out of 10 of the records. In Summer 2015, Corey teamed up with producer Keith Stegall (Alan Jackson, Zac Brown Band) for his album, “While the Gettin’ Is Good,” which was released on Sugar Hill Records.  Smith’s concerts, which were documented on his last live record, Live in Chattanooga, regularly sell out, with audiences singing along to such fan favorites as the coming-of-age anthem “Twenty-One,” the nostalgic time warp “If I Could Do It Again” and the group hug “I Love Everyone.”   Corey consistently tours, hitting around 120 dates per year and has begun releasing singles from his upcoming project, the Great Wide Underground.

Dee White Heart Talkin’   Dee White won’t object if you refer to him as an “old soul.” The crooner, picker, and songwriter from Slapout, Alabama, is all of 26 but finds his greatest joy in people and things that have come before. Hank Williams, Gene Watson, and Vern Gosdin are his singing inspirations, he spends his downtime hunting for antiques, especially Gibson acoustic guitars, and he counts an octogenarian songwriter as one of his closest friends.   “I learn more from old stuff. I try to hang on to bits of it, because it's going to be gone, as we all will be,” White says. “The hope is that maybe some other young person will come along and learn something from me that I learned from an 80-year-old object or person.”   On his new album Heart Talkin’, White fully embraces that role of preservationist. But Heart Talkin’ isn’t a time-traveling novelty; rather, it’s testament to White’s gift for taking what he’s gleaned from the past and adapting it for today. Produced by Grammy-winning producer Tony Brown, an architect of country music, the 10-track album is rich in guitars, both electric and acoustic, and detail-oriented lyricism. There are chicken-picking rave-ups like “Up the Creek Again,” gentle ballads like the title track, and foreboding cautionary tales like “Snake” — each one written by White, along with trusted collaborators including Daniel Donato, Ben Chapman, Melissa Erin, William Beckmann, and Kendell Marvel.   Heart Talkin’ is the follow-up to White’s 2019 debut, Southern Gentleman, which he made with producers Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and David Ferguson when he was just 19 years old. After touring in support of the album, opening for Alan Jackson, Alison Krauss, and, most recently, Jackson Dean, he brought a honed craft and new confidence to the studio this time. “There is less reliance on what other people may tell me is right, creatively and artistically,” he says. “But I wanted Tony to be 100 percent in on every song we recorded. And that was my decision: if it wasn’t an absolute ‘yes’ from him, I’d scrap it and write another song.”   Some of White’s favorites, like “Wagon Girl” and “Heart Talkin’,” he wrote the day before the sessions, massaging and finessing them into the wee hours. Then he and the musicians — including guitar aces Ilya Toshinskiy, Kenny Vaughn, and Kenny Greenberg, pedal-steel player Russ Pahl, and, in one of the final sessions before his death, bassist Michael Rhodes — recorded them live on the floor at Nashville’s Sound Emporium and the Castle in nearby Franklin, Tennessee. “The only overdubs we did on the entire album were background vocals,” White says.   When it came time to write “Snake,” a song about how hate is passed down through generations, White happened to be in a session with Joe Allen — his 80-something songwriter friend, whom he first met when Allen contributed the song “Bucket of Bolts” to Southern Gentleman. “Joe and I have done a few songwriter festivals and things like that together over the years, and we've just gotten closer and closer. Writing a song with him was a full circle moment,” White says. “I had the idea of ‘Everybody's got it in them/the charm and the venom,’ and Joe totally got where I was going, with the notion of original sin: ‘Every day we make it worse/but blame the first” — the serpent. He and I wrote all the lyrics down on a legal pad and then I went home that night and put music to it.”   “All Day Singing,” a co-write with Marvel, has a similar Southern gothic aesthetic. A swampy gospel-tinged song about what goes on just outside the gaze of God and your fellow worshippers, it has its roots in something that “Big Dee,” White’s grandfather, used to say: “All day singing, dinner on the grounds/whiskey in the bushes and the devil all around.”   “My grandfather was from a dry county, so ‘whiskey in the bushes’ was about having a potluck at church, and some of the old boys would go slip the jug with the XXXs on it out of the bush and take a drink. That was real life back then,” White says in his distinctly country voice.   To hear White tell the story of his hometown’s name (“It’s called Slapout because the owner of the grocery store there back during the Great Depression used to tell customers, ‘I’m sorry, we’re slap out’”) or, especially, sing live, is to be immersed in the honest, earthy tones of bluegrass, Americana, and country. Brown encouraged White to sing in a more robust, forceful style during the recording sessions, in contrast to the beautifully subdued, delicate vocals White employed on Southern Gentleman. It’s that controlled power that drives Heart Talkin’ along.   Opening song “Up the Creek Again,” a rollicking guitar jam, pays tribute to the hard-living “river rats” of the Coosa River in Alabama. The cascading ballad “Quicksand,” meanwhile, is about a relationship built on unsteady ground. And “Whiskey Please,” all weepy steel and yearning vocals, aims to keep the temptation of brown liquor at bay, told from the perspective of a recovering alcoholic.    Heart Talkin’ wraps up with the barn-burning “Wagon Girl,” written with Serg Sanchez (Morgan Wallen, and Bailey Zimmerman) and told from the point of view of a crushed-up Dixie cup and a snubbed-out cigarette — two metaphors for a guy used up and discarded by his lover. “Light me, bite me, drag me down,” White sings, “then use your boot to put me out.”   By the end of the album, you’ve gone on a true Southern journey, one that can only be told by a careful craftsman like Dee White. “I often sit in silence, mulling over my songwriting ideas,” he says, “but I will speak up here and say, if you want to hear good, authentic country and Americana music, then please listen to Heart Talkin’.”