Galveston, Texas area songwriter Cheryl Cawood has just released her first full-length solo album, Bullet In The Cabin Wall, as a tribute to her family’s history in Harlan County, Kentucky. She calls her music “Kentucky jams melded with jangly folk rock,” and turns that approach towards local Kentucky history on her new album.
The Cawood settlement of the 1700’s was later inhabited by the hundreds of migrant coal workers in the camps that sprang up in Harlan County, Kentucky when the big fossil fuel industry boomed. While the album’s title song deals with the feuding history of her Appalachian family, the first single, “Deep Down in Your Bones,” looks inside one family, a troubled mother-daughter relationship.
Cawood lived a cover band musician’s lifestyle while balancing a job and family. Having experienced the opiod epidemic in her family, she developed a passion to give back to the community, and hence, Hope Loves Harmony was born. Via this program, she writes songs with parents of addicted loved ones to help with healing, and advocates for social change surrounding issues of mental illness, poverty, and how these relate to drug abuse and addiction.
