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Facing cancer and a long-overdue honor, this small-town Renaissance man reflects on his faith, his art, and his gratitude

By Mark Kemp, The Charlotte Ledger, August 1, 2025

Hidden back from the road in a thicket of native trees, the 120-year-old house in Mount Holly looks like it could be haunted. Or cursed. Or maybe blessed — in an unusual way. A plastic skeleton greets visitors from a rickety wooden chair on the front porch, its bony neck draped in a garland of fake flowers.

Inside, in a corner of the living room, David Childers, flesh still very much attached to his own bones, sits in an easy chair strumming the final chord of a new song he’s written. It’s a talking blues about a vagrant stuck in a Durham bus station, praying for a free ride home. The man eventually makes it there — with help from a few angels along the way.

Childers gently places his battered Gibson acoustic guitar back onto its instrument stand and stares into the glow of the mid-afternoon sun streaming through translucent curtains. Surrounding him are walls and shelves filled with primitive paintings and other pieces of folk art: a muted blue cat with wise eyes, a shiny crucifix, a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.

Several of the works are his own creations. Since the 1990s, the stocky small-town lawyer with a gruff Southern drawl has made a name for himself as a sort of Renaissance man in this quaint Gaston County community just northwest of Charlotte. After years spent in courtrooms, he dusted off his old guitar, picked up a pen and later a paint brush, and began producing a steady stream of richly descriptive poems, songs and artworks packed with religious imagery characterizing a world — or a soul — in chaos.

Right now, he’s pondering the question I’ve just asked him: “What does it feel like when you’ve finished writing a song? You’re satisfied with it, you play it, and suddenly it exists in the world for others to experience.”

The room goes silent. His eyes well up. And then, finally…

“Spiritual,” he says.

“I have another song, ‘Greasy Dollar,’” he continues. “I wrote it about some dudes I worked with.” His voice begins to break with emotion. “I wanted to tell those guys’ stories. I wanted to make them live.”

The crucifix on the wall above the couch is the same one that appears prominently on the cover of Childers’s 2002 album Blessed in an Unusual Way, a masterpiece of country-folk songwriting, crackling dissonance, and Old Testament hellfire and redemption. It was the first album released by Ramseur Records, the Concord-based independent label that would later introduce The Avett Brothers to the world. In fact, Childers introduced the group to label owner Dolph Ramseur, who now manages both acts.

But where Avett Brothers albums like Emotionalism, I and Love and You, and True Sadness have sold in the hundreds of thousands to Americana music fans across the country, Childers’s albums — like Blessed in an Unusual Way, Burning in Hell, and Run Skeleton Run — are barely known outside the Charlotte metropolitan area. That may well change in October, when Childers will be inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, honored alongside prior inductees like James Taylor, the late Doc Watson and John Coltrane and the Avett Brothers.

This is a good thing. Because no matter how little-known he is, many believe David Childers is among the most gifted American songwriters of our times. “He’s such a larger-than-life character,” says Bob Crawford, the Avett Brothers bassist who’s recorded two albums with Childers under the band name The Overmountain Men. “He’s a man of great faith. He’s a man of great knowledge. And he’s a man of great talent, of many talents.”

Childers shrugs when he hears such praise. “I have no idea why I’m getting this,” he says of the induction. “I mean, I play most of my gigs in bars and breweries and places like that.” He pauses and smiles. “I do feel honored, though.”

‘I was ruined in this town’

Childers’s path to music wasn’t typical. But, then, nothing is typical about this former high school football player who loved poetry and spent much of his youth getting in trouble. His father, Max, was a World War II veteran who settled in Mount Holly in 1948, began practicing law, and served three terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives. His mother, Dolores, was a poet who was active in the community as president of the Mount Holly Garden Club and a member of the Gaston County Fine Arts Council. Both parents were heavily involved in the Democratic Party, and both were devout Christians who attended the First United Methodist Church of Mount Holly.

But life was far from rosy in the Childers household. For one thing, David and his mom didn’t get along. “We ended up having the most terrible relationship,” Childers remembers. He looked to his older brother’s book and record collections as an outlet, burying himself in Beat literature and folk music: the poems of Allen Ginsburg, the novels of Jack Kerouac, the songs of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. His schoolmates thought he was “weird.”

By age 15, Childers was drinking heavily, hanging out with sketchy kids, and running afoul of the law. Eventually, he asked his parents to send him away to Fishburne Military School in Virginia, the boarding school his brother attended. “I figured I was ruined in this town, for various and sundry reasons,” he says. “I wanted to go somewhere and start over. I just wanted to get out of here.”

At Fishburne, he learned discipline and found success in both academics and athletics. When he got out, he moved on to UNC Chapel Hill, where he met his wife, Linda, and graduated in 1973 with a degree in English. He taught poetry for a while, then attended UNC Greensboro, where he got his master’s in creative writing in 1977. From there, he and Linda moved to Wilmington for a short time before landing in Shelby with their newborn son, Robert.

Meanwhile, Childers had been writing tons of poetry and short stories and getting published in literary journals like The Greensboro Review, Southern Poetry Review and The Carolina Quarterly. But he wasn’t happy in Shelby, so he set off for law school at Campbell University. When he graduated in 1981, he moved his family back to his hometown.

For more than a decade, Linda taught school in Mount Holly while Childers practiced law alongside his dad, taking on criminal and domestic cases, DUIs and “just whatever was thrown at me,” he says. Every day, he saw the underbelly of society: violence, alcoholism, poverty. He started writing songs loosely based on the characters and situations he encountered. Eventually, he began performing them in Charlotte clubs like the Double Door Inn.

At 45 years old — more than twice the age of most fledgling singer-songwriters — Childers released his first CD with his group The Mount Holly Hellcats. Recorded in the mid-90s at a small studio in Charlotte’s Plaza Midwood neighborhood, Godzilla! He Done Broke Out! featured a cover illustration of the titular beast and a set of punk-inspired roots-rock songs with titles like “Beatrice in the Bushes,” “Voice of the Devil” and “Johnny Got a Mohawk.” The latter tune got some airplay on public radio station WNCW out of Spindale.

Throughout the late ’90s and early aughts, Childers juggled his law practice with his music making, recording three more albums with a variety of notable musicians — members of Charlotte bands Lou Ford and The Rank Outsiders, as well as the late West Coast guitarist Duane Jarvis, known for his work with Lucinda Williams. In the summer of 2000, Dolph Ramseur caught a Childers show at the Double Door and was blown away by his writing, his spiritual subject matter and his soulful voice. Ramseur asked if Childers wanted to make a record for an indie label he was starting up, and the two began working on Blessed in an Unusual Way. They’ve been working together ever since.

“I felt that, from there on out, we were going to be friends,” Ramseur remembers of the recording sessions, which were done in Childers’s home. “David’s been a kind of a rock for me in many ways. Much like it is with the Avetts and me, David and I speak the same language — that Southern Piedmont mill town thing. We’re all made from the same stuff.”

Childers followed Blessed with Room #23, a set of country songs and character sketches that was produced by Don Dixon, who’d worked on R.E.M.’s first two albums. The record didn’t sell as well as Childers had hoped, but it included two songs — “The Prettiest Thing” and “Lucky Stranger” — that the Avett Brothers would later cover during their concerts. Childers returned to writing about darker scenarios mixed with religious themes on his next two albums for Ramseur Records, Jailhouse Religion (2006) and Burning in Hell (2007).

Not everyone understood where Childers was coming from in his songs. During a show in New York City, he offended some audience members when he launched into “George Wallace,” from Jailhouse. They’d missed the point of the still-relevant account of how the notorious Alabama governor had risen to political prominence on a platform of racial hatred. “All they heard was ‘George Wallace,’” Childers says, “and they were like, ‘Oh my god, he’s singing a racist song!’ Some people don’t understand that songs are stories. They just don’t get it.”

By then, Childers was in his late 50s, and health concerns combined with the grind of practicing law, recording music and touring began to take a toll. In 2007, he announced his retirement from performing. It didn’t last long. Avett Brothers bassist Crawford, who shares Childers’s interest in history, convinced the singer to work with him on a history-themed music project. Childers’s son, Robert, came up with a name for the group: The Overmountain Men, in honor of the scrappy frontiersmen who, in 1780, helped American revolutionary troops win the battle of King’s Mountain just west of Mount Holly. In 2010, Crawford and Childers began writing songs for their first album, Glorious Day, and they returned three years later with a follow-up, The Next Big Thing.

A longtime fan of Childers’s music, Crawford feels that he deserves far more attention than he’s gotten. “David’s songwriting is every bit as great as what Scott and Seth (Avett) do,” Crawford says, referring to his fellow bandmates. “And David’s songs are equally as autobiographical as theirs. But they’re apples and oranges. What David does is he creates characters to deliver that autobiography. If you look at his catalog, there’s this whole world of these, like, nefarious characters — ne’er-do-wells, do-gooders, every kind of person under the sun — and in each of them, there’s something of himself.”

Between the two Overmountain Men albums, Childers recorded a set of Christmas songs, Madonna & Rose, with a band called The Bank Cormorants. And then, in 2014, he returned with a new album under his own name, Serpents of Reformation, another round of religious-themed songs with dark undertones in the experimental style of Blessed in an Unusual Way. Childers was back and in fine form, with lyrics that probe and challenge against the backdrop of adventurous music courtesy of Robert, who contributed elements of rock and hip-hop to tracks like “Cain and Abel.”

In 2017, Crawford — who loved what Dixon had done for Childers’s sound on Room #23 — convinced the singer to go back into the studio with the renowned producer. The result was Run Skeleton Run, one of Childers’s most musically consistent albums. With Scott Avett contributing to four songs, the album was packed with richly developed characters and music that ran from traditional folk (“Belmont Ford”) to old-school country (“Greasy Dollar”) to gorgeous balladry (“Ghostland”). Childers has continued to record and perform, releasing three albums with his current band, The Serpents — Interstate Lullaby in 2020; Melancholy Angel in 2023; and this year’s The Satan, You’re a Liars.

The latest album — described on the cover as “a gospel record for Southern misfits” — is a collaboration with Alabama folk artist Abe Partridge. He and Childers are kindred spirits. Both grew up on the songs of Dylan, John Prine and Townes Van Zandt. Both had troubled childhoods, found redemption and sought careers in the straight world. And both left those careers behind to make deeply allegorical music and visual art.

“Abe was a Pentecostal preacher from the time he was 18 years old,” Childers says. “But he was also a really good artist and a hell of a songwriter, and he saw the light.” Or, rather, he saw the hypocrisy in the church where he preached. “He was like, ‘This ain’t right,’ you know? But he was a serious Christian — still is. He just couldn’t keep doing what he was doing.” Childers lets out a big belly laugh. “I always tell him, ‘You’re doing more good now with your art — going out doing shows and stuff — than you ever could as a preacher.”

And so is Childers. Christian redemption is at the heart of everything he creates. But while he’s unabashed about his faith, he doesn’t evangelize in his songs. Rather, he practices the art of showing, not telling. In one of his earliest songs, “Don’t Go Down Easy,” from his 1999 album Time Machine, Childers sings, “We came to life with Adam’s shame. We learn to bear the mark of Cain. And who has never felt the rain wash right through their soul?”

Love poured in

Last summer, Childers got some rough news. Things weren’t feeling right, and he went to the doctor. As it turned out, he had colon cancer — Stage IV. He kept it quiet for a while, but word got out, and his friends and musical peers set up a GoFundMe account to help offset his bills. To date, they’ve raised more than $30,000.

Childers’s eyes well up again. “I had no idea how appreciated I was,” he says. “I mean, the amount of love that just poured in. And not only that, but also the financial help. I get checks in the mail for $500! I’m like, ‘What’s this for?’ and they’re like, ‘Well, just because of what you’ve done. You’ve meant a lot to me — your music.’”

He was hesitant about taking money from other people, but Linda and Robert convinced him that it was necessary. After all, Childers couldn’t write or play or sing or do much of anything during his chemo treatments. “Before my diagnosis, I had this song called ‘Thanks to All,’” he says, and then begins singing the lyrics: “To all my friends and comrades with whom I share the road, I thank you for your willingness to help me bear my load.” His voice cracks. “That pretty much sums up how I feel about what all these people have done for me.”

His latest song — the one that he played for me earlier about the vagrant in the Durham bus station — includes the lines, “Sometimes bad things happen… Keep your focus. You might get an answer. There might just be an angel standing next to you.”

Childers has put his trust in angels his entire life. His songs and paintings are all about darkness and light, sin and redemption, hard times and freedom. He doesn’t know where life will take him from here, but he knows he’s going to be OK.

“That’s one thing I want people to understand,” he says. “I’m doing fine.” He points out the window. “I get out there, I walk about a mile and a half a day. I cut grass with a push mower. I lift weights. I paint all the time. I’m back to playing gigs.” 

Tears well up in his eyes again, and a smile stretches across his face. “I’m probably the happiest I’ve been in my life,” he says. “I ain’t planning on dying anytime soon.”

Mark Kemp is an award-winning music journalist and author whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Our State, The Charlotte Observer and other publications. Reach him at opted1@yahoo.com.