Seven years before he was born, Charles Wesley Godwin’s parents survived a hurricane and subsequent flood in 1985 that was determined to wreak havoc on West Virginia. For a harrowing several hours, his mom and dad navigated treacherous waters and a washed-out bridge by car and foot trying to reach the safe embrace of their parents and grandparents.
As they walked along the ridgelines of the Allegheny mountains, they saw Godwin’s uncle, waving a flashlight in the darkness, waiting on them. “He had no idea they would be coming, no way to reach them, but he just said he had a feeling they would come, so he went to the hill that night to wait on them,” Godwin says.
That true tale is recounted in “The Flood,” a song on Godwin’s third album, Family Ties, out Sept. 22 on Big Loud Records. Godwin calls the song a chronicling of “the bravest moment in my mom’s life.” It is one of several family-oriented songs on the project, alongside the towering romance of “Willing and Able” (written for his wife Samantha), “Gabriel” and “Dance in Rain,” written for their children, and the keen-eyed “Miner Imperfections” (a tribute to Godwin’s father).
Godwin has been among the acoustic, roots-oriented singer-songwriters and groups surging to the forefront over the past few years, including Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Billy Strings and Turnpike Troubadours. Since the release of his 2019 debut Seneca and its follow-up, 2021’s How The Mighty Fall, Godwin has further refined his considerable skill as a detailed storyteller. “The Cranes of Potter,” from How the Mighty Fall, cast a critical eye on big-city development, while that album’s title track surveyed the toll time ravages on the weak and strong alike. Much like those previous projects, Godwin is the sole writer on nearly every song on the new, 19-track album.
The aforementioned “Miner Imperfections,” written with Zach McCord, is one of the few exceptions. The track showcases Godwin’s rough-hewn vocals as he sings of the worthy qualities and shortcomings of a working-class man trying to build a simple, loving life, and his pride in all of it.
“[Zach] had that chorus, and my dad was a coal miner, so I loved the idea,” Godwin says. “His dad’s a blue-collar guy from West Virginia and both of them were similar, in that they were pretty quiet guys, but extremely loving fathers at the same time. We worked on it that whole day and We just wrote it for our dads. It felt like a perfect song for this album.”
Godwin picked up a guitar just over a decade ago, inspired by watching a Grammys performance from The Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons.
“It blew me away,” he says. “It made me want to pick up a guitar. I thought it would just be another productive hobby, since after high school, I wasn’t playing sports anymore.” But rather than the onslaught of bro-country that dominated the country radio airwaves around that time, Godwin’s influences veered toward names like Prine, Kristofferson and Nelson.
He first played onstage while still studying finance at West Virginia University; a college classmate essentially forced him onstage during a semester abroad in Estonia, during Godwin’s junior year.
“I brought my guitar [on the trip] and one night we went to a show in Tartu,” Godwin says. “I didn’t know it, but one of my roommates took my guitar out of my room after I left and brought it to the show. When the concert was over, he ran up onstage — and somehow didn’t get kicked out — and got everyone in the room to start chanting, until I got up there and played a song.”
His potential as a musician was solidified when he received a Facebook message from a local fashion designer who had seen his impromptu performance and offered him 150 Euros to play music during a local fashion show. “Drinks were on me that night,” he recalls with a laugh. “That just changed my whole life.”
Along the way, Godwin has slowly, deliberately built his career, playing shows, and drawing fans with his burly vocal and nuanced writing style. But not long after the release of How the Mighty Fall, Godwin began facing new pressures as labels began sniffing around.
“I was having a hard time dealing with it, to be honest,” he recalls. “I was in a funk for a handful of months. I was trying to get back to writing songs, spending each morning going into the woodshed, kind of writing garbage but just trying my best. A bunch of labels wanted to hear what I was working on, even though I had just come out with an album. It threw me off because I had two albums out at that point and was selling tickets all around the country. To me, I was not a risk, yet folks were still kind of wanting to cherry-pick whether I had ‘it’ or not.”
He recalls that it took him “a few months to get my head around that, and be confident again. I had all these guys depending on me, my family. I want to keep growing on their behalf, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care if a label worked out or not.”
A heart-to-heart with his father offered perspective. “He said, ‘All you have control over is the pen in your hand and the notebook in front of you. Everything else will happen in time if it’s meant to be.’ It helped me to shake all that stuff off.’”
The next morning, Godwin wrote “Two Weeks Gone,” start to finish; the song served as a launching point for what became Family Ties. “I just thought, ‘Okay, how about I just go within myself and write what’s personal to me? I’m gonna write about my family this year.’ I ended up having one of the best writing years of my life last year, and that led to the album.”
Earlier this year, he released the EP Live From the Church, recorded at The Church studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He recorded Family Ties at Echo Mountain Recording, an old Asheville, North Carolina church building that was remodeled into a recording studio and has since become a go-to recording center for artists including The Avett Brothers (Godwin was inspired to record there thanks to the 2017 The Avett Brothers documentary May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers).
“I always wondered what it would be like to get to record in a place like that,” Godwin says. “This time around, I finally had the opportunity and resource to do it. And in a practical sense, the main room is so big — and they have so many iso booths — that all of us were able to record live to tape at the same time. It was a best-case scenario to work in that studio.”
He also nods to his roots with “Cue Country Roads” and cover of the John Denver classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which he performs to close every show. Godwin says he recorded it with the blessing of the manager of Denver’s estate. “He and his son came out to Red Rocks when I played there in May,” he says. “They said they loved it and wanted to do whatever they can to help, because they view it as kind of helping the song reach the next generation.”
The label issues resolved themselves, too; in March, Big Loud, home to artists including Morgan Wallen, HARDY, and Hailey Whitters, announced it had signed Godwin. Family Ties was completed before he signed his label deal.
“We made the album in January and handed it in to them and they said, ‘We love it,’ and that was it. There was no helicoptering over making the album or anything,” Godwin says.
Godwin spent much of this year opening for Zach Bryan’s Burn, Burn, Burn Tour and will join Luke Combs’ 2024 summer stadium tour. But before then, he will continue with the house of worship-turned-house of music conduit when he headlines two shows at Nashville’s own Mother Church, the Ryman Auditorium on Dec. 7-8.
“I’m just very grateful for the people that connect with my music,” Godwin says. “It’s amazing just how diehard they are and it’s going to be a really special couple of nights.”
