Dispatches from the Edge

     When the doctors began to explain to singer-songwriter Ron Etheridge how he would never play guitar or piano again, he stopped listening.

     The previous few days had been a confusing haze of faces, both familiar and foreign, alongside the bleeps of monitoring equipment and a tangle of plastic tubes attached to machines keeping him alive.

     The last thing Etheridge could remember was the morning of November 20, 2019, when he went out to buy cigarettes and guitar strings for a gig he had that night. Around 9 a.m., after a late-night songwriting session bled into daylight, his Nissan Xterra collided with a tractor-trailer. The accident left him paralyzed from the chest down, with a traumatic brain injury, broken vertebrae, a broken wrist, and a long list of cuts and contusions.

     He was lucky to be alive. But his troubles were far from over.

     Rock Bottom was a place Etheridge had grown to know well over years of dalliances with substance abuse and troubles that had once landed him in the Rankin County lockup. Now, unable to do what he loved most—play music, never mind walking—he entered a deep depression that crushed him in ways the accident itself couldn’t. In the end, it almost finished the job.

     Etheridge had loved making music since his youth in Greenville, where he sang at Emmanuel Baptist Church. He started playing guitar at age twelve after his father died, and by sixteen, he was playing open mic nights at the downtown bar One Block East.

     “One minute you’re playing a twelve-bar blues with the house band, and the next you look over, and you’re playing with Lil’ Bill Wallace, Willie Foster, and T-Model Ford—some of the greatest names in what was left of the Delta bluesmen,” he says about those days in the mid-1990s. “You never knew what you were going to get to see on any given night.”

     Stints lived in cities like Laurel—where he backed a pre-fame Afroman, the rapper who scored a novelty hit in 2000 with “Because I Got High”—and Nashville followed but didn’t last long compared to the decade he spent in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he made a living as a gigging musician. After he returned to Mississippi, the seasoned songwriter and performer cut the alt-country album There Will Be Wolves for Malaco’s Old Trace Records imprint, which earned him the title Mississippi Songwriter of the Year in 2017.

     His hot streak continued until that November morning after he made a voice memo recording of the tune he was writing and then hopped in the driver’s seat. For much of the year following the accident, he stayed in bed, unsure of what else to do. Slowly, though, as he began to question why he was still alive, he could only reach one conclusion: His survival meant that God wanted him here.

     “I had this realization that I didn’t have before, and I knew it so deeply that it was a message from God,” he says. “The only thing that made sense to me—that pulled me out of that depression—was that God is real, and God knew that it was important to take my hands so that I had to relearn to appreciate music and the gifts that he’s given me.”

     At least subconsciously, he had already been on the cusp of a complete revival of faith even before the accident. The lyrics of the song he was writing that night read, “I’m calling for a miracle—got myself in deep.” He then asks God to lead him out of “the valley of the wayward sheep.”

     With a renewed purpose, he finished the song “Good Family,” writing bass, drum, and keyboard parts using virtual instruments he could control with an iPad, even with his severely limited hand movement. He wrote more than half of the album that way, layering the instruments in GarageBand and sending the arrangements to Nick Smith, his producer, to give to session musicians to play.

     Songwriting had always been therapeutic for Etheridge and a way to be honest about himself. “I could lie about who I was and what I did, but you could find the truth of who I was in my songs,” he says. “I could wrap it up in a pretty, poetic way, but like a puzzle, all you had to do is put the pieces together, and you would find that I was an addict, a phony, and a liar.” On Good Family, those tales from his darker past point to a hopeful future, something he once struggled to see.

     “A lot of the songs have this feel of redemption in the lyrics,” says Smith, who also produced There Will Be Wolves. “I think people really connect to his music because they listen to the words and go, ‘Is that about me?’ Those are the songwriters that I love the most.”

     Etheridge was on hand for the recording sessions at Malaco, providing direction and feedback to musicians from the Jackson music scene he’d known for years. Advances in digital recording technology allowed Smith to capture his singing in small spurts so Etheridge could focus on one line at a time, if needed, and put the right amount of power into his phrasing. The result is a triumph of determination over adversity. Just as he conquered his demons and depression, he was able to make a record that stands on its own despite his limitations.

     Malaco is currently releasing singles from Good Family, credited to Ron Etheridge and Friends, ahead of a full album launch this autumn. After working to regain some mobility in his arms and hands, Etheridge is putting together a band for live gigs, too—enough to strum patterns on a dobro with a slide. And on the strength of “The Call,” the album’s first single, he reclaimed his title of Mississippi Songwriter of the Year for 2024.

     Etheridge found his calling, sure enough, but this time without the distractions of his former life. And he’s determined to keep moving forward as an artist. “Not only does he not stop thinking about music, he never stops thinking about his music,” says Smith of Etheridge. “He’s always kind of got this plan, this path in his head. He’s just so blindly driven.”

     He has plenty of reasons to be bullish on the future. With his faith restored and his life on a solid track, Etheridge is looking forward again and creating new music. And more than ever, he’s sure he is doing the work he’s meant to do.

     “This is why I give God praise in this new album,” he says. “The more I give Him, the more he seems to bless me.” DM