Tom Dunne: Jelly Roll's amazing tale shows the redemptive power of music 

The similarities to music are striking; creatives trying to make it in a cutthroat industry that attracts more than its share of troubled souls. You’re unlikely to make it, unlikely to make money, but people do it anyway, because they love it.

But music is worse. The power dynamic, the way it identifies stars before they have even reached their teens – when they are in Mickey Mouse Club - and basically enslaves them. Read Britney’s memoir if you doubt me. I have been leaving it around the house hoping a certain person might pick it up.

Or maybe not. Do I want her to know Britney was already number one the world over at her age and already in a relationship with Justin Timberlake, then 18, that would have real-life, huge, adult consequences? Maybe not.

Over her shoulder I see two more rock stars being named in sexual assault cases. Innocent until proven guilty of course, but the sheer number of cases is wearying. The idea of writing a book called Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, No Really, Don’t!! gets stronger every day. The business sucks.

Then I spot a story about a guy called Jelly Roll. It’s the photograph I notice first. He is 38 years old, and 400 lbs. His face is covered in tattoos. He has a drug past and a prison record. “I am a broken man,” says the headline. “Exactly I think, “music again!” 

He looks vaguely like the Brendan Grace character, Father Fintan Stack, in Father Ted. “You say that to me again,” you can imagine him saying, “and I’ll put your face through that feckin’ wall.”

 “The music sounds like he’s drilling holes in walls, Ted,” Dougal might add, helpfully.

Assume makes an ass of u & me as they say. It was mum nick named him Jelly Roll. Aren’t mothers great? He was in prison by 15, a dad soon after. He became a rapper and was giving copies of his music to the people he was buying drugs from. In and out of prison, he played any gig he could, but the music business didn’t want to know.

“No one is going to buy music from a 400-pound man singing sad songs,” they told him. But if music isn’t about redemption, what is it about?

In 2020 he recorded a track called 'Save Me' with Lainey Wilson. It’s a country song in which a damaged man sings about the pain he is in and why: addiction. It hit a chord, and attracted, as it still does, millions of views. There is his life before 'Save Me' and after.

Fast forward to 2023; He is nominated for two Grammys for his album Withsitt Chapel, one of which is for Best New Artist, has already won three CMT music awards, and donated the profits from one gig – an estimated $400,000 - to a charity for at-risk kids and built a recording studio in a youth centre.

But it is the comments on 'Save Me' on YouTube that are the most striking. Fans talk so openly, of the death of loved ones in America’s opiate crisis and their own struggles with addiction. One person describes it as “a masterpiece for us broken folk.” Another, states simply, “I feel this song in my soul. My whole family wrote me off as a lost cause. But I've shown them, they were wrong. I've been clean & sober from a heroin addiction for eight and a half years now. We do recover.” 

It is all very moving, and very powerful. It still doesn’t quite have the edge of Willy Nelson and Johnny Cash in their Outlaw days, or the wit of John Prine, but then what does?

So where does this leave the career advice for my daughter? Ideally, get yourself into a situation where you don’t need music to save you. Remind me how you do that again.