Starting on banjo at 9, showing sheep and cattle through the county extension 4-H chapter, Moody took to playing music in local bands as a way to have fun. But that doesn’t mean the music – even the country music – didn’t rock.” “Growing up in Roper boots, a John Deere belt buckle, my t-shirt tucked in my jeans, I was a farm kid, and there weren’t that many of us. It was her favorite, and all that fast stuff,” he explains. “I sang ‘Folsom Prison’ at my Grandmother’s funeral. Raised on Alan Jackson, Don Williams, Johnny Cash, George Strait and Earl Scruggs, with a strong pull to the simple universality of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Moody’s country isn’t aligned to today’s country radio… and that’s where the divergence sets in. Like so many talented young people, Moody fell in with people who knew more, but didn’t understand his vision. “But it didn’t make me feel the way I thought it would, and it didn’t really give me what I thought it was supposed to.” “When I came to Nashville and got a publishing deal, it was everything I thought I wanted,” the quiet musician says with a laugh. And Music City’s business practices has a way of testing one’s love of music, turning people away from what they’re meant to do, before ultimately bringing them back – more resolved and committed to the songs they’ve written and music they’re supposed to make. Life, though, has a way of leading the ones meant to make music to Nashville. Already enrolled into the JROTC, the young man who grew up on a family farm believed his future was in flying planes in the Air Force. Even though Austin Moody was writing songs at 15, the bluegrass musician from East Tennessee never thought he’d make his living chasing that dream.

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