Photo: Taylor Ponticelli

Country music, much like an agricultural crop, seems to thrive in certain climates more than others. Indeed, for generations now, Texas, the South, and the North American West have produced high yields. Bumper crop after bumper crop of singers and songwriters and pickers and players have come out of those regions, a pipeline so consistent that it can leave a person wondering if the music is somehow stored in the dirt there.

The music is tied to the land of course, driven by early immigration patterns, slavery, and Indigenous influences that all combined to deposit specific music styles and instruments in certain areas, and different ones in others—creating localized music traditions that then got passed down like family heirlooms. Those regions’ claim to country music was further strengthened by all the tunes and ballads and love letters written to them. Songs about Texas and Tennessee and coal mining and cowboying populate the genre’s broad canon.

For the country artists who continue to emerge from these areas, the music probably does feel like an inheritance, or at least a permission slip, a gift from both those bygone music people and the contemporary ones who played on local stages and porches during their formative years.

New England, on the other hand, doesn’t offer the same advantages, at least as it relates to aspiring country music people. The artists who seem to give fullest expression to the area are literary—from Alcott and Thoreau all the way to Philip Roth, Richard Russo, Steven King.

For Joshua Quimby, who grew up in rural Connecticut, and started dreaming of a career in music when he was still a kid, the region didn’t incubate him in the country genre. “Well, I’ve come to learn there’s a lot more guys out playing and singing, and doing their best to hustle what little local circuit does exist,” Quimby recently told me. “But growing up I definitely didn’t know it existed. I was out there on my own when it came to finding music, I didn’t really have real community in music.”

Quimby moved to Nashville when he was 18, at first only intending to play guitar for other people, but eventually writing and recording his own music. His connection to home was evident from the beginning. The opening number on his 2022 self-titled debut album is called “Ticket to Hartford.” He led his 2023 follow-up EP, These Old Jeans, with the song, “Small-Town New England,” an autobiographical tune where he declares matter-of-factly, “Up in small town New England, there just ain’t much for one to do//Except for stare out into the deep woods, pack a fat one, and smoke it through.”

On his new record, Back Home, Quimby dedicates the entire album to his New England roots, honoring an old country music tradition of celebrating and interrogating childhood’s backdrop. He paints vivid pictures of life there, unpacks the many ways it has changed, and the ways it hasn’t. By casting his studied eye across the region, gone long enough to see it clearly, Quimby finds it, and brings it to life in ways that have largely proved elusive in this medium.

Quimby’s regard for home is felt across the record. “Well I came up in the North land, bred and born and raised, where the trees they stretch for miles, through an early morning haze//In a quaint New England town, seems a stone’s throw length across, you got time to take in moments, that come peacefully enough,” he sings on “A Thing or Two.”

But it’s the kind of affection that comes from the realization that the place you couldn’t wait to get away from is the place that molded you. Quimby details his version of this journey on the album’s title track, where he sings of “the farms and swamps and barns, the mellow creeks and brooks, which I always took for granted, as a rowdy wild kid//I packed my bags for Nashville and I never turned my head.”

He sums up the record’s ethos in the refrain. “I spent far too long trying to be someone I’m not// Running from my small town roots, at every chance I got//Now I take pride in every stride, damn proud of where I’m from//Been growing up and sure enough, I’m bringing it all back home.”

What makes the record so remarkable, and so much more than a country artist rediscovering his home region, is that he’s rediscovering a place that has lacked any meaningful connection to the genre—and traditions—of country music. As such, Quimby is plowing new ground, and in doing so, he’s unlocking the music stored there, the music that remembers its past, remembers its natural wonders, remembers the people who make it work.

“I’ve noticed that people who want to make country music but who come from places outside those country music meccas can put too much of an emphasis on the stereotype of what country music is supposed to be,” Quimby says. “How Southern or Western can you pretend to be? I’m really trying to represent what country life is like in New England, which is not necessarily cowboy hats and rodeo. It’s not the same as the western culture, or southern culture. I’m trying to craft a music and a sound that is representative of the region in a different and unique way,” he said.

On Back Home, Quimby is realizing that ambition. He lovingly takes listeners across the geography of the region, in the broad tradition of country music, but in places we’re not used to hearing about. Pawtucket. Tolland County. Rhode Island Bay. Salem, “good ol’ Eastern CT, where the autumn breeze runs cool.”

The song “Nor’eastern Blues” could only be inspired by a few locales, and again, not the ones that have produced much of the country music we consume. But it’s as evocative as anything that’s come before it.

“Well the cold’s creeping in, ‘cross these woods once again//the trees lose their leaves, to that harsh winter wind//Its dark and its dreary, and its lonesome as sin//Most folks stay shut in, alongside their kin//It’s that time of year, once again ‘round these parts//It gets blacker than nighttime, before five o’clock.”

Country music has long featured and honored the struggles of working people, but there aren’t many songs about commercial fishermen. Quimby’s beautiful love song, “The Big Catch,” rectifies that omission, and contributes a character into the country music canon who has an outsize influence on the economy and life in New England.

Quimby is a gifted lyricist, adept at summoning sophisticated phrasings and an old-soul perspective, suggesting that maybe the ghosts of those old New England poets and authors are still swirling around the on those Nor’easters and ocean winds. On “The Barn,” he sings:

“Well, the barn that once stood has been newly demolished, the land sold again to build homes ‘long the street//Went from dense woods to grassland, to mud then to asphalt, ’til all trace of what was had become obsolete.”

Quimby’s commitment to fostering an authentic kind of New England country music goes beyond his own songwriting. Earlier this summer, he organized “Back Home Fest,” a concert that brought over a dozen country artists from across the region together in Hartford.

“It felt like a really really beautiful community event, which is exactly what I hoped,” said Quimby. “That was the whole reason I created it, to uplift and help amplify the voices of that community. It was cool that it brought us all together in one place. A lot of the people hadn’t even met each other before. I’m already working on next year’s.”

In many ways, New England’s rich history and culture defined the United States more than any other region. It certainly has less to apologize for than, say, the South. In that context, it’s surprising that more country music, or “Americana,” doesn’t spring up out of it. It is, after all, where it all began. You don’t need to be from the region, or ever lived in it, to feel the connection. Sometimes you just need someone to bring you back home.