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      Jesse McReynolds, Lead Singer in Long-Running Bluegrass Duo, Dies at 93

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      He also played mandolin in the act, Jim & Jesse, performing with his brother for 55 years.Jesse McReynolds, for 55 years the lead singer and mandolin player with Jim & Jesse, the first-generation bluegrass duo he established with his older brother, Jim McReynolds, died on Friday at his home in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his wife, Joy McReynolds, on her Facebook page.Bluegrass’s longest running brother act, Jim & Jesse developed a smooth blend of harmony singing that contrasted with the more piercing, down-home vocal arrangements of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Mr. McReynolds sang the melody line in a crystalline baritone, while his brother, who died of thyroid cancer in 2002, added honeyed tenor harmonies on top.The McReynolds’s instrumental approach likewise was more polished than that of their peers, creating a bridge between the barnyard twang of early sibling duos like the Delmore Brothers and the more streamlined sounds of mid-20th century country music.Typically backed by banjo, fiddle and bass, the duo’s music — built around Mr. McReynolds’s plaintive mandolin playing and his brother’s metronome-like rhythm guitar — was not without its experimental side. Most notable was Mr. McReynolds’s widely imitated cross-picking technique, which employed a flat pick to approximate the three-finger banjo roll of the bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs.“I was sort of listening to what he was doing,” Mr. McReynolds said, discussing the origins of his Scruggs-style picking, an approach that influenced mandolin virtuosos like David Grisman and Sam Bush, in a 2019 interview for the website candlewater.com.“I didn’t know how he was doing it. I knew he was using a three-finger roll on it,” he added, but “I was trying to do it with a straight pick so I could play my other style, too.”That other style, which also qualified as an innovation in bluegrass, involved a split-string technique in which Mr. McReynolds used his pinkie to hold down one string of his mandolin’s four pairs of strings while letting its counterpart reverberate, or ring open, to achieve a droning effect. Requiring great precision, this sleight-of-hand produced two distinct notes from a pair of strings which, on the mandolin, were usually played in unison.The duo’s 1963 recording of the instrumental “Stoney Creek” is often cited as the quintessential vehicle for Mr. McReynolds’s prowess as a mandolinist. His Scruggs-inspired “mandolin roll,” though, already could be heard a decade earlier on gospel recordings like “I’ll Fly Away” and “On the Jericho Road.”The McReynolds brothers sometimes incorporated electric and steel guitar into their performances in lieu of bluegrass’s customary banjo and fiddle. In 1969, Mr. McReynolds contributed mandolin to a track on “The Soft Parade,” an album released by the countercultural Los Angeles rock band the Doors.Repertoire was yet another area in which Jim & Jesse were in the bluegrass vanguard. Nowhere was this more evident than with the 1965 release of “Berry Pickin’ in the Country,” a collection of bluegrass covers of Chuck Berry songs, including a chuffing take of “Memphis.” The album proved to be one of the most popular of the brothers’ career.Jesse McReynolds, center, in Nashville in 2014. He continued to perform after his brother Jim died in 2002. Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesTheir untrammeled musical instincts notwithstanding, Jim & Jesse were among the most commercially successful bluegrass acts of the ’60s and ’70s. They placed 10 singles on the country chart, notably “Cotton Mill Man” (1964), a worker’s plaint, and “Diesel on My Tail” (1967), a truck-driving song featuring steel guitar that reached No. 18.Jesse Lester McReynolds was born on July 9, 1929, in Carfax, Va., in the mountains of southern Appalachia. His father, Claude Matthew McReynolds, was a coal miner and amateur banjo player; his mother, Savannah Prudence (Robinette) McReynolds, played guitar, banjo and harmonica and taught her sons to sing gospel harmonies. Mr. McReynolds’s grandfather, the fiddler Charles McReynolds, recorded as one-half of the Bull Mountain Moonshiners at 1927’s Bristol Sessions, the so-called big bang of country music that produced landmark recordings by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.Although raised in a musical family, young Jesse did not take up the mandolin in earnest until he turned 14 and was recovering from an automobile accident that left him with two broken legs. Four years later, he and his brother started a banjo-less string band that played country music throughout southwestern Virginia. It was not until 1952, when they began working with the producer Ken Nelson at Capitol Records, that they first described the music they were making as bluegrass.“We were hesitating over whether we’d even feature the five-string banjo,” Mr. McReynolds said in an interview for the liner notes to “Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys: In the Tradition,” a 1987 album released by Rounder Records. “But it turned out that Ken Nelson was expecting us to record as a bluegrass band, so that’s what we did.”Mr. Nelson also encouraged the brothers to change the name of their ensemble from the Virginia Trio, under which they made their first recordings in 1951, to Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys. In 1960, after more than a decade of performing on many of the radio barn dances of the era, they began hosting their own syndicated television program, sponsored by the Martha White flour company.The duo was a popular draw on the early ’60s folk circuit, appearing, among other places, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. A year later they became members of the cast of the Grand Old Opry, having gained a reputation, like Bill Monroe before them, for attracting elite talent to their band like the fiddle players Tommy Jackson and Vassar Clements.The ensuing decades found the brothers returning to a more traditional approach to bluegrass while consolidating their reputation as one of the premier ensembles in the history of the idiom. Mr. McReynolds served as the affable frontman of the group, his brother as manager of their business affairs.In the late ’80s, Mr. McReynolds toured and recorded with the Masters, a bluegrass supergroup that included the fiddler Kenny Baker, the dobroist Josh Graves and the banjo player and guitarist Eddie Adcock.In 1993, Jim & Jesse were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame. Four years later they received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. McReynolds remained active after his brother’s death. Among other projects, he released a 2010 collection of songs written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, a band upon which Jim & Jesse were a formative influence.Besides his wife of 27 years, Mr. McReynolds is survived by a daughter, Gwen; two sons, Michael and Randy; eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.Much has been made of Mr. McReynolds’s debt to the ebullient banjo phrasing of Earl Scruggs. While certainly the case, Mr. McReynolds also improvised on his forebear’s technique by reversing the order of the notes he played in his variant of the Scruggs banjo roll to create a more melancholy tonal effect.“Ultimately, I ended up playing the opposite of what he did,” Mr. McReynolds explained, talking about the differences between his technique and that of Mr. Scruggs in a 2017 interview with Bluegrass Today. “My rolls went backwards, while Earl’s rolls went forward.” More

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      Morgan Wallen’s ‘One Thing’ Returns to No. 1 for the 13th Time

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      The country singer’s latest album has topped the Billboard chart for more than half the year.Nearly halfway through the year, Morgan Wallen has spent most of it on top.For the 13th time out of the 25 chart weeks so far in 2023, the country singer’s blockbuster album “One Thing at a Time” sits at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, returning to the highest perch after two weeks at No. 2. “One Thing at a Time” had spent the previous 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1 following its release in March, before being temporarily topped by a new edition of Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” and a CD barrage from the K-pop group Stray Kids.Wallen’s album totaled 112,000 equivalent units in its 15th week of release, including 141 million digital streams and 4,500 in album sales. Its 13 weeks at No. 1 matches dominant albums from the last decade by Bad Bunny (“Un Verano Sin Ti,” 2022), Drake (“Views,” 2016) and the soundtrack for “Frozen” (2014). Adele’s “21” was the last album with more than 13 weeks at No. 1 in 2011 and 2012, Billboard reports.In part because of Wallen’s dominance, this year marks the first time since 1993 that no rap album or single has topped the Billboard charts by this point in the calendar. “A Gift and a Curse,” the new album by the Atlanta rapper Gunna — his first since being released from jail after pleading out of the RICO case that also includes his mentor, Young Thug — will debut on the album chart next week.Rounding out the Top 5 this week are albums by the former One Direction singer Niall Horan, whose “The Show” starts at No. 2 with 81,000 units; a deluxe reissue of “Stick Season” by the pop singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, which totaled 71,000 units at No. 3; Swift’s “Midnights,” at No. 4 with 69,000 units; and the producer Metro Boomin’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” soundtrack, at No. 5 with 54,000 units. “5-Star” by Stray Kids, last week’s No. 1, falls to No. 6. More

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      12 New Songs From Janelle Monáe, Rosalía, PinkPantheress and More

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      Hear tracks from Rosalía, L’Rain, Romy and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.PinkPantheress, ‘Angel’“One day my baby just went away,” the British pop star PinkPantheress sings on “Angel,” an aching, bittersweet new track from the soundtrack to the upcoming movie “Barbie.” No grand tragedy has occurred here — just some run-of-the-mill ghosting. Still, PinkPantheress manages to squeeze pathos out of the story, thanks to a dreamy melody and a vocal delivery that blends wide-eyed optimism with creeping doubt: “Everyone tells me life was hard but it’s a piece of cake,” she sings, “even if Johnny hasn’t answered in a couple days.” Ken would never! LINDSAY ZOLADZRosalía, ‘Tuya’“Tuya” (“Yours”) is the kind of song Rosalía can apparently toss off at will: a lilting tune carrying a cheerful, amorous boast. “Sex with me is mind-blowing,” she promises. The production, as usual, goes genre hopping: plucked notes on a Japanese koto, a reggaeton beat, some flamenco handclaps and vocal quavers and, for the big finale, a slamming gabber techno beat and hyperpop pitch-shifted vocals. For Rosalía, they’re all within easy reach. JON PARELESRomy, ‘Loveher’A private, intimate confidence goes happily public in “Loveher” by Romy Madley Croft from the xx. “Hold my hand under the table,” she sings with quiet, breathy intensity. “It’s not that I’m not proud in the company of strangers/It’s just some things are for us.” The production — by Jamie xx, Stuart Price and Fred again.. — coaxes her into a proclamation. It evolves from sparse piano notes and a subdued four-on-the-floor beat to full-scale, chord-pounding house, while Romy’s vocal rises into an ecstatic loop: “I love her, I love her.” The beat suddenly falls away at the end, leaving Romy almost a cappella as she insists, “When they ask me I’ll tell them/Won’t be ashamed.” PARELESMadeline Kenney, ‘I Drew a Line’The Oakland singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney fills her sonic canvas with bold, angular shapes on “I Drew a Line,” the latest single from her upcoming album, “A New Reality Mind.” “Had an idea of who to be,” Kenney sings on this tale of self-revision and emotional growth, as a silky saxophone solo suddenly takes the song in a new direction. ZOLADZJanelle Monáe featuring Doechii, ‘Phenomenal’Janelle Monáe’s new album announces its intentions in its title: “The Age of Pleasure.” It’s all about physical, carnal joy as self-affirmation, underlined by Monáe’s full-spectrum mastery of African-diaspora music. “She’s a mystic sexy creature,” Monáe sings in “Phenomenal,” adding, “She’s a god and I’m a believer.” The groove is spring-loaded, Caribbean-tinged and jazzy, and it works through ever-changing variations — with call-and-response vocals, teasing guitar lines, electronics and horns — on the way to a seamless segue into the next song, “Haute.” PARELESJessie Murph and Maren Morris, ‘Texas’Maren Morris has made it her business to prove that country singers listen outside that limited format. Her latest collaboration is with the broody goth-pop songwriter Jessie Murph, and they take mutual delight in slinging radio-unfriendly words in “Texas,” one of Murph’s typically dark, unhappy accusations. Murph and Morris sing about consequences that a man has shrugged off. “I’m cold, I’m lost, I’m ruined/And you go back to Texas,” Murph sings. The video is set at a rodeo, but cowboy hats, mandolin and fiddle can’t lift the darkness. PARELESShamir, ‘Oversized Sweater’In a folk-rock fortress built around steady-strummed guitar, Shamir’s falsetto is simultaneously piercing and doleful as he sings about getting through a heartbreak. His palliatives are binge-watching TV, getting “higher than Mariah’s head” (voice), cuddling up in an oversized sweater and singing “until I believe in love again.” The marching, chiming production suggests he will. PARELESL’Rain, ‘New Year’s UnResolution’Echoes ripple across “New Year’s UnResolution,” a richly unmoored track by Taja Cheek, who records as L’Rain. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in love,” she sings in a blur of reverb, guitar swoops and harmony vocals over a programmed beat. The song ponders longing, time perception and memory, reaching no conclusion but raising evocative questions. PARELESNora Stanley and Benny Bock, ‘Peaches’A lot of the music on “Distance of the Moon” — the debut album from the baby-faced duo of Nora Stanley and Benny Bock — has been added in layers, via laptop, on the second or the 15th pass. They’re working with tons of instruments here: analog synths, Fender Rhodes, digitally programmed percussion, baritone guitar, saxophones, kalimba. Still, the result feels organic and bleary-eyed and miniature, not overworked. Stanley lives in New York, and Bock in Los Angeles, and the sound reflects that distance: This is music with a sense of focus and intimacy, yet a kind of unknowability too. It’s gentle and lovely, but not settled. On “Peaches,” Stanley’s vibrato-heavy saxophone trembles in harmony with a wavy synth, over minimalist drum programming and an undressed two-chord vamp. Fans of Sam Gendel or Alabaster dePlume or (going back further) Jimmy Giuffre will dig the mellow saxophone; anyone who trances out to Laraaji will probably feel the hypnotic pull of the electronic vamp. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLaura Misch, ‘Portals’The English songwriter and electronic-music producer Laura Misch celebrates a mystical communion of people, nature and art in “Portals” from an album due in October, “Sample the Sky.” Harplike plinks and clicking percussion rise around her voice, enfolded in instrumental and vocal harmonies as she sings that “portals open as you slowly drift through/surrounded by our love.” PARELESBlack Duck, ‘Lemon Treasure’One repeated note and an increasingly assertive beat propel “Lemon Treasure,” a drone and slide-guitar jam from the Chicago trio Black Duck: the bassist Douglas McCombs from Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, the guitarist Bill MacKay and the drummer Charles Rumback. McCombs can’t resist hopping through an occasional arpeggio, and Rumback’s drumming grows splashier and more insistent along the way, but the track is MacKay’s showcase. He bears down on chords, lofts raga-tinged scales, hints at the blues and bends and stretches sustained notes; his guitar both rides the beat and taunts it. PARELESRoxana Amed and Frank Carlberg, ‘Pido El Silencio’“Los Trabajos y Las Noches” is a 10-part song cycle that the Argentine vocalist Roxana Amed and the New York pianist Frank Carlberg wrote, using the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik — a literary hero in mid-20th-century Argentina — as lyrics. Pizarnik’s verse, like Miles Davis’s trumpet playing, was known for its strategic use of silence and restraint. So the album’s first track, “Pido El Silencio,” (“I Beg for Silence”), is an apt opener: nine minutes of forbearance and cycling harmonies and non-resolution. Amed sings the short, mysterious poem repeatedly (in English, it’s: “Although it is late, it is nighttime,/and you’re unable./Sing as if nothing’s happened./Nothing happens”), then she sings in harmony with Carlberg’s piano and Adam Kolker’s tenor saxophone on a wordless bridge. The pianist starts a looming octave chime in the upper register and the band fixes upon a sequence of obscured, sometimes-mucky harmonies, until he finally breaks out into a lyrical solo. But even when Carlberg gets going, there are savory chunks of hesitation embedded in his phrases. RUSSONELLO More

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      Taylor Swift Halts Morgan Wallen’s Run at No. 1

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      After 12 straight weeks at the top, the country star’s “One Thing at a Time” yields to Swift’s “Midnights,” which was reissued in expanded editions.For 12 weeks, nothing could stop Morgan Wallen’s domination of the Billboard chart with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time.” Not Metallica. Not Ed Sheeran. Not the Jonas Brothers or solo projects from two members of BTS.Then came deluxe reissues of “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s seven-month-old LP.With two expanded editions featuring bonus tracks, “Midnights” returns to No. 1, notching its sixth time at the top. One of the new versions, called “The Late Night Edition,” was primarily sold as a CD at Swift’s current stadium tour, though for 24 hours it was also available as a download from the singer’s website. Counting all variations, “Midnights” logged the equivalent of 282,000 sales in the United States last week, including 196,000 copies sold as complete packages and 108 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“Midnights” has been a steady hit since it came out last October. In its 32 weeks on the chart, it has never left the Top 10, and in all but three of those weeks it was in the Top 5. In the United States, “Midnights” has had the equivalent of nearly five million sales and been streamed 3.2 billion times.Lately, as Swift’s Eras Tour has become a cultural juggernaut, her wider catalog has also dotted the upper ranks of the album chart. Last week, Swift had nine titles in the Top 40. (“Lover,” from 2019, is No. 6 this week.) Swift also announced recently that a rerecorded version of her 2010 album “Speak Now” — featuring the hits “Mine,” “Back to December” and “Mean” — will come out in July.The return of “Midnights” bumps Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” to No. 2. Its 12-week consecutive run at the top was historic, falling just one week short of tying a record set by Stevie Wonder in 1977 among albums that open at No. 1 and hold there. Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 5 this week, its 122nd appearance in the Top 10.Also this week, “Almost Healed,” the new album by the Chicago rapper Lil Durk — featuring guest appearances by Alicia Keys, 21 Savage and Wallen — starts at No. 3 with the equivalent of 125,000 sales, including 168 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4. More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): Morgan Wallen, Indie Sleaze and ‘Survivor’

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWelcome to Popcast (Deluxe), a new weekly video show hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli that breaks down essential pop culture. This week’s episode includes segments on:Morgan Wallen, the country singer who continues to top both the Billboard album chart and the Hot 100 despite the postponement of several dates on his stadium tour because of a vocal cord injuryThe Dare, a rising star of New York neo-electroclashThe Hulu documentary “Queenmaker,” about early 2000s It Girls and the blogs that alternately fawned over and savaged themThe season finale of “Survivor,” in which a gaggle of star-level outcasts made it to the end of the gameNew songs from YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Lana Del Rey More

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      Morgan Wallen’s ‘One Thing at a Time’ Earns a 12th Week at No. 1

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      The Nashville star’s latest album will be challenged next week by an older one: Taylor Swift’s “Midnights,” which was rereleased as a deluxe version with bonus tracks.The country superstar Morgan Wallen continues to dominate the Billboard album chart. His latest release, “One Thing at a Time,” holds No. 1 for a 12th straight week, surpassing a milestone by Whitney Houston and marking the longest chart-topping run for a country album since Billy Ray Cyrus three decades ago.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time,” which first arrived at the top of the Billboard 200 chart in early March, remains undefeated after three full months. In its latest week, it had the equivalent of 129,000 sales in the United States, including nearly 163 million streams and 6,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since the album came out, it has been streamed 2.8 billion times in the United States.Last week, Wallen tied a chart feat by Houston, whose 1987 album “Whitney” spent its first 11 weeks at No. 1. The last album to debut at No. 1 and hold there for a longer stretch is Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” which had 13 weeks in 1976 and 1977.As a country album that has made it to No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200, “One Thing” has also now surpassed Taylor Swift’s “Fearless,” which logged a total of 11 weeks there in 2008 and 2009. The last country album to have a longer run on the main chart was Cyrus’s “Some Gave All” — which included the ubiquitous “Achy Breaky Heart” — in 1992. (It opened at No. 4 and then notched 17 consecutive weeks at the top.)Wallen’s song “Last Night” also clinches the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 singles chart for an eighth week.How much longer can Wallen hold the No. 1 album? His next major challenger is not a new release, but Swift’s “Midnights,” which came out in October and racked up a total of five weeks at No. 1. (This week it is in third place.) With a new deluxe version of the album, including extra tracks like a version of “Karma” featuring Ice Spice, “Midnights” has a shot at retaking No. 1 on the next chart.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” rises five spots to No. 2, propelled by its release on vinyl and CD. Wallen’s last LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 4. Dave Matthews Band’s new “Walk Around the Moon” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 44,000 sales. More

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      Morgan Wallen Joins an Elite Club With 11 Weeks at No. 1

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      The country star’s chart run with “One Thing at a Time” puts him in a league with Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder and the “Titanic” soundtrack.There was snow on the ground when Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” arrived at No. 1 in early March. Now, in balmy late spring, the country superstar’s latest LP is racking up its 11th consecutive week on the chart — a feat that puts Wallen in the company of Whitney Houston and Stevie Wonder.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time” has been a streaming blockbuster since it came out, and its numbers have cooled only modestly since then. Week after week, it has fended off competition from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Metallica and two members of BTS to remain music’s most popular album. In its latest week, “One Thing” had the equivalent of 134,500 sales in the United States, including 165 million streams and 8,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Long runs on the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart, are not unheard-of. Bad Bunny, Drake and the “Frozen” soundtrack have all notched a total of 13 weeks; Taylor Swift has gotten 11 twice before. But none of those were for consecutive streaks, which are far more rare.According to Billboard, the last album to hold No. 1 for at least 11 weeks in a row was the “Titanic” soundtrack, which reigned for 16 back in 1998. But the last to spend its first 11 weeks at the top — to open at No. 1 and hold there 10 more times — came in 1987 with Houston’s “Whitney,” which featured hits like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional.” Before that, Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” logged its first 13 weeks at No. 1 back in 1976 and 1977.Wallen’s accomplishment surpasses even his own record, after the singer’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” topped the chart for its initial 10 weeks in early 2021. That run came amid an industrywide rebuke after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur, resulting in his temporary disappearance from radio and streaming playlists.Also this week, the Jonas Brothers open at No. 3 with “The Album,” while the hyper-prolific Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again comes in at No. 4 with “Richest Opp,” his third release to reach the Top 10 this year alone — the last time just three weeks ago.Swift, whose triumphant stadium tour comes to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., for three shows this weekend, is No. 2 with her latest, “Midnights,” and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5. More

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      How Bailey Zimmerman Charmed Nashville

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      NASHVILLE — The spoils of fame are coming fast for the emerging country star Bailey Zimmerman. The Texas singer-songwriter Cody Johnson gave him a standing offer to come ride horses at his ranch. The Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger flew him on a private plane to his home in Canada to spend some time writing songs. The guitar whiz Gary Clark Jr. and the singing ex-rapper Jelly Roll partied with him backstage at the CMT Awards.Recently, Kid Rock had him over for dinner at his ranch outside Nashville.“He freestyled for us at dinner and we went in and he showed us his pool and his bowling alley and all his guns,” Zimmerman said last month, still a little awe-struck, enthusiastically sipping a Bacardi and Coke at the bar at Topgolf. “He let me do a TikTok in one of the bars!”Zimmerman, 23, is boisterous and amiable, openhearted and still a little stupefied by it all. Only two and a half years have passed since he first posted a clip of himself singing one verse of an original song — his first ever — to TikTok, went to bed, and woke up to a million views. Now, he’s got the No. 1 song at country radio, “Rock and a Hard Place”; is the first opening act on the current Morgan Wallen stadium tour; and is on the cusp of releasing his debut album on Friday, the comfortably bruising and appealingly bruised “Religiously. The Album.”But this is how Nashville works now, at least sometimes. Social media is increasingly dictating how country music is evolving, and sometimes that’s in unexpected, lightly chaotic directions.“I never wanted to be, like, ‘country,’” Zimmerman said earlier that day, at the East Nashville home belonging to his producer Austin Shawn, where he records all of his music, cutting vocals in a closet. “Whatever I want to make that day, that’s what I want to be. Some days you’ll see me in penny loafers and then sometimes you’ll see me in Air Force 1s.”He was indeed wearing Air Force 1s, gray ones. (He started sporting them — he tries not to wear the same pair twice — when his manager suggested he needed to step up from the Vans he used to favor.) He’d paired them with a lightly distressed denim jacket and jeans. His longish, tousled hair was swept back under a black cap with a BZ logo (which he’d later sign and give to the Topgolf staff for a charity auction) and a BZ diamond pendant on a chain around his neck.“You know, I can go to a farm and put boots on and take care of 500 head of cattle and do all that,” he said. “But I just don’t, like, act ‘country’ I guess. You know what I’m saying?”Zimmerman is a modern country star in a hybrid mold. He has a rigorously raspy voice, and sings with power he’s mainlined from his primary influences, many of which are rock acts: Nickelback, Three Days Grace, Foo Fighters and, most crucially, the Southern-rock bruisers Hinder — bands that specialize in puffed-chest emoting. Zimmerman’s favorite band is the melodic hard rock outfit Tesla. (He recently enthusiastically posted a video online of the frontman Jeff Keith singing the hook of “Rock and a Hard Place.”)“The TikTok and the Instagram, me doing that every day, that is the brand, of course,” Zimmerman said. Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesAt Topgolf, the music was blasting loudly and the songs Zimmerman had the most electrified reaction to were the pop-punk anthem “My Own Worst Enemy” by the sleaze-rock band Lit, and the unruly glam plosion “Time to Pretend” by MGMT.But he is also clearly an inheritor of Nashville’s recent crop of shaggy-at-the-edges superstars — singers like the powerhouse Luke Combs, or the genre’s reigning titan, Wallen, who have collectively iterated beyond the boyfriend and gentleman country of the mid-2010s, and whose songwriting and commitment to genre mark them as somewhat more traditional than the bro-country breakouts of the early 2010s.Shawn said that “the door has been opened” by artists like Combs and Wallen, “even people like Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers.” Shawn, who produced or co-produced every song on the album, added, “Is he a country singer? Or a rock singer? Or a folk/Americana singer with a little bit of a gritty edge?”Those lines are blurry in Nashville’s contemporary mainstream. Given that pre-existing context, Zimmerman has floated to the top of Nashville’s rising class with remarkable ease and speed. The ascent has been even more remarkable given his starting point. Zimmerman is from Louisville, Ill., a town in the Southern part of the state with a population of just over 1,000 and proximate to not much. (“A two-hour drive to get to a mall to go school shopping.”) His father owned a trucking business and repossessed vehicles; his mother owned the family car dealership with Zimmerman’s grandfather and uncle.When Zimmerman struck out on his own, he took on some of the hardest physical labor available: working on natural gas pipelines in West Virginia. “The gnarliest most chaotic work,” he said. “Screaming, yelling, breaking stuff. Hard hats, walkie talkies, whatever they had in their hands, they’d chuck it at you. Like, you’d walk home with black eyes, bruises from people chucking drinks on you and just belittling you.” On one particularly unpleasant assignment, he was fired in a series of events that included a coffee thrown in his face, a broken shovel wielded as a weapon and a brawl in the living room of his abode that smashed the coffee table.Even still, he maintains a soft spot for the work. “I was so into pipeline, man. Like, I loved working hard. I’ve always loved working hard. Like, I loved getting my hands dirty and coming home and having oil on my face,” he said. “I just felt like, man, there’s no possible way I’m going to ever make it out of this. I’m going to be 65, 70 years old, hips broken, back broken, still have nothing to show for it.”He moved home and began custom building lifted trucks — pickup trucks with super tall wheels — and posted videos about them on TikTok, eventually amassing a respectable 60,000 followers. In his earliest TikToks, his hair is prim and short, and he has braces on his teeth.One day in late 2020 Gavin Lucas, a high school acquaintance who wrote songs, heard Zimmerman singing on Snapchat and was impressed. For a couple of weeks, they fiddled around and eventually, on Christmas night, wrote a verse for a new song. The resulting TikTok changed both of their lives — Zimmerman resigned from his union the following day. Within a couple of weeks, they had finished the song — the rowdy country-rock number “Never Comin’ Home” — Googled information on how to record songs, and driven to Nashville to cut it in a real studio, splitting the $3,000 cost. (Zimmerman borrowed his half from his mother.)Attention came at a disorienting speed. When Zimmerman first met Chief Zaruk, an industry insider who would become one of his managers, “I thought he was the mayor of Nashville, ’cause that’s how everybody introduced him on the Zoom call,” Zimmerman said. “I’m just like, man, why is the mayor of Nashville trying to sign me? This makes no sense.”But the kismet continued. “Morgan was one of the first artists I ever met. He was walking up to Big Loud just randomly,” Zimmerman said, referring to offices for the label and management company. “And he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m a big fan of your song ‘Fall in Love.’ And I’m like, holy crap!” He continued, “Morgan has just been such a big part of my life since 2015, since 16, ‘Up Down,’ ‘Chain Smokin’’ and ‘Spin You Around.’ All that stuff has just been my life.”Zimmerman currently has the No. 1 song at country radio, “Rock and a Hard Place.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesLast October, he released his debut EP, “Leave the Light On,” which remains in the Top 50 of the all-genre Billboard album chart. This is owing to his success at radio, but also to Zimmerman’s relentless presence on TikTok and Instagram. He is his own best promoter, and his success underscores how even Nashville, the most hidebound of music industry towns, is increasingly powerless against the tide of social media.Lucas said that Zimmerman’s attitude has been crucial to the speed of his success. “I love how excited he gets and how much he jumps the gun,” he said of Zimmerman’s no-brakes ascent. “I don’t think we’d be where we are today if Bailey wasn’t that enthusiastic. I know we wouldn’t.”“The TikTok and the Instagram, me doing that every day, that is the brand, of course,” Zimmerman said. “That is the company. And now it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, label, hold on. I now have an avenue of my own to make me successful by myself.” That said, TikTok provides, and TikTok takes away, as seen in Zimmerman’s first true public fumble — a viral video of him singing woefully off-pitch at a recent concert. But rather than duck it, Zimmerman posted through the embarrassment, apologizing for his misstep and taking his lumps with a sense of humor and as much enthusiasm as when he posts about a new song.“I heard a saying the other day, and I’m living by that now,” he said. “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.”And so he’ll keep speeding. Sometimes literally, in the white 2023 Corvette with a red interior that he bought in cash after “Fall in Love” went to No. 1 at country radio, his first splurge. (He also has an even taller truck than his old one that’s in the shop being built to spec.)“I try to keep my sins to a limit, of course, always,” he said. “But of course, dude, I cuss every day. I drink, I smoke, I harm my temple.” And so he’s also taken to the trappings of being a star who needs to perform at a high level — vitamin IV drips, injections of the anti-inflammatory treatment N.A.D.+ and cryotherapy. He’s put both of his parents on his payroll, and is trying to encourage his uncle Brent, whose guitar Zimmerman used to practice on as a child, to become a full-time songwriter.Unexpected things keep happening to him — most recently, it’s the chaotic cross-genre collaboration on the soundtrack of the upcoming “Fast X” film “Won’t Back Down,” with the Irish crooner Dermot Kennedy and the prolific rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, making for a trio of blood-letter vocalists — but Zimmerman still prefers to operate as if there are no guarantees.He recalled playing one of his first songs for his father. “You need to chase this,” he said his father told him.“He’s like, ‘I wasted my whole life not chasing nothing, man. You need to chase something.’” More