Aaron Dowdy Draws On His Appalachian Roots In Fust

This interview originally aired in the March 30, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The last few years have seen a new wave of indie rock music emerging from the Mountain South. 

These bands are distinguished by a rich, Southern rock sound and lyrics drawn from observations about living in the region. We’re talking about acts like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman — and Fust, a group that’s based in Durham, North Carolina with deep Appalachian roots. 

Fust has a new album. It’s called Big Ugly, and was produced by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina.

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams recently spoke with Fust singer and songwriter Aaron Dowdy.

Adams: Do you consider yourself Appalachian?

Dowdy: Absolutely. I grew up in the heart of Appalachia. I was raised in Bristol, Virginia, then I lived for a while in Asheville. So just purely based on the location and being fully surrounded by that area, I clearly consider myself to be Appalachian. But what that means is something more. I don’t know what the specific details of that is. That’s what I’ve been tracing, and my writing is less like a biographical detail and more about the entire feeling and subject of what it means to be from Appalachia. 

Adams: When did you become aware of the concept of Appalachia? Was it something you grew up with, or did you kind of discover it later?

Dowdy: My dad’s family is all from West Virginia: Wyoming County, Pineville, Beckley area. We had family, though, in Union and Fayetteville. Also, Bristol is a great place to be born for music, for the history of music. Obviously, it’s the so-called “Birthplace of Country Music,” if you want to take that version of things. And Clarence Ashley‘s from there, and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and that culture is alive and well. I think my parents really loved being from that region. I mean, obviously there’s complications, but we never shied away from it. We tried to participate in as many cultural things as we could. I was brought up to know it and to love it.

Adams: The press release for Big Ugly mentions your connections to the Hatfield family in West Virginia, as well as the groundbreaking Carter family, which of course exploded at the “big bang of country music” in Bristol. Was that something you were aware of, too? And can you talk a little bit about your interest in your family’s links to those famous families?

Dowdy: Mostly this comes out of taking a greater interest in family history, as a lot of people do. At a certain point, you want to know where you come from and also you grow to love your grandparents and their experiences, and you want to know the history of that. And so, I started to sort of inquire with my grandmother about her family and where she comes from in West Virginia, and what her experiences were like. We would take trips together over the past five or ten years, where we would just kind of walk around her area and hear stories, and these connections came out, going to Matewan and seeing the courthouse steps.

She would say, it just would kind of come out in her speech, “Oh, we had family connections to the Hatfields.” And then also talking with family and talking to my dad, who’s also done similar work, asking questions about family and our connection to Maybelle Carter. It’s a kind of narrative we tell about ourselves that’s true, but it’s also just a way of feeling tied to the area and what the area’s done. And it’s legendary stuff. I mean, the Hatfields and McCoys, obviously, but also the Carters have become the stuff of legends, and there’s a long history of what the Carter family opened up and made possible for music, and the fact that I feel myself to be a part of that area and still writing music, I necessarily feel like I’m part of the lineage. Yes, I mean, I think there’s a familial tie. There definitely is, but there’s also something else — a kind of cultural tie that I feel like I’m a part of, and I’m happy to be a part of.

Adams: That feeling definitely translates to the music and the lyrics you write. How did growing up here, and all that context you talk about, how does that affect your songwriting?

Dowdy: I didn’t grow up with a community of music. It wasn’t like everybody I knew played music, or my parents don’t play music, but it was so ambiently rich that I knew music and playing music was a thing that people did. We have folk and roots festivals in that area, and we would go to them. It became clear to me at some point that music was the way that I saw the world. I didn’t intend it in any way. It wasn’t like I took lessons to try to become a great performer. I never really cared about that. It was just that at a certain point, I realized I was singing a lot, and I was tending towards instruments, and I was fixated on performers and wanting to go to shows, and I always gravitated towards being a songwriter.

That’s what I liked the most, was blending melody and instrumentations and lyrics. I think part of what makes the lyrics specifically Appalachian or specifically Southern in that way, I had lived in the South for most of my life, and then I moved to New York, and I thought that I was maybe getting away from something or needed to, just as a different experience. But almost immediately [I] felt something missing, and I was so curious, as I was missing the South, what it was that I was missing. And so, I started writing. I started the Fust project, specifically on those grounds, as somebody who had grown up in it but had moved away for a bit, to start reconnecting with the South and my region and my upbringing. So, the themes being so specifically Southern in that way, and specifically Appalachian, have to do with me trying to return to and think hard about where I’m from and what’s going on there. And yes, there are a lot of issues, but also there’s just so much feeling and so much history and so many good people. I think lyrics having an opportunity to host those contradictions, or try to describe those contradictions, is what drives the project, lyrically at least.

Adams: The lyrics on “Spangled,” the first single from the album,  grab me right out the gate with the first line, “They tore down the hospital.” There have been a lot of rural hospital closures in the last decade. So right away, this hits. What inspired that line?

Dowdy: That line works on so many levels for me. I like lines that are very complicated. Rural hospital closures are a serious problem. I don’t go into the reasoning behind it in the song, whether it’s financial losses or low reimbursement rates, or whatever it may be, declining populations in rural areas. I mean, it’s just a fact. And there’s so much at play in these closures. On a personal level, the hospital I was born in was closed down in Bristol, Tennessee. That’s sort of been a figure in my thoughts since I was a kid, not being able to see the place I was born, exactly. You can kind of see the area that it was, but you can’t see the building, and you can’t visit the room. And that has been a motif that I thought about for a long time, but when I started writing this song, what I really wanted to get at was trauma in the South, or a certain kind of difficulty that maybe you end up often end up at the hospital, and the hospital becomes a point of crisis or a transition point in some person’s life. It can have a lot of meaning for somebody — that moment of being saved, or whatever you know, or coming to recognize where you are, what you need — and for that building to have been taken down. I started to imagine all the people who had that experience floating there in time. But I would also say those lyrics are really interesting.

If you take the opening couplet of “They tore down the hospital out on Route 11. I’m not sure what happened. It seems like repossession.” I mean, it can be from one angle, describing this financial inequality that’s behind the closure, but then also it kind of describes the person immediately, “I’m not sure what happened.” You kind of are losing consciousness a little bit, or something sort of stepping in to get in the way. And “repossession”. You’re repossessed by an old event that happened to you, and something comes over you, and you’re repossessed by an old memory, and you lose focus. I like that play on the very personal and the historical, how they collide. And I think that opening couplet really does that.

Adams: Big Ugly is a grower. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new, and it’s still kind of revealing itself to me. But right away, my favorite song is “Mountain Language.” I love this connection between mountains and language. I spent a few years living away, and whenever I heard a mountain accent, it immediately brought me back home, and I felt like I was in community. Can you share some of what inspired this song?

Dowdy: The initial kernel for this song was actually — seems really out of field — but it’s a play by the playwright, Harold Pinter, called “Mountain Language.” And interestingly, it’s about the Kurds and the military coup of 1980 when the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public life and private life. It’s a one-act play about the soldiers, and they’re asking questions to the prisoners, but they’re not allowed to speak in their own language, but they don’t know the language of the captors. So there’s this impasse. And it really struck me. I mean, obviously, the Syrian Civil War is a big part of my life, not exactly, but just as a global event during my lifetime. And that story always stuck with me. But then, of course, coming from Appalachia, my first thought when I think about “mountain language” is something like you’re saying, like the real character of Southern personality and regionalism and expressions.

What I wanted to write was some kind of blend of those two — this idea of a people who, when someone’s stronger than you or is more ideologically coherent or dominant, and you feel like you have to play that part. You have to speak that language. But you know you still dream in yours, in a way, that yours has gone underground, but you’ve got this language that is really true to your way of life, that maybe doesn’t get the opportunity to be worked through because you have to work these jobs, and you have to work these or deal with these kind of cultural setbacks. I wanted to write the song about country utopia, about making it up the mountain again, and being with friends and and this language, a language that is proportional to life in the South and that feels like it expresses it right, and doesn’t have to deal with the sort of ways of the world, and that kind of community that’s not inhibited, but actually it’s precisely what it needs to be. It’s Southern and it’s mountain. I like that idea of a kind of utopia that is consisting of things that people might not expect them to exist with. It’s not a technological utopia. It’s a country or mountain utopia.

Fust’s new album is Big Ugly. It’s out now.