Back in the throes of the first Trump presidency, Lee Bains hunkered down in Georgia and Alabama, pouring every spare bit of time and energy into researching, writing, and recording an album called Old-Time Folks. The album sought wisdom and inspiration from past Southerners' struggles for justice, equality, and democracy when people were up against hard times and crushing forces, just as people were as 2020 approached. 

Then, when the COVID pandemic hit, times became harder. Racist police violence spread like wildfire, workers faced layoffs and unsafe work conditions, and millions were left sick and unprotected, all while the wealthiest and most powerful were further consolidating their wealth and power. The pandemic, quarantines, supply-chain disruptions, and corporate overtaking of music infrastructure meant that the album he'd worked so hard to release as a defiant rebuke of Trump in 2020 couldn't come out until 2022. When 2022 did finally come, Bains caught COVID on his first tour back, his longtime band quit, and his road-worn tour van broke down. Biden was president, and large swaths of America seemed intent on trying to move past what they had all just been through and on returning to normalcy as best they could. After a couple tours, Bains wound up injured and without healthcare, unable to work, much less tour. He stayed close to home, and worked on recovery, ultimately putting his efforts into his home-repair job, writing, and supporting other musicians.

But, while collective outcry cooled, those cruel systems raged on. As the Biden administration's 2020 promises of racial reparation, accountable policing, workers' protections, economic justice, and immigrants' rights came to be revealed as largely unfulfilled, Trumpism took on a more cruel, violent, repressive tone. By the time 2024 dawned, Bains felt the frustration of complacency, felt the crushing weight of mounting fascism, and felt the call to get back to work against it all in the tiny way he felt he best could: to hit the road. Inspired by musicians of the past who navigated times of injustice and economic austerity to make energetic music via cheap technology, whether the Madchester scene under Thatcherist austerity or the Dirty South scene under trickle-down economics, Lee turned to synthesizers and drum machines, scrapping together bits of know-how and his back catalogue of four albums into driving drum-and-bass beats. (One early listener at a show in Chattanooga quipped, "It's like Skynyrd grew up on 2000's rap, and was playing a show at the Haçienda in 1984.") Bains was, to quote one of Old-Time Folks' central songs, "done playing dead." 

What he found, as he made his way from San Antonio to Boston, Gainesville to Green Bay, was a multitude of people just like those described in that now two-year-old album: old-time folks. He found, across the country, real and deeply rooted Americans, in all their varying identities and backgrounds and complexities, sharing a common desire for democracy and solidarity and freedom, and, in small ways, working to make them happen by various means wherever they stood. It became clear to him that freedom and democracy weren't contingent on the actions of billionaires or politicians somewhere out there in the future. They already existed among the people in the here and now. Whether or not the spirit of equality was present in the state house or board room, it thrived in dive bars and DIY spaces. Whether or not the truth was heard in courthouses or press rooms, it was voiced loudly in union halls and frontline demonstrations. Each day on tour, he entered into a group of people and a tiny physical space that was striving to be both just and free.

To document this, in August 2025, he decamped to the Cherry Street Tavern in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a scene known for holding a light for collective good and personal freedom, in order to record a live album. Over that weekend, a group of anti-war activists, union workers, queer rights organizers, inclusive pastors, and people of goodwill—old-time folks—came from Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia to gather at the Cherry Street Tavern. That weekend, that small group of people on Cherry Street, just like innumerable other groups that day and throughout history, demonstrated to each other and to the microphones, that, in 2025, the South was comprised of free people, no matter what. Free South 2025. Free South 2026. Free South forever.

Tracklist:

1. The Company Man (live)
2. (In Remembrance Of The) 40-Hour Week (live)
3. Whitewash (live)
4. Done Playing Dead (live)
5. Rednecks (live)
6. Gentlemen (live)
7. Outlaws (live)
8. Nail My Feed Down To The Southside Of Town (live)
9. God's A-Working, Man (live)

Release date: August 7, 2026