Culture

An Interview With Paddy Tarleton: The Volkish Folk Singer

This is an interview piece with an exciting musician, singer, and songwriter named Paddy Tarleton. He makes music that speaks directly to the heart of the Alt-Right’s current issues and plight. You may have heard him on several podcasts, including Radical Agenda with Christopher Cantwell, or read one of the many interviews that he has done over the years. Paddy’s prodigious talent combines traditional Americana music with a contemporary subject matter. His style represents the true musical embodiment of the word folk in the venerable sense of the word, which means people or kindred tribe. Most importantly, he is helping to create and shape an artistic culture that our movement so desperately wants and needs.

Paddy is woke to the Boomer Question. Take a listen to his song-  Hallelujah I’m A Boomer:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuA2BQxLyh8]

Paddy, how would you summarize your political beliefs?

Politically, I tend to lean more towards social nationalism but I have friends and allies in every camp of the Alt Right/New Right.  The more time passes, the more I see we are fighting a war that is spiritual as much as it is cultural and political.  I’m Orthodox [Christian], having recently been baptized by Father Matthew Rafael Johnson, my priest, and I am now a member of the Catacomb church whose metropolitan is based in Moscow.  

How did where you grew up influence you both socially and musically? 

 I was born in Baltimore but grew up mostly in northern Delaware, right on the border that meets eastern Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.  I remember going through a number of phases in the early 2000s, just before and during my time at college.  I guess at that time I considered myself a cross between a libertarian and a run-of-the-mill globalist liberal.  But I didn’t know who I was or what I was talking about at that time.  I knew what I felt but I couldn’t articulate it.  I think most young people endure that briefly.  Of course, it doesn’t seem very brief while you’re going through it.  Anyway, I finally began to wake up in my mid-twenties.  This was around ’08, going into ’09.  My social and political beliefs were forged simultaneously as they were intertwined.  I knew I hated modernity, cosmopolitanism, and liberalism, and this could be seen even before I decided to exert my political convictions through the music I made.  It was around those years that I started getting back into a lot of the Anglo-Celtic and old-time Americana/Country music I’d heard as a kid.  Roots music.  I do hate that term, though.  “Roots” music.  So much traditional forms of music have been hijacked by deluded leftists that even once appropriate terms like that tend to irk me. 

How did you get started playing music? 

Well, I heard a lot of old music as a child.  My grandfather played old-time and classic country, though never professionally.  Just around the house.  Unfortunately, I never got to see him actually play as he was very old by the time I was born and died just before I hit my teens.  But during my teens and early twenties, I strayed and got really into old punk rock.  But again, there was that factor again – old; traditional.  It had to be older punk or old rock n’ roll.  I hated anything new.  And not just because it was new.  I know how pretentious and hipsterish that must sound but its very true.  Newer styles of music were so terrible, almost all of them, at least.  There were bands, of course, that played the music I liked in the more traditional fashions and I naturally liked them but they were very few and far between.  I suppose you can hear punk bands now that go for the older sound but its such a boring and vapid form of music today in the twenty-first century. Hell, it had pretty much run its course by the time I started listening to it as a youth in the late 1990s/early 2000s.  It didn’t take long before that natural urge to hear authentic, sincere, quality music led me to dig deeper.  I don’t think it has anything to do with age, either.  I think there are simply people who can see and some who can’t.  Most newer forms of music, newer styles, much like new fashions, new films, and new “progressive” ideas, are trash.  Garbage.  Mindless.  Modern.  Ugly.  

Who are your musical influences? 

There are so many but a few of my main ones that have greatly influenced my style and voice are Luke Kelly, Margaret Barry, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Ewan MacColl, Kitty Wells, and Hank Williams.  There’s even a little John Lydon in there, believe it or not.  

Is your music influenced by your ethnic heritage?

You mean Anglo-Celtic? I would say so, absolutely.  But really, the North American is very much an Anglicized person, even if one is of ethnic German or Scandinavian descent.  In my view, we sometimes get so wrapped up here with either diffusive identities based on our last names or this bullshit, insta-identity given to everybody here, this rootless idea of the “American”, that I think we forget about what our true, organic identities are.  Lacking as they might seem, they are easily won back. 

How would you describe your music? 

It’s just traditional American folk music, which is Anglo-Celtic in style and content. Naturally, our traditional music here, at least for whites, has always been rooted in the British Isles.  American country music, old-time string band music/bluegrass, all the forms of music here that are associated with whites here, are rooted in England, Ireland, Scotland, and, to some extent, Wales. Almost every traditional old-time or bluegrass song is just a slight variation of an old Scots or Anglo-Irish melody.  I use many of these melodies for my own songs because that is the folk tradition.  I tend not to go on tangents like this in my personal life, but since this is the appropriate setting I want to take the opportunity to say that it is important to realize what I do is not “parody”.  All traditional folk melodies are borrowed.  That’s why its traditional.  To give one example known to most, the “Horst Wessel Lied” [national anthem of the Third Reich] is based on an old German folk melody that goes back at least two hundred years before Horst Wessel’s own time.  For many in the Alt Right, this is something not well known but I see my place within this movement as an opportunity to help others gain that sense of traditionalism back through music.  This music is YOURS.  We’re so modernized and accustomed to popular, media-driven “music” that we have forgotten this.  

Favorite instrument to play and why? 

I play the guitar and the banjitar, or “guitjo” as its sometimes known.  But, really, that’s just a lazy man’s banjo.  Its tuned like a guitar and has six strings.  It’s a banjo, to be sure, it’s just not a very common one.  I know the guys in Old Crow Medicine Show have a banjitar player.  They were quite popular in the early twentieth century as they gave guitar players an easier route to playing banjo.  Thus far, I’ve only used it on two of my songs, though.  But the upcoming record I am still working on will have a few more songs with it.  

Favorite classical musical period and composer? Mine is anything Baroque with a harpsichord.

Oh, I’m with you on that one, my friend!  Baroque is what I much prefer.  Boccherini is a favorite, lots of Italian baroque.  I am especially fond of John Playford’s “English Dancing Master” and a lot of 17th and early 18th English country dancing music in general.  

How difficult was it for you to start voicing your political opinions aloud and then via your music? 

It was never all that difficult.  Once I really understood the truth and how the world really worked, what was at stake, and the reality of the age in which we live, it was easy.  

If I may get personal, have your political beliefs and music caused any strain on your personal relationships?

Yes, of course. Mostly old friends.  But it no longer bothers me.  Look, we live in terrible times.  Most people are delusional and for many of them it isn’t entirely their fault.  I still get hate mail from people from back in my home area, which I haven’t even lived in for a while now.  I now no longer respond when people from my past contact me to spew venom at me or lower themselves by verbally attacking me.  They don’t understand why they’re doing it.  They think they’re doing something noble, that they have free will, or maybe for some of the more politically radicalized ones they feel that they are on the right side of history.  Some of them even do that thing where they’ll contact me to yell at me hoping that I’ll respond in anger so they can screen shot it and post it on their social media accounts.  I had one former band mate try to do that.  I just ignored it.  There was an ex I had who sort of did similar, and like an idiot, I took the bait.  But you learn.  At this stage in my life, at my age, it’s too exhausting to get into these mindless debates with people about these things.  

I mean, most of us come from small towns or cities with rootless, degenerated populations of whites who have been conditioned their entire lives to work against their own interests and to hate their own, or, to at least not recognize any significance or importance in their own blood.  They’ve grown up eating terribly, zoned out on anxiety medications and mood stabilizers, pornography, TV sports, etc.  The normalization of every degenerate ill under the sun, from porn to media promotion of racially mixed relationships (almost always pushed and advertised using non-European males with European females) and castigating those who reject these things, as we saw with the Left’s “punch a nazi” sensation last winter, even if they do so peaceably, should tell anyone with an IQ above room temperature all they need to know about who is in the wrong and why.  Fortunately, for us, we are growing, and the opposition’s hatred for us is exactly what is helping us grow.  They’re making heroes of us and captivating the interests of young people.  In this way, its great for us.  The suffering eventually pays off.  This scares the living shit out of Joe Pancake who loves his football teams full of Africans who would otherwise hate him, his processed food, and precious porn websites.  We can only pray for them and hope they’ll come around.  If not, their loss.  

You mentioned to me that you have difficulty playing live shows due to security issues. Have any horror stories? 

Oh, yes, but it was something that in the end helped promote me!  My sales for “Diversity is our Strength” were so good after that article I was able to cover three rent checks afterward.  Anyway, this brings us back to what I said earlier about the Left and their trash media making us more appealing, especially to young people, without even realizing it.  This was around this time last year, in late June.  I was hosting some friends from the UK and was getting ready to relocate to New England so I had a lot on my plate at the time.  I went out with my friends and we had a late night of drink and conversation.  I wake up the next morning to get a barrage of what seemed to be well over a hundred text messages from friends and family telling me that I was on the front cover of the state newspaper.  Now, I was already an established local musician so I just figured it was the cover of the arts and entertainment section, so I didn’t really care.  Went back to sleep.  Woke up and a close friend sent me a photo of the copy of the paper with yours truly’s handsome mug on the cover.  Of course, they picked the worst possible picture of me they could find.  Didn’t even get my good side.  I looked like an emaciated Ian MacKaye having a mental breakdown, it was pretty bad.  Anyway, this complete cuck of a journalist – and I want to place a strong emphasis on that word because he was exactly what comes to mind when you hear that word – had written this big piece about me.  It was his first real article and on the front page, no less.  Before, he’d only been a slightly well-known local music journalist, covering only obscure indie bands in northern Delaware and Philly.  He had a friend who was in one of these bands, most of whom were radical leftists, some who were even known Antifa, and this guy had it out for a former friend of mine who appeared in that Vice documentary with Heimbach and I.  They wanted to tie in the article with the current hype about Trump, “racism” and all that ridiculous nonsense, you know.  Real typical sleazy journalism stuff.  The only trouble was, that former friend of mine was barely featured in it.  His face was shown maybe twice for probably less than two seconds and he says not a word throughout its entirety.  And he wasn’t even in the movement anyway, he left shortly after the doc came out.  Because of this, this journalist – whose name for anyone interested is Ryan Cormier – couldn’t really do much with the article.  But he knew who I was as he used to promote some of my shows for a number of years.  He already knew me and he realized that if he made it about me, since I was one of the main figures with Heimbach, that it would give him a hit piece and his friend could get the cheap kudos from other leftists and radicalized anti-white minorities in the area by attempting to somehow embarrass me.  Unfortunately for them, it didn’t.  It had the opposite effect.  But the sad part of it was that it revealed just how frighteningly brainwashed people in areas like that are.  That part got to me a little.  These are people who are your own kin.  People who grew up exactly as you did, have families that all knew each other, same class, same income brackets, same struggles, same schools, same hangouts, same dialect, same shared history.  They didn’t care about those things, though.  They cared about drinking craft beer at local punk rock shows, virtue signaling in public for social acceptance, and bad tattoos.  And almost all of them knew my politics before the article came out and never said a word to me.  Now, suddenly, like magic, they cared.  If that doesn’t tell you anything, well, I don’t know what will.  

Quite often, music is a more powerful influence on politics than most other genres of art. Why do you think that is true?

It’s the rawest appeal to the emotions.  It goes straight for the jugular.  You can almost gauge a song’s content and purpose within the first ten seconds, even without words.  I think that’s why I focus solely on traditional music.  I not only want to revive our traditional music but I also want to rail against modernity through the music itself, not just the lyrics.  Seeing it for only the lyrical content is a utilitarian view.  If that were the only reason, there would be no point.  I’m not Mr. Bond.  And this isn’t parody.  

Why is having our own music culture that reflects our movement’s ideology important? 

It is the soundtrack to our entire historical timeline.  Every people the world over makes music that is an expression of their communal [kinship].  Blood sings.  

Why is it important to you for Whites to have their own homelands? Can’t we all just get along? 

It is the natural state of things. A nation isn’t just a confined space with borders wherein a people remain citizens.  God, I hate that word.  “Citizens”.  It’s so meaningless.  A nation is not so much a state as it is a transcendental entity.  It lives and it breathes.  Blood and soil.  If you do not have this, you have nothing.  You have no culture, no protection, no commonality, no communal soul.  This is exactly why we’re under the boot of oligarchy today.  This mechanistic view of life and linear view of history.  A homeland is something special, it is yours and no one else’s, and white peoples, wherever they live, deserve their own homelands as much as anybody else.  There is to be no compromise on this either.  You either support this or you do not.  

Many journalists incredulously ask people in our movement what happened to make us the way we are, so I will ask you that question as well to avoid any possible counter-signaling from the enemy?

Living in the real world, struggling.  The Left only get it half right.  They feel the same way we do, in the beginning.  They’re frustrated, they’re angry, and rightfully so.  They should be.  They love a battle but tirelessly fight the wrong one.  They go after the wrong people.  They’re confused.  I am more interested at this point in time trying to get them over to our side.  So many eventually do anyway, its just that its harder to make some of the younger ones understand.  One thing that a lot of these young saplings and retarded anarcho raggamuffins don’t seem to know or consider is just how many of us were once in their shoes. Most of them have no idea.  I could tell you some hilarious stories, but that is for another interview.  Think of it this way: how many middle-aged antifa have you met thus far in your own life?  I rest my case.  

Besides the obvious choice of Taylor Swift, the Alt-Right goddess, what current music other than your own would you recommend for our readers?

As for music that carries our message, I would suggest 14 Sacred Words, my dear friend Jason Augustus’ project.  I would also recommend more young people get out and start playing traditional forms of music, our folk music.  I see a lot of it, fortunately, in the southern regions, among our southern nationalist friends.  I’m very grateful for a lot of what those fellas are doing.  They know who they are and where their music comes from.  

Favorite musical act of all time?

Hands down, Margaret Barry. There is no one greater.  For those who have not yet heard her, I encourage you to please give her a listen.  She had a very raw, but very beautiful voice and style.  Sometimes, on her records, you can hear her hit bum notes on her zither banjo but on she played.  There is a raw sincerity in her style and its some of the best folk music I have ever heard.  

Any advice or words of wisdom for our readers? 

Yes, for the young readers, the teens.  If your parents are leftists or Zionist neocons, don’t pay them any mind.  You are doing the right thing.  If it’s possible, help them.  Obviously, care for them.  Whatever your religion, pray for them.  But don’t worry yourself in what they’re telling you, it’s all horseshit, and you know it.  Don’t doubt yourself, even though, at your age, you will anyway.  But hold fast.  You’re in the right.  And if you’re in public school, do yourself a favor and tune those rootless vultures the fuck out.  If you must, due to the legal system, get through it, but learn a trade, something valuable that will support you.  Work to live outside the system as best you can.  Fight it.  Join other nationalists and traditionalists who share your values.  Form a tribe of like minds and to hell with the Regime.  Fuck ’em. 

Where and when can our readers see you play live in the future? 

I am hoping to be in Charlottesville in August for the Unite the Right rally but it is not entirely set in stone yet.  I don’t play live very often but that will change very soon.  

 

You can find more of Paddy’s  music at the following link: Paddy Tarleton

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8LL32ZinWQ&w=560&h=315]

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