Call It Country. Call It Blues. Grateful Is Rock & Roll

On Grateful, Mobile’s The Red Clay Strays tear through the lines between blues, gospel, soul and Southern rock without bothering to ask where one ends and another begins.

By Elena Stevens

The first time I moved to the Gulf Coast in 2002, I was a long way from Toronto in more ways than mileage.

I knew soul music because my mother raised me on it. Motown was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. What I didn’t know was the music I started encountering once I got south: Mississippi and Louisiana blues, Cajun, Zydeco and the regional sounds that rarely made their way into my orbit growing up in Canada.

Working at a local record shop became an education. So did living there. I also spent plenty of nights going to shows in Mobile, Alabama.

More than two decades later, some of that education came rushing back while listening to Grateful, the third album from Mobile’s The Red Clay Strays.

It’s gritty. It’s bluesy. It’s raw.

And it’s just a fucking great record.

The Red Clay Strays sit somewhat outside the lane Riot + Reverie usually occupies. We spend a lot of our time in punk, alternative and independent music. On paper, a band regularly filed under country or Americana might look like an outlier.

Listen to Grateful and those distinctions start feeling pretty useless.

There’s country here, certainly. But there’s also Southern rock, soul, blues and gospel. More importantly, there’s rock & roll, the sweaty, imperfect kind that sounds like it came from human beings occupying the same room rather than musicians individually dropped onto a grid.

Produced by Dave Cobb, Grateful was recorded between Cobb’s home studio in Savannah and the historic RCA Studio A in Nashville. The six members of The Red Clay Strays spent the sessions workshopping ideas and, at times, writing collectively in the room.

You can hear that chemistry in the finished record. The songs feel lived-in and instinctive, with the musicians responding to one another rather than sounding like individual parts assembled after the fact.

Nothing about Grateful feels particularly interested in being pristine.

Brandon Coleman’s voice is a large reason why.

Coleman doesn’t so much glide through these songs as wrestle with them. There’s soul in his voice, but there’s strain too. At times he sounds like a preacher. At others, like the guy who probably shouldn’t have stayed at the bar for one more drink the night before church.

That tension runs throughout Grateful.

Sacred and profane. Faith and doubt. Saturday night and Sunday morning.

If you’ve spent enough time along the Gulf Coast, that contradiction doesn’t feel particularly contradictory. It feels familiar.

Gospel and blues have never existed particularly far apart, nor have country, soul and rock & roll. The lines we draw between them often become considerably cleaner once the music leaves the places that created it.

The Red Clay Strays seem perfectly comfortable making those lines messy again.

Across 11 tracks, Grateful moves through that territory without sounding like six guys raiding a Southern music history book for references. There’s a difference between wearing an influence and sounding like you actually understand it.

The band understands it.

That sense of place matters because Grateful never sounds like an exercise in nostalgia. The Red Clay Strays aren’t trying to recreate some idealized version of Southern music. They’re pulling from traditions that have always overlapped and making something that feels immediate.

The timing is fitting. The band is currently in the middle of its Grateful Tour ’26, with The Revivalists joining them on select dates, alongside guests including Sierra Ferrell, Brent Cobb, Travis Tritt and Muscadine Bloodline.

And back home, something even bigger is waiting. On March 26, 2027, The Red Clay Strays will return to Mobile to headline the first live concert at the new 10,000-capacity Regions Arena, with St. Paul & The Broken Bones supporting.

There’s something fitting about a band this rooted in where it came from being tapped to open a new hometown arena.

But the scale of what’s happening around The Red Clay Strays shouldn’t overshadow what makes Grateful work.

There’s an atmosphere to this record.

Cobb’s production gives the songs room to breathe without cleaning the dirt from underneath their fingernails. That dirt matters. So does the gospel running through the record.

Faith here feels less like decoration and more like part of the architecture. It sits alongside temptation, regret, gratitude and survival. The record doesn’t pretend those things exist separately.

Neither does the music.

What exactly makes something a rock & roll record anymore?

I s it distortion? Guitars? Volume?

Or is it something less easily measured?

Maybe it’s danger. Sweat. Soul. Imperfection. A singer pushing his voice until you can hear the edges of it. A band reacting to one another instead of simply executing individual parts.

By that definition, Grateful is a rock & roll record.

A damn good one.

And perhaps that’s why a record that initially seemed outside Riot + Reverie’s usual orbit ultimately made perfect sense for us to cover.

Good music has a habit of making genre arguments feel stupid.

More than two decades after I first landed on the Gulf Coast and started learning just how much music I didn’t know, Grateful managed to remind me of that all over again.