"the guy who taught me to write songs"  Justin Townes Earle

SCOTTY MELTON is a troubadour. A poet. A philosopher. In his own words, "Just a bum folksinger." More than anything, he's a truth-teller, a writer who wouldn't even know what to do with a lie. He's a man who looks in the mirror of his soul and sees not just the littered rear-view, but the ravaged inner-view, then - unflinchingly and without apology - puts it into song, his Haunting Demons singing back-up, his Better Angels taking alternate, if fleeting, solos. 

Based out of Johnson City, in the mountains of East Tennessee, Melton's career - like the Smokeys - has also had peaks and valleys. He co-wrote three of the songs on the above-mentioned Justin Townes Earle's ground-breaking debut The Good Life, helping to nudge Earle out of the shadow of his legendary father, Steve Earle. He also co-wrote (again, with the younger Earle), "Roger's Park," featured on JTE's award-winning Harlem River Blues. He's toured with the likes of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Malcolm Holcomb, and Steve Young, all artists and poets who occupy that higher plain of the vocation, beyond craft and language - the songwriters other songwriters dream of being. 
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In the sad tradition of so many of his heroes and mentors, he's also battled drug and alcohol addiction, and suffered heartbreaking tragedy. Through it all, he's written and played and recorded, the Dream and the Hope still alive, yet taking a backseat to the simple overriding drive to ponder and pontificate, to write as both participant and observer, to explore every nook and cranny of psyche and circumstance along the way. 

Truth is a raw thing, concerned with neither perspective nor appearance, without pride or prejudice. Scotty Melton's songs embody both the beauty and the pain, giving truth free reign to do anything but hide.  

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