Grace Rogers is a musician, poet, and essayist from Owingsville, KY. She grew up in the eastern Kentucky old time music community and has been playing traditional Kentucky music and writing songs since childhood. She moved to Louisville in 2017 to attend the University of Louisville where she earned a BA in English. Currently, she is a Charlie Whitaker Memorial Apprentice under east Kentucky banjo player John Haywood and is also a 2023 archival fellow at the Berea College studying the banjo music of Magoffin County, KY. Grace performs in an old-time and singer-songwriter duo with fiddler Blakeley Burger.
In January 2023, she released the EP Cowpocalypse on the Louisville label Obsolete Staircases. The project was a collaboration with Tyler Termini of ATOMO. The project was written and recorded in 2020 inspired shortly after a bout of widespread, destructive flooding in Estill, Powell, Lee, and Wolfe Counties in 2019.
We had to ask, what is a Cowpocalypse? Grace explains:
"COWPOCALYPSE is monoculture of the mind. It is the touchy feely side of the (maybe already happening) apocalypse of industrial agriculture, environmental destruction, food apartheid, and floodwaters in Kentucky. It is the shit-water left behind after the industrial massacre of the landscape. COWPOCALYPSE is a feeling—namely the feeling of being in north eastern Kentucky in 2019–before the big flood and before COVID, trying to imagine what it might feel like in the future (aka now). COWPOCALYPSE is not dejected, is not anti-agriculture, and is not anti-cow. It is rooted in the undeniable, intuitive feeling that we will hold each other up through what is here and what is coming. And we will do so singing."
Check out her new EP below.
