How the three lives of Jelly Roll's 'Save Me' changed his life, country's pop future
In the four years since Nashville's Jelly Roll released the bluesy country ballad "Save Me," the genre's revival has grown alongside his pop stardom.
Over the past three months, 2024 Country Music Association Awards Entertainer of the Year nominee Jelly Roll has filled roughly 60 venues to their capacity while touring his latest album, "Beautifully Broken."
At the end of each concert, a house frame is set ablaze with the performer inside. A gush of water falls from the ceiling and the house stops burning. Each time, the Nashville's native's neighborhood is metaphorically baptized anew.
The song he sings during that moment is "Save Me." And though Jelly Roll is up for the the most vaunted award at Wednesday night's CMA Awards, Entertainer of the Year isn't the category he'd most like to win this year.
"Lainey Wilson and I for 'Save Me,' for 'Musical Event of the Year," he told The Tennessean, part of the Paste BN Network. "It'd be like 'Musical Event of a Lifetime' because it's changed my whole life three times."
In four years, the ballad of broken souls "damaged beyond repair" has moved from being a Music City industry outlier to a globally beloved classic, connecting with artists ranging from Wilson to rap legend Eminem.
Interviews with Jelly Roll's lifelong friend and "Save Me" co-writer David Ray, BMG's president of Frontline Recordings for The Americas, Jon Loba, BMG Nashville's executive vice president of recorded music, JoJamie Hahr and Wilson, the reigning Entertainer of the Year, reveal how the song has impacted them, too.
The recording of 'Save Me'
Jelly Roll struck a distribution deal with BMG Nashville while working on his Oct. 2020-released album "Self-Medicated."
On the last day of that album's 17-day recording run between May and June 2020 in Nashville, Ray recalls sitting in a corner while playing the guitar riff and singing the chorus that would eventually evolve into "Save Me."
"Somebody save me...save me from myself," is all Ray had. Jelly Roll, who was scrolling through messages on his cell phone in the studio, stopped immediately.
The friends stared astonished at each other. They immediately commenced quickly writing and composing it into a bluesy, near-dirge of a ballad. It was a vast departure from any other track the duo had worked on together over 20 years. It was recorded the same day, June 3, 2020.
Two weeks later, on June 16, Jelly Roll excitedly called Ray with a proposition as the Nashville area native, songwriter and construction company owner was on his tractor mowing the grass on his 30-acre property in Dickson, Tennessee, an hour west of Music City.
"I went from bush-hogging my property to grabbing my acoustic guitar and being at the music video shoot for 'Save Me' at Sound Emporium within an hour," says Ray.
"This one is a little bit of a curveball for me. I don't usually do these stripped-down acoustic videos, but writing this song made me feel something and I felt y'all needed some insight into the more vulnerable side of the music business," Jelly Roll wrote in file's description as he posted the video he recorded for his millions of hyper-engaged YouTube followers.
Rap roots connect Jelly Roll, Eminem
The roots of "Save Me," stretch much further back for Jelly Roll, who was arrested in the ninth grade for dealing drugs at a high school (and two dozen times after) and was incarcerated when he learned of the birth of his daughter Bailee Ann.
They go back 20 years to the Outer Limits nightclub.
Freestyle rap battles further popularized by the Eminem movie "8 Mile" were frequent there. Still-active rappers gaining regional and national renown in the era, like Haystak, took notice of Jelly Roll's talents.
"Jelly was the best rapper," Ray recalled. "Nobody could beat him. He was the freestyle king around here."
Upon the release of Eminem's "Save Me"-sampling "Somebody Save Me," Jelly Roll offered the following via social media.
"As a teenager (and still today), I could recite every song on the 'Slim Shady' album, the 'Marshal Mathers' album and the 'Eminem Show.' When I bonded out of jail at 17 years old and was sneaking into cyphers and battles in Nashville, they would also play the 'Lose Yourself' beat when I came out on stage at the freestyle battles. I related to every word Eminem wrote. I understand him and felt like he understood me, which was rare cause I spent most of my life feeling misunderstood."
Ray said Eminem's sampling of the track was a moment of validation for a couple of guys "who, for years, bought every one of his CDs and remained inspired by them to figure out how to make it in the music industry."
How Jelly Roll developed his voice
As an artist, "Save Me" represents Jelly Roll's evolution from a braggadocious battle emcee to America's favorite gospel blues crooner.
For longtime fans of his artistry, falsetto vocals in his songs are a familiar and beloved part of his early work. It's a similar adoration to his "Waylon and Willie" mixtape partner and close confidant Struggle Jennings growling in a hoarse baritone.
Ray recalls meeting Jelly Roll when, as impoverished independent and underground rappers, their shared tastes for artists including Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, among many artists, offered a glimpse of the emotional ranges to which he'd someday be willing to gravitate.
He has done just that, finding a more lucrative career as a rapper-turned-crooner with influences in a multitude of genres.
Wilson talks 'Save Me'
By 2023, "Save Me" was already an undeniable hit. Alongside his 2021 "Ballads of the Broken" album singles "Dead Man Walking" and "Son of A Sinner," it represented five million singles sold.
Re-cutting "Save Me" as a duet with Wilson was a stunning move.
The song's bluesy vibe and exudes the two vocalists' growing confidence and maturity amid their shared rise to country stardom.
"'Save Me' works as a duet because even though Jelly and I come from two different walks of life — I'm a little country girl from Baskin, Louisiana and he's this rough around the edges city guy from Nashville with tattoos on his face," Wilson said. "But the magic happens in that song because we're humans, first, we speak because we have something to say, second."
The shared pain of embracing trauma creates an obvious connective tie to country's fans. Alongside "Save Me," Wilson worked with HARDY on 2022's similarly dark and melancholic murder ballad "wait in the truck."
However, Jelly Roll and Wilson have achieved incredible boosts in stardom since their "Save Me" duet's release. Thus, the song represents a deeper tie. The tandem aren't just heroes shouldering the world's sadness. Instead, they're seen as advocates for healed people reveling in the joy of an unexpected lifeline to something more.
"Women have always worn the shoes that song describes but hadn't heard themselves sing that type of song in country music in a long time," she said. "Hearing me on that song pulled them into a story they believed they needed to see themselves in how it finished."
A 'unique, beautiful power'
"Save Me" isn't the only country song that's achieved three "lifetimes" in modern musical history.
The Don Schlitz-penned "The Gambler" was two years old before Bobby Bare recorded it in Oct. 1977. Then, Schlitz himself cut it in March 1978. Kenny Rogers, for whom the song became a classic, cut it in Oct. 1978, only a month before Johnny Cash did.
Bare's version didn't chart. Schlitz's version hit No. 65. Rogers used the hit to become a Grammy-winning and pop-crossover country chart-topper.
"Tennessee Whiskey" was recorded by David Allan Coe in 1981. That version peaked at No. 77 on the country charts. By Aug. 1983, the version of the song that George Jones cut in the same Sound Emporium Studios where Jelly Roll first recorded "Save Me" was released. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in three months.
In 2015, Chris Stapleton performed the R&B-styled version of "Tennessee Whiskey he'd released earlier that year on his star-making album "Traveller" at the CMA Awards as a duet with Justin Timberlake. Within less than six months of that performance, it was a platinum-selling chart-topper. Fast forward a decade and it's an over 14-time platinum-selling career and genre-redefining track.
In 2020, "Save Me" emerged as a fever dream of a solo album cut. It then platformed and cemented Jelly Roll and Wilson's rise to stardom three years later. In 2024, when rap and pop legend Eminem needed a final track for his rumored 12th and final album, "The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)," "Somebody Save Me" emerged. Though performed primarily by Eminem, the song's chorus is sampled from "Save Me."
"Regardless of its subject matter, ("Save Me") is a special, relatable and universal song that has already connected with many people. In every incarnation, the song has the unique, beautiful power to absorb its vocalist's and listener's pain," said BMG president Loba.
Eminem gets on board
Loba excitedly recalled receiving word from Eminem's team that the hip-hop legend wanted to use a sample of "Save Me" on his final album.
Jelly Roll and Eminem's longtime manager, Paul Rosenberg, had been in talks for some time before the eventual recording of "Somebody Save Me," Ray said.
After signing a publishing deal with Warner Chappell, B.J. Hill, their senior vice president of A&R, advised Ray that Interscope Records (the label to which Eminem is signed) would be emailing him. While in a songwriting session, he received word that Eminem needed Ray's okay to proceed with the sample he intended to use for his track.
"My high expectations for what the song could be were positively met. Like hearing Lainey's version, hearing Eminem's take reduced me to chills and tears," Loba said.
"Sometimes, a great cover song can capture the original version's magic," he said. "But this rare song compounds and amplifies the previous version."
Jelly Roll said he was brought to tears when he learned Eminem would sampling the song "to discuss the other side of what could've happened if he would've allowed his demons to win."
BMG Nashville's executive vice president of recorded music, JoJamie Hahr said "Save Me" allowed Jelly Roll to grow from a personable country outsider to an honest, certifiable superstar able to "push country music's envelope by saying big, scary things that everyone feels but are afraid to say."
To Hahr, Jelly Roll's stardom represents how country's modern era has aesthetically and sonically evolved from "polished" artists like Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw to artists like Jelly Roll and Luke Combs, among many whose blue-collar edginess makes them entertainingly approachable.
"Real people are singing about real problems," says Hahr flatly.
'A deal I made with God...'
"If it doesn't feel right, Jelly doesn't do it," said Ray when asked why Jelly Roll has allowed "Save Me" to have so many incarnations.
"Jelly Roll's still all heart," he said. "And because he's all heart and his career goals never had a plan B, he worked himself to a place where his (aspirations) became his destiny."
Asked the same question, Jelly Roll goes back to his troubled youth spent in and out of incarceration.
"My musical career and the rest of my life was built upon a deal I made with God while sitting at rock bottom and afraid that, even if things improved, I wouldn't know how to handle success," he said. "I told him I'd ... blown every opportunity I'd ever been given. I promised that if things ever got better, I'd give him credit and do right at every opportunity."
He said: "Moments like 'Save Me' are me honoring my end of the deal I made with God."