Elam McKnight and Lil*Bit 

The Walter Gray Starnes Album is six generations in the making, stretching back to the turn of the 20th century. 

I wrote and recorded most of the album in the summer of 200x. 

I'd always wanted to do a project about my great grandfather Walter Gray Starnes, but every time I wrote a song, it came out uncooked, somehow not right. 

Then in June, one song hit me  - Somebody's Blocking My Road. I knew I'd hit a nerve, and once it came out, the others followed. I went to Nashville and recorded x songs with just me on guitar. At the time, that seemed the way to go. 

I knew I needed a few more songs to make an album, and then the pandemic hit. 

My daughter and I were cooped up in the house for months. I shared the stories of her great great grandparents, and we started doing a live show online to give us something to do together and connect with the world outside - mostly covers and some of my originals. Then one day, she came to me with a song of her own. That's when I knew I had the missing layer, and it was no longer my project but ours. 

This album is the culmination of six generations of storytellers passing down the history of a family who lived hard, loved hard, drank hard, and still managed to pull together and find the sunshine despite the gray skies.