You Can’t Stop the Queer South is Them’s series spotlighting LGBTQ+ voices of resistance and resilience in the American South, created with guest editor adrienne maree brown. In the time since producing these stories, Hurricane Helene has devastated areas across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia, with nearly 200 dead, a million without power, and countless homes destroyed or displaced. We ask readers to support on-the-ground relief efforts however possible. See our Hurricane Helene relief resource guide to learn how you can help.
Clover-Lynn had been living out West doing the typical “trans woman in the tech industry” thing, when, on a visit home to rural Virginia for Thanksgiving in 2019, she stopped by her local music store and purchased a banjo.
With jet-black hair and heavy, black eyeliner and large, black platform combat boots, Clover-Lynn doesn’t look like the kind of girl who would casually pick up the instrument. And Franklin County, where she’s from, isn’t the kind of place you would expect to meet a goth trans woman. It’s a Bible-Belt region known for a history of illegal moonshining and more recently for “Trump Town,” a 24-hour shrine to the former president that sits on a prominent highway intersection where you can buy “Trump ice cream” and pose side-by-side with life-size cutouts of the politician.
Nonetheless, after four years away, Clover-Lynn moved back to Appalachia in 2020. More than anything, it was the music — particularly bluegrass and old time — that drew her back. After all, the 27-year-old artist had grown up listening to the likes of the Stanley Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs on her granny and papa’s records. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, this part of Virginia where Clover’s family has lived for over 200 years is considered by some “the birthplace of country music.”
For Clover, this was not just a homecoming. It was a reckoning.
Within a year of her return, she began to post short videos of herself online playing the banjo. For a small-town girl, her “Hillbilly Gothic” TikTok account quickly amassed an impressive following, with millions of people engaging with her and her music. In her videos, the musician can be seen wearing all-black clothes, playing the banjo, throwing back cans of Dr. Pepper, and sometimes speaking directly to the camera about issues such as the boundaries of Appalachia or the war in Gaza. But Hillbilly Gothic, Clover tells me, is more than just an online presence. It is a way of reconciling disparate elements of her identity. “It started just as a way for me to combine two big parts of my life,” she tells me. “Growing up in Southwest Virginia, and the gothic.”
With her band the Laurel Hells Ramblers, now reimagined as Clover-Lynn and the Hellfires, she builds on a history of what is known as string band music — songs performed on all-acoustic instruments such as the guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and banjo, often accompanying dancing. But what would it sound like to make this music more goth, more queer? By merging alternative subcultures with traditional music, Clover-Lynn seeks to refashion the stereotypical sounds and images of Appalachian music.
To most outsiders, Appalachia calls to mind poor, white, rural communities and the sounds of country and bluegrass — stereotypically “hick” aesthetics, which to many simply means “white.” But that’s not the full story. Pierceton Hobbs, a fellow queer musician and former bandmate of Clover’s from Dickinson County, Virginia, tells me that the region’s musical traditions are a melting pot. “When I got older and started to learn more about Appalachian music,” Hobbs says, “I started to realize a lot of the music — the repertoire — of folks who live here comes from Black people.”
William Isom II, director of the organization Black in Appalachia, says that recognizing the Black roots of the region’s music can be revelatory. “[It] means we were, and have been, in this geography, not only operating as nameless labor but living full lives with art, love, and thought throughout the past 250 or so years.” This story can be traced in the instruments and playing styles themselves. At The Blue Ridge Music Center, a National Parks Service site in Galax, Virginia on the Blue Ridge Parkway, visitors can learn how the banjo evolved from a stringed instrument brought to North America by enslaved Africans and how Black musicians innovated the fiddle techniques that became integral to the region’s distinctive sound.
Yet by the mid-twentieth century, when Clover’s grandparents were coming up in Southwest Virginia, the “look” of traditional music had become predominantly white. For many Americans, Black contributions to country music would long be forgotten — until perhaps projects like Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter album that have sought to restore and uplift country music’s Black history, including by platforming Black Appalachian artists like Rhiannon Giddens.
Clover tells me that seeing Giddens perform for the first time helped her to realize this was “a musical genre that could take you beyond just the hyperlocal in Southwest Virginia.” That there might be a place for a goth girl in the traditional music scene, too.
Yet growing up, Clover felt another yawning discordance between herself and the expectations of her Baptist church-attending family and local community: she wasn’t a boy.
In the song “Daddy’s First Son (Oh),” recorded with the Laurel Hells Ramblers, she sings of a “prodigal son” raised on “old Baptist hymns.” In this track, Clover sings of having to kill off that “boy” part of herself: “He didn’t beg for his life / He just sat there starin’ / As I plunged in that knife.” In the final stanza, she turns to her father, asking, “Oh, tell me daddy / Can you ever forgive / the death of your son / so your daughter can live?”
Clover-Lynn calls it “a traditional Appalachian murder ballad from the perspective of the killer, but the killer and the victim are one.” She continues, “It is perhaps the most country goth queer song that could have ever been written.”
One recent humid summer evening, Clover-Lynn fulfilled a lifelong dream: performing on the stage at the Floyd Country Store in Southwest Virginia. This venue is an important center for traditional music and dance, hosting a Friday night jamboree every weekend since the 1980s. Clover recalls how, as a teenager, she would go there to watch the musicians play, yet she could not imagine herself ever standing up on that stage as a goth trans woman.
Beyond merely being an aesthetic, the gothic is essential to Clover-Lynn’s art. It is an encompassing approach to making music, both in sound and performance. With the Laurel Hells Ramblers, she made music billed as “gothic mountain bluegrass.” Deirdre Price, guitarist for the Ramblers, says that “the gothic is really good at putting a language to things that are usually unspeakable, things that are taboo.”
To achieve that gothic sound, the Ramblers often transpose traditional songs, like “John Brown’s Dream” or “Cripple Creek,” changing them from a major to a minor key. This makes the songs sound darker, eerier, and more foreboding.
“The way I was raised in Southwest Virginia was very Christian, very Baptist,” Clover-Lynn tells me. “I think the gothic, and specifically trans gothic, is almost a response to the very Puritanical values that were part of my upbringing.”
In a region dominated by political conservatism, the traditional music scene can provide a unique space of inclusion for some queer people, Price says. “You might go into a room with somebody who has opinions about a group of people in an ambiguous way, like, ‘I think this about gay people.’ And then you’re playing music with them, and they’re like ‘I like your playing.’”
For Clover-Lynn, her musicality has been a way of opening up conversations across these differences. At a music jam one evening, an older man known for his conservative views pulled her aside. He said, “Hey, I’m not trying to out you, but I know you’re trans.” What he said next surprised her. “If you ever have issues getting your hormones or anything like that, you just let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to help you.”
On TikTok, Clover-Lynn’s most popular videos are the ones that feature a split-screen. On the right side, she’ll replay a video of an angry man on a misogynistic verbal tirade. On the left, we see this goth trans country girl with a banjo magically appearing in her hands. Just as the man begins his rant, Clover starts strumming a loud, twangy riff to drown out his message.
“Anytime I’m covering up someone in these videos they have been people who just say extremely egregious things about women,” she explains. “Discussion only works up to a point.”
But the real work of these videos, Clover tells me, is to showcase the power of Appalachian women and Appalachian music. There is a power in putting herself into spaces, musical and otherwise, that have been traditionally dominated by white cisgender men. Price explains that Clover’s audiences include “people who are interested in the answers to big questions” about identity and belonging in Appalachia. “Whether they are interested because they are queer or marginalized,” they are able to find a home in Clover’s weird marriage of the traditional and the alternative.
“My music has always been, and will always be, for rural queer people who feel like they don’t belong in their own home,” Clover tells me.
“But we do belong,” she adds. “This is where we’re from.”
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