Smelling Salts

Biography

Chapel Hill, NC-based insurgent country band Trailer Bride was led by singer/songwriter Melissa Swingle, a onetime member of the all-female trio Pussy Teeth. Following that band's demise, Swingle switched from bass to guitar, began writing songs and formed Trailer Bride Southern Gothic alt-country outfit, in 1993 with upright bassist Daryl White. Following a succession of drummers, Brad Goolsby joined the line-up, and with the addition of lead guitarist Bryon Settle, the roster was complete. T...

Chapel Hill, NC-based insurgent country band Trailer Bride was led by singer/songwriter Melissa Swingle, a onetime member of the all-female trio Pussy Teeth. Following that band's demise, Swingle switched from bass to guitar, began writing songs and formed Trailer Bride Southern Gothic alt-country outfit, in 1993 with upright bassist Daryl White. Following a succession of drummers, Brad Goolsby joined the line-up, and with the addition of lead guitarist Bryon Settle, the roster was complete.

They come from a land full of snakes, ticks, chiggers, dangerous, stultifying heat and humidity--all sorts of flying and crawling things that will bite you if you let yourself get too dreamy and unfocused. You even have to keep your eye on the plants; they have Venus fly traps and poison sumac and oak and ivy. Given such an environment, it’s no wonder that Trailer Bride move at their own pace, that their songs weave wearily and warily through the woods, and that they somehow recreate the sound of sweat rolling down a glass of iced tea, or of a vine creeping up the leg of couch left out on the porch

The Mississippi-born frontwoman picked up a taste for juju while attending missionary school in the Ivory Coast and taught herself guitar while pregnant with her daughter. Her enticing drawl beckons listeners to set a spell while she spins yarns about the ghosts in the trees. Live, she will charm you with her endearing, spastic, arrhythmic dance she does when her eyeballs are rolled up in her head and she's ripping off one of her idiot savant guitar solos.

They released four albums on the notorious "insurgent country" label, Bloodshot Records, before eventually splitting in 2004, after touring in support of their last album, "Hope is a Thing With Feathers." Lead singer-songwriter, Melissa Swingle, is currently in blues punk duo The Moaners and was featured in the BBC documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, along with Jim White and David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower and Woven Hand.
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