“I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he says, his voice still filled with remorse. Jelly says when he was 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult. “I always knew that the music was my only chance because I knew the way that people in the community responded to it that it could be big,” he says. Customers who bought quarter ounces of cocaine also got a free mixtape of his raps. Still, he never abandoned music entirely. “When he left, I was like, ‘Somebody’s got to do what he was doing, at least trying to figure out some money.’ ” I think that’s what really did it, too,” he adds, in terms of why he turned to crime. “I told my dad before he died, ‘I wonder, if I’d have moved in with you when you divorced, if I’d have went to Vanderbilt or something.’ But I felt this need to take care of my mother back then. His parents divorced when he was 13, and Jelly felt responsible for his mother, who suffered from mental health and substance abuse issues. Jelly has three older half-siblings, but he’s the only child from his parents’ union, which he says was his father’s fifth or sixth. “I wanted to be the guy getting money, not the guy losing it.” “As f–ked up as this may sound, there were drug dealers and drug users,” he says. Everyone around him had a hustle - even his father, who ran a wholesale meat business, was a bookie on the side - and he wanted one of his own. Eric Ryan Andersonīut his love of music couldn’t keep him out of trouble. Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Rolex watch. “We had a dude who had a rolling keyboard and he’d make beats.” “There was a place in Antioch that would let us cut demos for like 30 bucks an hour,” he says. He wrote his first rap when he was 9 or 10, and by the time he was in eighth grade, he was passing out mixtapes of his music in the high school parking lot. Music was his way out - it just took him decades to get here. Emblazoned across his forehead, Jelly’s latest tattoo describes who he is now: “Music Man.” On his left cheek, there’s an apple core, an homage to some of his die-hard fans who call themselves the Bad Apples. His hair has grown over his 15-year-old daughter Bailee’s name, but it’s there, too. There’s a heart with a lock, a rose, three crosses and a tear drop. Much of Jelly’s own truth is written in ink on his face. “That’s what country is, anyway, right? Three chords and the solid truth,” says Jelly, paraphrasing legendary songwriter Howard Harlan’s oft-quoted description of a good country song. As he sings on “Save Me”: “I’m a lost cause/Baby don’t waste your time on me/I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and dreams.” On the gut-wrenchingly raw Whitsitt Chapel, out June 2 on Bailee & Buddy/Stoney Creek Records/BMG, Jelly relives his search for refuge and redemption in a world where sinners outnumber saints and hell often feels closer than heaven. But he still struggles to reconcile that hopeless past with his prosperous present and seemingly limitless future. Jelly (whose mother christened him with the nickname when he was little) has risen from the streets of Antioch to the upper reaches of Billboard’s rap, rock and now country charts, and even played the revered Grand Ole Opry. “It’s the f–king wildest story ever to me - maybe because I’m the one f–king in the middle of it - but that sh-t’s crazy.” The 38-year-old - now better known as the inspirational, tattoo-covered artist Jelly Roll - recently returned to the church for the first time in decades. “I got baptized in here some 20 years ago and have since done nothing but go to prison, treat a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, go on to be a f–king multimillionaire and help as many people as I possibly can,” says DeFord today, a hint of awe in his voice as he sits in a red upholstered pew at Whitsitt Chapel. For the next decade, DeFord cycled in and out of juvenile and then adult correctional facilities for crimes ranging from aggravated robbery to drug dealing. By the end of that year, he was incarcerated for the first, but not the last, time. In January 1999, one month after he turned 14, Jason DeFord was baptized by full immersion at Whitsitt Chapel Baptist Church in Antioch, Tenn. Jelly Roll: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
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