Hope is home for a 2026 Grammy Winner by the name of Jimmy Matt Rowland, who lived here up to the point he finished elementary school, a grandson of legendary founder of what became University of Arkansas Hope Texarkana, J.W. Rowe.  

He is part of The Food Stamps, the band that plays with Tyler Childers on recordings and on tour, contributing as a backup vocalist and on multiple instruments.  When Childers’ song “Bitin’ List” won the 2026 Best Country Song Grammy at last Sunday’s ceremony, Rowland came on stage to stand behind fellow band member Jesse Welles as Welles accepted the Grammy on Childers’ behalf.  The band, with Rowland included, also played on the song by Childers nominated for Best Country Solo Performance, “Nose on the Grindstone.”  (Childers’ and Margo Price’s “Love Me Like You Used To” was nominated for Best Country Duo/Group Performance.)

In the decades before this week, Rowland has learned his skills and built a career as a studio and road musician, recording with such acts as Ladycouch and Brent Cobb.  He also has released an album of atmospheric and heartfelt instrumentals under the non de plume Grampa Patches. He said he is especially proud of his work on Cobb’s 2023 Southern Star album. 

We spoke with Rowland last Wednesday afternoon after he and wife Olivia’s return to Hope from Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles where the Grammy Awards ceremony took place Sunday.

SWARK.Today: I want to get to the immediate. What has happened as of the past several days? What has all this been like for you?

Jimmy Matt Rowland:   It's a little bit overwhelming. I'm not used to being fancy. I'm used to being on stages, but I'm not used to being at the ball. The stage part wasn't the problem. It’s just being surrounded by so many pretty people and tuxes and stuff.  I wore Carhartts and jeans on stage when we played the White House last year. Other than that, it was … it was a lot, but yeah, it was good. And it was great to be recognized.

SWARK.Today:  To go back a little further, hearing about the nominations must have been something too. What were your emotions then?

Rowland: I always think, “Oh, we're going to lose, you know.  Jelly Roll’s gonna beat us. Zach Top is gonna beat us.”  I hate competition. You know, if I would have been more competitive, I'd  have been a baseball player.

SWARK.Today:  It’s almost obscene when it comes to this work.

Rowland: Yeah, I know. And it's like Joseph Campbell says, Beethoven doesn't ask you to throw away Mozart. We turn it into this super competitive thing. And I understand what that's for.

SWARK.Today:  It's about marketing. 

Rowland: That is what the Grammys are about. It's a record push. That's inside baseball but to get recognized for the work is amazing. And Tyler is an incredible writer. If you're into American literature, this dude has words. He's like Mark Twain. 

SWARK.Today: Very much so.  I think of the confessional poets Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton …

Rowland: In today's world, the audience wants songwriters to be talking about their personal lives. And Tyler's done that really well.  On this record [2025’s Snipe Hunter], there's songs about watching out for snakes and bears when you're out in the woods looking for mushrooms. It's a song about mushroom hunting with his kid. But at the same time, I think that there might be a future where he would like to write more fiction, because it's fun.  It's fun to imagine things and expand. … You can write a cheating song and stay true to your wife. He's just such a family person. And the whole band is, and it's a wonderful family that I've gotten myself involved in.

SWARK.Today: Hearing that name called for Best Country song at the Premiere Ceremony, that had to be an amazing experience. Was it a surprise? 

Rowland:  We had already lost two of them, and then it was the third one.  It kind of surprised me. When [presenter] Sierra Hull called our name, I jumped out of my seat, and I ran to the front. And Leland Sklar was in the band and they’re playing “Chattahoochee.” I don't think we'll ever listen to “Chattahoochee” the same way.

SWARK.Today: And “Bitin’ List” was the one that won.  Kind of an unusual song for Tyler Childers.

Rowland: To win on that! I think it's a funny song.  Tyler and I both, one of the things we bonded over, among 1,000 things when I got the gig--was Ray Stevens. Tyler appreciates that. “If I ever get rabies, you're number one.”  He’ll talk about it live. And it says something about the way society is right now.

SWARK.Today: What was your particular addition to that song?

Rowland:  I played vocoder on it. So I'm singing [through] synthesizers. I did a lot of the vocal arranging. We've got two keyboard players, and the other, Kory [Caudil], he played organ on it, and I just played some rhythm and sang vocoder on the choruses, which is fun. I did that a lot on this record. It's one thing to play my little piano, but it's another thing to sing Tyler's words.  In my experience of being in Nashville the last 25 years, the easy part of music is the music. The hard part of music is saying something and saying it in an artful way.

[Tyler Childers] has got a great blend of both of those. The music doesn't have to be rocket science. That's what's great about country music. It's simple. Granted, it's also deceptively hard because you have to play this simple music as perfect as can be. But because the music is so simple and perfect the lyrics can be where the where the fun’s at.

SWARK.Today: I want to go back to the very beginning, your being in in Hope, growing up in Hope. How did you come to music? 

Rowland:  One grandfather [Jimmy Rowland] was the mayor of Fulton. My other grandfather was the director of the vo-tech school, J.W. Rowe. That’s my mom's family.  They lived in that house right next to the college.  So after church, my group of cousins would all go over to grandma and granddaddy’s and eat lunch.  Grandmother [Janis Rowe] was a pretty great musician. They were like the OG Beverly Hillbillies. They were in South Central Arkansas, but they struck oil during the Depression, and it got them some bread, some money. So she was able to go to the University of Arkansas in the 40s. She was one of the first women to graduate. I didn't realize till just a few years ago that she was a bassoon major. She was a multi-instrumentalist, so she had a piano and organ in the house and played a lot.  One day somebody taught somebody “Chopsticks.”  I was in first or second grade. This would have been 1990, maybe a little earlier. And then “Body and Soul.” Then one day, pretty soon afterwards, we lived on Rosston Road, and a piano just appeared in our house. Mom said “You're going to start taking lessons. You have an aptitude.” I started taking lessons from Jonathan Bradford who’s still around. When I look back at learning the rudiments of music as a second or third grader, it was pretty instant. That was my experience. I just really took to it.

SWARK.Today: And then did you go to Yerger?

Rowland:  We left in 94 when I was in a rising seventh grader. So I would have gone to Yerger, but I barely missed it.  I went to Edith Brown just like our president, and I was one of the last classes that went there. Wendell [McCorkle] was principal and Wendell’s a great piano player.

SWARK.Today: I know he's a wonderful florist.

Rowland:  He plays at United Methodist Church that’s in the Episcopal church now.  One of my favorite things when we were in elementary school was when one day a year during Christmas, he played Christmas carols.  I think about my early piano influences.  Other than Mr. Bradford, you’ve got Wendell and then Betty Moore, [First Baptist Church Pastor] Daniel Bramlett's grandmother. Me and Daniel got baptized on the same day and now we're neighbors and just old friends. As soon as we got saved and baptized, we were there on the front row, right in front of the piano, taking notes. I did fifth and sixth grades at Beryl Henry when Clinton Primary started.  Then we left and moved to Tennessee.

Hope punches above its weight, musically, in a subtle way. Clinton and Huckabee are both known as musicians. That's not like Obama playing basketball. He's not playing guitar.

SWARK.Today: He does the occasional Al Green song.  I’d buy that album.

Rowland:  Clinton was on the Arsenio Hall Show playing.  Mike's a great bass player. 

SWARK.Today: And you’ve got Joe Purvis who’s just an excellent singer and personality, too.

Rowland: And Jack Daniels is a great piano player I’ve become acquainted with. I wore a bolo tie that was his dad's on the Grammy’s stage. I needed to borrow one and his daughter, Katie [Daniels Montgomery] has become good friends with my wife. So I was wearing Jack's bolo tie up there in Los Angeles, and honored to do so.

He's been in Nashville a lot, and he knows how it works. He's training a lot of kids, teaching them theory and stuff. And it's actual practical things. I think music is something that anybody should try to get into.

SWARK.Today: There are some of us who are mere listeners.

Rowland: I wish I was just a listener. It has not been easy. I'm not a spring chicken. I'm 43 years old and I'm just now starting to get mine. People are broke.  Now you’ve got to go be an electrician. AI can't do that. Or be a plumber.

Real creativity comes from an organic place.  It comes from the Divine and--.

SWARK.Today: And suffering. 

Rowland: Yes, exactly. I don't think that AI has suffered enough to have the blues, to write good country music. It can't be George Jones.

SWARK.Today: I'll tell you a connection I make with one of the cuts on your Grampa Patches album Pandemia (2023). I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, he made this with electronics and it’s very clearly a computer-assisted thing.’ But there was a voice in there that reminded me of Eric Clapton's solo in Cream’s “Sunshine of My Love.”  There's a vulnerability about that solo that almost gives me tears to hear. And I heard that at the end of your instrumental “Big Beat of Corona Pt. 5.”

Rowland: Thank you, Jeff. I think you're about the third person that heard it.

SWARK.Today:  It’s sort of crying as it sings. And that got me.

Rowland: I made all that stuff during the pandemic. I didn't work and I had these two little kids that I was homeschooling. I wasn't teaching them music. I was teaching them math and English and who Jesus was, and all of the important things during that time, since I wasn't playing, I didn't have any gigs, I wasn't trying to work, and I really couldn't, because there's some immunocompromised things going on.  While I was doing that, I would get home from teaching, and just have a fire to make music, and because there's a lot of emotions going on of losing music and thinking I'm never going to travel the world doing this again. There's a lot of grief and I think a lot of people were going through that at the time.

SWARK.Today: To go back to your childhood, where did you all move to in Tennessee?

Rowland:  We moved to around Knoxville and Oak Ridge, which is where they enriched all the uranium for the bomb. Secret City Manhattan Project.  It was great. I got an incredible education. I never wanted to leave. It wasn't my decision. It's depressing, but it ended up being really great. I locked myself in the basement for a couple of years and played Beatles songs on the guitar. I found a guitar when we were moving, and I was like “Maybe I can do this.” I would have been like, 12 or 13.  I ended up with an incredible piano teacher there, this Italian lady that her father was a opera conductor at La Scala.  The only way I was allowed to rebel was basically by playing guitar in church. I was never allowed to quit piano, period. And so I did it all through high school, and I played a lot of guitar in church.

SWARK.Today: Where was college for you?

Rowland: I went to Middle Tennessee State University. My parents [Bill and Mona Rowland] made me.  I almost went to the University of Arkansas. My parents made me audition. So I showed up, and I got a good scholarship. MTSU has a really good Recording Industry Music Business program, maybe the best, and I was going to go that way.  Then I got that scholarship, and I thought,  “I guess I'll just be a music major,” which is an exceptionally difficult thing to do, because you're getting graded on getting better, not just learning.  It put me in Nashville. This is the early 2000s when Nashville wasn't New Nashville, like it is now. And it's Music City, USA, and people laugh, but even then, it was chock full of incredible music. Just the best of the best of the best and, once I started, eventually, I got a gig playing bass with a trad country band. I dropped out of school, and I started hanging out in East Nashville and hanging out with Chris Scruggs [bassist in Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives band] and all these people.

SWARK.Today:  Back to the present day.  How did you come to buy a nice big, historic house in Hope, the one formerly owned by David and Cherry Stewart?

Rowland:  A couple years ago, I tried to buy a house in Nashville, and I didn’t.  I couldn’t have afforded it. Doing what I do, until now I've never had W2s.  Once I write off expenses, my money on paper is laughable and was laughable to a bank.  The way the housing market was, after the pandemic peak, it was just in high, super high interest rates.  It wasn't gonna happen.  Then when in 2024 I got this gig with Tyler, I realized I should start thinking about buying a house.  Everybody else in the band, they all live in East Kentucky and West Virginia, and they’ve got great houses and great lives and great families.  There’s another universe where I play my gigs, and I do my stuff with Tyler, and then I come home, and I might not touch an instrument for weeks. 

SWARK.Today: You toured a lot last year. It sure has to feel good coming home to Hope after that.

Rowland: I'd always fantasized about how nice it is. Oh man, small towns are so nice. The biggest thing is a parade or the Lions Club Fish Fry. I had met my wife in Richmond, and that’s where we were living at the time.  It might have been on the last day my grandmother in Fulton was alive.  We opened Zillow and said let's just look, because some friends of mine had bought a historical house in Texarkana.  

[Here Rowland described the circumstances that led to him being in Hope, running into Cherry Stewart and discovering the house listed on Zillow was hers.] Cherry was there and I told her, “You don't know this, but I'd never had hummus or an alfalfa sprout until Cherry’s. So we kind of reconnected there and then, and then this happened, and then I realized it was her house.  I said, “Oh, look at us. This is probably what the good Lord wants.”

SWARK.Today: A lot of great art has happened there because of David Stewart. 

Rowland: The McRaes built that house. For my grandfather Jimmy, who was the mayor of Fulton, Ben McRae was his best friend. He was born in that house.

All last January, I was in India, and then I went straight from there to New Zealand and Australia, so, and I didn't get back until my birthday on the third of March, and we closed on the 13th. I did everything, literally from the other side of the world on the phone in the middle of the night. It worked out and we're really happy with it.  

Below photos: Photo by April Lovette taken at SWARK.Today offices February 4th.  Pages from a family scrapbook as well as photos of Rowland,  The last two are taken by Olivia Rowland.