Nashville’s Plowboy Records is pleased to announce the signing of Chuck Mead and the release of his new record Free State Serenade. A wild ride of hillbilly blues and honky-tonk, Mead, best known for his work as frontman for BR549, wrote the album based on the stories, legends, crimes and lonesome open roads of his childhood and formative years in Kansas. Recorded with his longtime band The Grassy Knoll Boys, Free State Serenade was co-produced with Joe Pisapia (kd Lang, Ben Folds Five) and features special guests BR549’s Don Herron and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Critter Fuqua.

Free State Serenade jumps from jaunty mountain airs like “Neosho Valley Sue,” with BR5-49’s Don Herron lending his fiddle to what Mead calls a “coming of age ditty,” to “Sittin’ On Top Of The Bottom” – a whip-smart ode to “Sittin’ On Top Of The World.” Reaching into the dark lore of Kansas history, “The Devil By Their Side” is a chugging rock n’ roll number about William Quantrill’s murderous 1863 Civil War raid on Lawrence, Kansas.