Vince Gill releases his new album, OKIE, on Friday (August 23rd). The album’s title is taken from the once-derogatory term used to disparage migrants from Oklahoma to the nation’s west coast during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression eras. A proud Oklahoman, Gill has appropriated this term on an album that embraces his roots and explores some of the most important issues of our time.

“I wrestled hard for what to call this record, just because of the songs, you know what they represented – a lifetime of experience,” says Vince. “I had the good fortune of getting to sit down and watch the Ken Burns documentary about the history of country music and that was so powerful. It was so emotional to watch, to really watch this history get told properly with respect, with dignity, with all these things. Because we, as a musical world, there were a lot of times in our history where we were looked down upon, whether they called us hillbillies or whether we were poor people or whether we were this or that. But, in the way that they told that story and they told it with such grace about how the races got along, and so you go back to our very incarnation of what we were and it’s beautiful because we weren’t segregated. We weren’t hateful. We weren’t any of those things. But we were kind of treated that way off and on for a pretty good stretch. And I don’t think a lot of people understand that the word Okie was – I always knew it — but when we migrated during the Dust Bowl and went out west to try to find work and feed families and dig a living out of the dirt, they used that word disparagingly. You called an Okie and Okie it was meant with distain. And I thought after watching that documentary I said I kind of like that. It’s where I’m from, I said, and I’ve got a lot of pride about being where I’m from and what our history is and how hard working those people are and kind and fair-minded and common sense and a lot of things that I’ve taken with me on this journey. I thought this might be a good name for this record. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks, and everybody liked it. So, as it could be construed as ‘well he’s from Oklahoma. He’s calling it OKIE,’ it has a much deeper kind of connotation and inspired by what Ken and those guys did to paint our history with some dignity and respect.”

Okie marks Gill’s most recent solo album since 2016’s Down To My Last Bad Habit and 2011’s Guitar Slinger.  In 2013, Gill partnered with famed steel guitarist Paul Franklin on Bakersfield as a tribute to the “Bakersfield sound” of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. With 21 GRAMMY Awards to his credit.  Gill has solidified his place as country music’s most eloquent and impassioned champion. He is both a world-class musician and a wide-ranging songwriter whose compositions earned him entry into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007. Gill has also made appearances on over 1000 artists’ records.