My name is Dennis Ray Watts. I was raised in a small town that clings to the western border of West Virginia, separated by a muddy river from the somewhat greener pastures and smoother roads of the state of Kentucky. I moved away and lived and played music in Memphis, TN for several years, then traveled the highways and back roads of America before returning home to that same small town. The music I make as The Drawn, with help from an ever changing cast of local characters, is the story of the few who left our town, and the many more who stayed – their ambitions and desires seeming to hover and dissipate like smoke from the power plant across the river, gone yet lingering in the air. It is music haunted by the ghosts of dead relations, family members that seemed to go out of this life either meekly unfulfilled or defiantly unrepentant. These songs are not quite the grandchildren of either Hank Williams or Bill Monroe, the sounds I was both irresistibly drawn to and rejected growing up, and only a cousin to the rock and country music streaming out car windows and up and down the dirt roads of my teenage years. The music of The Drawn, whatever its lineage, is not exactly like anything that preceded it, not country or rock nor bluegrass or celtic.