Jeremy Tepper, who over an extended and assorted profession as a journalist, singer, label proprietor and radio producer championed the anarchic, high-energy music that straddled the traces separating nation, rock, punk and plain outdated Americana, died on June 14 in Queens. He was 60.
His spouse, the musician Laura Cantrell, mentioned the reason for loss of life, at Elmhurst Hospital, was a coronary heart assault.
Born in upstate New York and educated in Manhattan, Mr. Tepper was maybe an unlikely apostle for a mode of music variously known as alt- or outlaw nation, however which he most well-liked to name “rig rock” — the form of sounds favored by long-haul truck drivers.
Removed from the large hats and ostrich-skin boots of Nashville’s Decrease Broadway, it’s the music one may hear coming from honky-tonks, jukeboxes, truck stops and big-rig radios, the greasy corners of Americana that Mr. Tepper celebrated with unironic pleasure.
“It’s taking all that truck-driving music — streamlined, guitar-based nation rock — and dragging it onto the trendy interstate,” he informed Newsday in 1990.
Mr. Tepper was rig-rock’s best fan and largest booster. He wrote about it for publications like Pulse and The Journal of Nation Music, and for his personal journal, Road Beat, which was devoted to jukeboxes and the music one present in them.
His file label, Diesel Solely, promoted the careers of artists like Dale Watson, Ms. Cantrell and his personal band, the World Well-known Blue Jays. It additionally launched compilations of truckin’ classics by artists like Buck Owens, Marty Stuart and Steve Earle.
“Jeremy was all the time joyful, type and gracious together with his effort and time,” mentioned the musician Jason Isbell. “So many people by no means would’ve discovered our viewers with out his tireless work and curiosity.”
Mr. Tepper was finest identified for his roles at SiriusXM, first as a number within the early 2000s and, since 2004, because the programmer, producer and all-around impresario behind the Outlaw Nation and Willie’s Roadhouse channels.
He introduced on musicians as D.J.s, together with Shooter Jennings, Elizabeth Prepare dinner and Mojo Nixon, to play an eclectic mix of Jimmie Rodgers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lucinda Williams and the Previous 97’s.
“Jeremy championed artists who coloured in and out of doors the traces of mainstream music,” mentioned Emmylou Harris, one other artist in heavy rotation on Mr. Tepper’s channels.
A ubiquitous presence at bars, festivals and award reveals, Mr. Tepper made connections and introductions, knitting collectively a group round his favourite music.
“He was the primary one to deliver me onto Willie Nelson’s bus and introduce me to him,” the musician Margo Worth wrote in an e mail. “It was at Farm Assist in 2016. The primary time I ever smoked a doobie with Willie, Jeremy Tepper was the one different individual on the bus with us.”
For the final decade, he corralled a lot of his favourite acts to hitch the Outlaw Nation Cruise, a raucous, nine-day voyage across the Caribbean together with 1,200 excited followers — although nobody was extra excited to be there than Mr. Tepper.
“Jeremy cherished music greater than anyone else I’ve ever identified,” Mr. Earle mentioned in an e mail.
The love went past the music. Mr. Tepper relished the blue-collar tradition of the American freeway. Whereas attending school within the Nineteen Eighties, he labored half time for commerce magazines that could possibly be discovered within the nation’s interstate pit stops, like Most important Occasion, about professional wrestling, and Merchandising Occasions, targeted on pinball machines, jukeboxes and all method of issues coin-operated.
Throughout that point he fronted the World Well-known Blue Jays, a rustic band that grew out of the anarchic mix of punk, rock and roots music that bubbled up from Manhattan’s East Village within the Nineteen Eighties. He was, as Spin journal wrote in 1992, “a 28-year-old big of a person with a voice as thick as tar.”
Their songs celebrated the working-class lifetime of the open street, particularly the women and men piloting 18-wheelers forwards and backwards throughout the nation.
In a single track, “Good Morning, Mr. Trucker,” Mr. Tepper exclaimed, “It’s not that I like driving — it’s the one factor I can do.”
Jeremy Evan Tepper was born on Nov. 18, 1963, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to Elly (Zeitlin) Tepper, an artist and educator, and Noel Tepper, a lawyer.
His ardour for Americana bloomed in highschool, when he labored half time at a file retailer whereas additionally diving by his mother and father’ assortment of nation albums. Like many suburban boys of the late Seventies and early ’80s, he was drawn to the manic energy of punk and post-punk music, and he discovered an identical power within the likes of Johnny Money, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.
He studied journalism at New York College. By then he was an editor for Fashionable Truck Cease, a commerce journal, in addition to Merchandising Occasions, the place he turned a senior editor after graduating in 1986. He based Diesel Solely in 1990.
He married Ms. Cantrell in 1997. Alongside along with her, he’s survived by their daughter, Isabella; two grandchildren from a earlier relationship; his mother and father; and his brother, Anderson.
Mr. Tepper remained a staple within the alt-country scene till his loss of life. On June 12, he was on the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in Cleveland for the opening of an exhibit devoted to his shut good friend Mojo Nixon, who died in February throughout an Outlaw Nation Cruise.
And he continued to mount the stage, within the squatting, mike-to-mouth pose of a punk rocker, belting out joyfully bizarre songs about alien craft, barbecue and massive rigs.
“This isn’t camp,” Mr. Tepper informed Spin. “That is different nation music.”
