The following article includes mentions of drug addiction and mental health issues.
He was surrounded by music, getting his love for tunes from his mother, Donna.
Read below to learn more about Jelly Roll’s grueling journey to stardom.
“I don’t think I knew anybody with a real job,” he toldGQof his community.
“I didn’t even know a barber.”
His father, Horace “Buddy” DeFord, was a meat salesman who moonlighted as a bookie.
“ESPN didn’t run what happened between Alcorn State and Northwestern,” he told the outlet.
He said was the only guy around town that could give you a play-by-play.
“I’m just like, ‘Yo, here’s a sack of weed.
Here’s a gram of coke.
Here’s a mixtape,'” he toldCBS News.
“It was like my business card.”
The country singer felt that even his drug-dealing days were a pipeline to becoming a famous musician.
According to the singer, it was the ending of his father’s fifth or sixth marriage.
In an interview withBillboard, he said that the only way to support his mother feasibly was through crime.
Instead, Jelly Roll turned to dealing.
It seemed like all the people around him struggled with addiction, including his mother.
His dad organized illegal betting on the side.
“I wanted to be the guy getting money, not the guy losing it.”
But eventually, Jelly Roll became the latter.
“I had to learn that you could drink alcohol without doing cocaine,” he said.
“It took me a long time to learn that.”
It was through these moments that the singer discovered the healing properties of music.
According to the singer, he spent ages 13 to 25 in and out of jail.
Speaking on the"Flagrant"podcast, he said his first stint behind bars was for possessing marijuana.
It was the first of 40 times that Jelly Roll would step foot in a jail cell.
It wasn’t until he was in his 20s that he vowed to change the trajectory of his life.
It was in that moment that Jelly Roll knew he had to turn his life around.
He was tried as an adult.
“They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he told Billboard.
He felt that the system shaped him for a life behind bars.
Now,Jelly Roll is stepping up for the youth who are in the dark place he was once.
“These kids need chances,” Jelly Roll said on"The Bobby Bones Show"podcast.
“They need to see outside their environment.”
