music · Oct 12, 2026 · DAILY TRANSMISSION
Country Found a New Voice on Richmond’s Riverfront: Cherokee
At the Richmond Folk Festival, Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey sang country music in Cherokee—and made an old American sound feel wonderfully unfinished.
A steel-string song, spoken differently
Picture a country song floating over Richmond’s riverfront. There’s the familiar pull: longing, a plain melody, maybe a little ache around the edges. Then the words arrive in Cherokee.
That was Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey’s corner of the Richmond Folk Festival, held October 9–11. The free festival packed more than 30 artists onto six stages, with bluegrass, Cajun music, go-go, mariachi, Tibetan performance, Puerto Rican bomba, Indigenous hip-hop, and more.
Mackey played three sets there. His appearance could sound like a clever headline if you read it too fast: country music, but in Cherokee. The real story is warmer and stranger than a gimmick.
His family already knew the chorus
Mackey is a Cherokee musician from Kenwood, Oklahoma. Country was not some costume he pulled from a rack. He has described elders and relatives in his community as country listeners.
His grandfather two-stepped to Bob Wills. His mother and grandmother loved outlaw country, a rougher country style linked with artists who resisted Nashville’s polish. That family soundtrack sits beside Mackey’s earlier life with ceremonial and traditional Cherokee singing.
During the COVID-19 period, he and his family played music together at home. He began making country and folk music professionally, then tried writing a country song in Cherokee. He said the idea “put a fire” in him because he felt nobody else was doing it then.
No sprinkle of Cherokee on top
Mackey writes original songs in Cherokee. He also translates selected standards, meaning well-known songs that have lasted across generations. His debut album, Nasgino Inagei Nidayulenvi, or It Started in the Woods, includes Cherokee versions of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”
That Hank Williams detail is delicious. But it works because the song is not being treated like a museum object with a new label. Country has always carried grief, love, family stories, bad decisions, roads, weather, and the occasional emotional train wreck.
Those materials can travel. They do not make Cherokee and English interchangeable, obviously. They do show that a song’s feeling can cross into another language without losing its bones.
A creek, the seasons, and a yodel nearby
Mackey’s work is rooted in more than covers. NPR described his song “Tsitsutsa Tsigesv,” translated as “When I Was a Boy,” as a reflection on his upbringing, water, a childhood creek, and the seasons. Mackey connected its view of life to respect for elders.
That is country music’s usual toolbox, frankly: place, memory, family, and something important happening near water. Yet hearing those ideas in Cherokee changes the map. Country stops looking like a fixed English-only zone and starts acting like what it can be: a community form for telling stories people need to keep around.
At Richmond, that point landed without a lecture. Mackey’s sets shared a festival schedule with many musical traditions. Cherokee-language country did not sit off to the side as a novelty creature in a glass tank. It was one active sound in a giant, noisy American mix.
Songs are good at getting loose
Mackey has said he wants younger people to meet Cherokee in contemporary songs. That is a practical, lively idea. A language can live in formal learning and ceremonial space, but a chorus gives it another place to hang out.
You do not need to understand every word to feel where a song is heading. Mackey has said as much. Anyone who has shouted along to a song in a language they barely know understands the deal: melody carries meaning before your brain catches every detail.
Nobody should claim one musician can save a language. Mackey’s work offers something more real: more moments when Cherokee can be heard, sung, learned, and enjoyed. Somewhere between the riverfront stage and a childhood creek, an old country song found fresh boots.
SOURCES FROM THIS TRANSMISSION
General Info l Richmond Folk Festival ↗Schedule l Richmond Folk Festival ↗Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey — Richmond Folk Festival ↗Cherokee singer keeps language alive at Richmond Folk Festival ↗Agalisiga Mackey reflects on writing songs in his native Cherokee language | KGOU - Oklahoma's NPR Source ↗