Nashville Pedal Steel Player Runs for Tennessee Governor
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- Adam "Ditch" Kurtz, a Nashville pedal steel player who has toured with Joshua Ray Walker, Silverada, and Sunny Sweeney and fronts the Buck Owens tribute band Buck N Stuff, is running as a long-shot Democrat in Tennessee's Thursday gubernatorial primary, trailing Memphis councilwoman Jerri Green in most polls in a state where Republican Bill Lee is leaving due to term limits.
- Kurtz launched his campaign in March 2025 with a social media post promoting education and a minimum wage increase; his current platform includes affordable health care, workers' rights, and protections for LGBTQ and immigrant communities.
- Kurtz says pent-up energy after the 2024 election drove him to run and argues his country-music career uniquely positions him to "reach across the aisle" in deep-red Tennessee — and as a "side guy," he says he "don't have to worry about fans not buying records or coming to shows."
- He is not the first independent-country artist to dive into politics: American Aquarium frontman BJ Barham finished just over 100 votes shy of a seat in a 2025 Wendell, North Carolina town council race (five candidates, three seats), and Texas guitarist Hayden Pedigo ran a surreal Amarillo city council campaign in 2019.
- Barham's motivation was concrete: his adopted hometown of Wendell grew from under 9,800 in 2020 to nearly 17,000 by 2024, and Barham says he won't run again because "we're gonna be a suburb of Raleigh very soon."
Why it matters: Kurtz is polling second in his own Democratic primary and openly admits he's a long shot in a state that hasn't elected a Democratic governor in decades, so his candidacy's real test is organizing, not winning — and he's explicitly framing working-musician cultural credibility as a replicable partisan-crossing tool. The piece pairs his bid with BJ Barham's near-miss in Wendell (over 1,000 votes, just 100 shy of a seat) and Hayden Pedigo's 2019 Amarillo run, suggesting a small but growing template of independent-country artists using their genre standing to enter politics without risking their day jobs.
