For Chelsea Lovitt, who grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and lives in the teeming music town of Nashville, Tennessee, the multifaceted music of the South is her inspiration. She is immersed in the traditions of country, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, and bluegrass, and her bona fides on guitar and fiddle match her vocal chops, which go from pure honky tonk to rockabilly to folk and rock ‘n’ roll. For sure, these days plenty of artists–in Nashville and elsewhere–use the criss-crossing map of Southern music as their handbook. What Chelsea Lovitt knows is that it’s a map that leads you to new places while laying out the eternal truths. Above all, Lovitt is a writer, so you can bring in Faulkner, romantic poets like John Keats and certainly Tennessee Williams as guides to her sensibility. Her music is complex, full of contradictions, which means she honors the mystery of the Southern tradition.