TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

Chosen Road’s Jonathan Buckner remembers where he was standing the first time he heard “Kitchens & Cathedrals.” He was in his own kitchen, phone in hand, wife nearby, when he hit play on a demo written by Lee Black and Gina Bowe. He didn’t make it past the first verse before he was crying.

“I never will forget the moment that I opened that demo up and I listened to it,” Buckner says. “I was with my wife in our kitchen and I hit play, got through the first verse and I was in tears.”

The song pulled him straight back to his grandmother’s house. She was a preacher’s wife raising ten kids largely on her own, since her husband spent long stretches on the road as a traveling evangelist. Buckner’s grandfather had started out as a coal miner before answering a call to ministry, leaving his wife to hold the household together through faith alone.

“She was an amazing woman who just loved the Lord,” Buckner says of his grandmother. “She really had to lean into her faith.”

That instinct, leaning into faith when circumstances demand it, has defined Chosen Road for more than seventeen years. Formed in the mountains of West Virginia, the band built its sound the way bluegrass has always been built: on front porches and in small country churches, with harmonies worked out standing close enough to hear one another breathe. Their catalog stretches from traditional bluegrass into country, gospel, and Americana, resisting easy genre labels in favor of something the band simply calls honest.

Albums like Appalachian hymns and the newer American morning have carried that approach to a growing national audience, landing on bluegrass and gospel radio charts along the way. “Kitchens & Cathedrals” continues that trajectory, less a departure than a return to the values the band was founded on: faith, family, and music that means something to the people singing it as much as the people hearing it.

For Buckner, the song’s power lies in the way it collapses decades in a single verse, turning a kitchen table memory into something closer to scripture. It is a small moment made large, the kind Chosen Road has spent nearly two decades trying to write.