Issue #15: The 'Justified' Theme & the Not-So-Lonely Road to Its Unforgettable Blend of Bluegrass and Hip-Hop

How a Bronx M.C. and a Brooklyn producer created an Emmy-nominated song fit for Harlan County, Kentucky

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By Natalie Weiner

If you spent six seasons with Raylan, Boyd and the gang(s), you're intimately familiar with the pulsing backbeat-into-overwhelmingly twangy dobro riff that punctuates the beginning of each episode of Justified. If you didn't, you should probably consider correcting that — but know that the show, which follows a U.S. Marshal back to his home in Harlan County, Kentucky and to his frenemy (a hyper-articulate ne'er-do-well Walton Goggins, what more do you need to know), has very little music: there are different versions of Darrell Scott's "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" and there’s its swaggering theme song, a constant through the entire series. 

That theme, "Long Hard Times To Come" by Gangstagrass and T.O.N.E-z, is exactly what you would expect based on the name Gangstagrass (unless you're expecting something weed-related) — rap verses over a bluegrass-tinged beat. The story behind it, though, is as improbable as that combination of influences might seem at first glance.

At a studio in Queens in 1999, an ambitious producer from Southern California befriended an M.C. who had been born and raised in the Bronx. Rench (whose given name is Oscar Owens), the producer, had started this career behind the boards while attending NYU, taking any and all classes that would allow home access to the recording studios before moving on to small studios where he'd record local bands and M.C.s; T.O.N.E-z (whose given name is Jason Keaton) had been rapping almost since rap's genesis, following in the footsteps of his older brother Kevin — a.k.a. Special K of the pioneering hip-hop trio the Treacherous Three — to a short-lived record deal in the early '90s.

Rench invited T.O.N.E-z to take advantage of his home studio, which he did fairly prolifically. The producer had started to dabble in country-rap crossover in the early aughts with a hip-hop honky-tonk band called B-Star. His father was originally from Oklahoma, which meant he'd grown up with country classics around the house, and the deeper he got into music the more he found himself revisiting those sounds. That rediscovery — and the O, Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack — brought him to Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. 

"In bluegrass traditionally there are no drums, but it's very rhythmic," Rench says. "That left it open for me to say, 'You know, I could totally put a beat under this, and an emcee could go to town on it.' I really wanted to try that…it was sort of a musical itch that I needed to scratch."

He scratched that itch by creating new beats from bluegrass samples, and putting verses that different M.C.s (including T.O.N.E-z) had already recorded with him on top of them. The M.C.s were unfazed by the unusual offer. "He's so creative that I was like, 'If he's going to do this, I can't wait to hear it,'" says T.O.N.E-z. "He could have said polka music, and I would have been down. When I heard it, I was like, 'Damn!'" The result was Rench Presents: Gangstagrass, a 2006 mixtape that Rench released for free, and started to gain traction in classic blog-era fashion.

It was that mixtape — Rench's brainchild, with T.O.N.E-z's bars — that found its way to the Justified promo team shortly before the show premiered in 2010. They wanted to use one of the songs for the show's trailer, but didn't realize that Rench hadn't cleared any of the samples since it was a free release. So Rench called up T.O.N.E-z and some instrumentalists he knew to recreate a version of the track for that initial trailer, which also wound up being the first acoustic, full-band iteration of Gangstagrass — a band that now tours internationally with stops at bluegrass festivals along the way. 

The Justified showrunners liked the music in the promo so much that they asked Rench and T.O.N.E-z to create a song specifically to be the show's theme. "All they gave me as the idea for the show was like, 'A marshal leaves Kentucky and then returns home,'" T.O.N.E-z says. "I was like, 'That's all I've got to work with?'" Rench sent him a drum track to record over, and the M.C. set to writing — during the commercial breaks of an episode of Seinfeld he couldn't bring himself to pause. "When you hear 'On a lonely road,' he's by himself and clearly he's on a road, because he went somewhere, you know?" T.O.N.E-z says, explaining his thinking behind the lyrics. "Something must have happened, so, 'I'm pissed off, who wants some?'"

He sent the vocals back to Rench, who recorded the instrumental. The rest — the Emmy nomination that year for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music (the show's sole nomination that year; it lost the category to Nurse Jackie), the cosign from Elmore Leonard, whose novella inspired the series, the more than 10 years of Gangstagrass that have followed — is history. 

"It's the perfect kind of placement for Gangstagrass, because it's not saying anything about it — it just comes on at the beginning of the episode," says Rench. "One of the hurdles we face is if we say, 'This is bluegrass hip-hop music,' people immediately imagine something terrible and start running in the other direction. But if people just hear it, they're like, 'Hey, this is cool. What is this?'"

The response from Justified fans allowed Rench to turn Gangstagrass into a touring ensemble. The band has released five studio albums, many of which feature T.O.N.E-z along with M.C.s like Kool Keith, Dead Prez and Smif-N-Wessun. "They really don't bat an eye at it," says Rench. "If you're a good M.C., you can rhyme on anything." They've earned similarly impressive endorsements on the bluegrass side, collaborating with luminaries like Dan Tyminski and Jerry Douglas. "That's just another part of the humor we find when so-called purists are like, 'This is a crime against humanity,'" Rench adds. "Meanwhile, the people they consider the standard-bearers of the genre are like, 'Oh, this is cool.'"

Despite their lack of major label support, Rench and T.O.N.E-z were able to negotiate a fair-ish deal for "Long Hard Times To Come"; the placement also helped earn them more TV syncs. They even fought to do a meagerly-budgeted music video, which wound up being included on DVD releases of the series. T.O.N.E-z talked his way into a role on three Justified episodes — he was a member of Limehouse's crew, with a couple lines — which meant more time in L.A., meeting the cast and other famous fans. 

"I was hanging out at the Justified office in Culver City, and somebody was like, 'Hey man, there's a guy here who's a big fan of the show — he wanted to say what's up and shake your hand, because he really loved the song,'" T.O.N.E-z recalls. "I'm thinking it's gonna be like, the janitor or something. You know who it was? Mel Brooks." Ted Danson and Jeff Bridges also told him how much they liked the song ["He was actually angry that we didn't win (the Emmy)," T.O.N.E-z says of Bridges.]

The M.C. has continued to work within a similar, country-rap sound since. He just released a collection of songs he and Rench have put together over the years to coincide with the premiere of the Justified reboot, Justified: City Primeval (it starts tonight on FX) — both he and Rench submitted songs for use in the show's new iteration, but there will be no Gangstagrass this time around. It's not hard to imagine that the reboot will draw new attention to the original series and its cult favorite theme, though, bringing their anti-genre message to a new audience.

"I had grown up with the image that we're all presented, of country music being white music and hip hop and soul being black music," says Rench. "Even when I started combining the two, I was like, 'This is so cool because it's combining polar opposites.' But the longer I did it, more and more information started coming to me about the history of American music and how the segregation and the racializing of our genres happened artificially at the beginning of the recorded music industry — how much these ideas of white music and black music are just a lingering remnant of the Jim Crow system that they were developed under."

Now, he's come to realize that far from being opposites, the two musics he and his bandmates connect were always fruit of the same tree. "Hip-hop is folk music," he says. "It comes from people without resources finding a way that they can create music together spontaneously. 

"From the beginning, people who didn't necessarily know each other could sit down, start playing and trade solos back and forth," Rench adds. "Once we noticed that a cypher and a pick are the same thing, it all just clicked. Now we really capitalize on that, especially in our live shows — because we've discovered that these things have so much in common."