Wild Ones

Wild Ones — Jessie Murph and Jelly Roll's Long-Burning Country-Adjacent Anthem

Two Unlikely Stars, One Shared Register

Fall 2023 presented a country music landscape in active negotiation with itself: Morgan Wallen had crossover numbers no country act had ever matched, Zach Bryan was filling arenas, and a handful of artists operating at the intersection of country, rock, and hip-hop were finding that the old genre walls had become genuinely porous. Into this moment came a collaboration between Jessie Murph, a young singer-songwriter from Alabama with a voice bigger than seemed possible, and Jelly Roll, the Nashville-based artist whose improbable rise from hardship to arena-filling star had been one of the year's defining music stories. Wild Ones was what happened when their worlds collided, and the collision turned out to be remarkably clean: no awkward seams, no sense that two different songs had been spliced together.

A Slow Build That Went Thirty-Seven Weeks

Few songs in recent chart history illustrated the long-game dynamic of streaming-era country crossover better than Wild Ones. It debuted on the Hot 100 on October 21, 2023, at number 49, a strong entry that then, counterintuitively, dropped the following week before beginning a sustained upward grind. The chart trajectory was a series of advances and retreats, the pattern of a song finding its audience through repeat listening and playlist embedding rather than through a single explosive moment. On February 3, 2024, it reached its peak of number 35, and it remained on the Hot 100 for 37 weeks total: a marathon run that spoke to the depth of the audience it had built. That trajectory was not the result of radio plays alone; it was word-of-mouth at scale, digital recommendation, and genuine enthusiasm.

Murph's Voice, Jelly Roll's Story

The song worked because both performers brought something irreplaceable to it. Murph's voice carried the kind of raw power that transcended genre expectation; at twenty years old when the song charted, she sounded like someone who had lived considerably more than that. Jelly Roll brought the autobiographical weight that had made his earlier breakthrough Need a Favor resonate so broadly: a hard-won credibility about surviving difficult circumstances that gave the song's lyrical content a grounding that was hard to fake. Together they inhabited the song's emotional territory with a conviction that listeners responded to across demographic categories, and the chemistry between their voices created something that neither would have produced separately.

The "Outlaw Adjacent" Sound

The production aesthetic of Wild Ones sat in territory that country radio had been slowly warming to through 2022 and 2023: guitar-forward, with more edge than conventional Nashville polish, but melodically accessible enough to connect with mainstream country listeners. Jelly Roll's collaborations during this period helped define what "country-adjacent" crossover sounded like at its most commercially successful. The song didn't fit neatly into any format, which paradoxically helped it: it could appear in country playlists and pop playlists without feeling out of place in either. Genre ambiguity, in the streaming era, is often an advantage rather than a liability: algorithm-driven playlists will place a song wherever it fits, and a song that fits in multiple places reaches more people than one confined to a single bucket.

A Song for the Long Haul

Thirty-seven weeks on the Hot 100 is a number that means something specific. It means listeners found the song, stayed with it, returned to it, and recommended it to people who would return to it again. With over 104 million YouTube views, Wild Ones found a global audience for a sound that had initially seemed regionalized, proving that the emotional content was more portable than the genre category suggested. The song grew into itself over months, which is the best kind of chart story. Hit play and hear what an anthem sounds like before anyone officially declares it one.

“Wild Ones” — Jessie Murph & Jelly Roll's singular moment on the 2020s charts.