Oliver Anthony: Unknown Musician Makes US Chart History With “Rich Man North of Richmond”

Pop

Aug 22

OLIVER ANTHONY CAME OUT OF nowhere, with a guitar and a country song in his hand. He sits down and sings a stripped-down song in front of a professional microphone for the first time in his life. The rest is history.

This blue-collar anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100, making Anthony the first artist to achieve this without prior chart history. During the first week, “Rich Men” was streamed 17.5M times, and the music video soared to over 32M views in just 13 days. Yet, he is still unattached to any label.

With lyrics like “sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day; Overtime hours for bullshit pay,” people are calling him “the voice of the working class” under his YouTube video, while others slammed him for anti-tax sentiments (If you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”), invoking the welfare queen stereotype (“the obese milkin’ welfare”), and spreading conspiracy (“minors on an island,” a reference to the conspiracy theories around the death of Jeffery Epstein).

Fame and controversy only heat up from this point, spreading like wildfire, drawing attention and backlash to his other releases, but the man seems firm. He still stands his ground, just singing what he believes is true.

“People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off eight million dollar offers,” wrote Anthony. “I don’t want six tour buses, 15 tractor-trailers, and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering from mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’re being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.”

Born Christopher Anthony Lunsford, the “Rich Man” singer is the sixth person in Billboard chart history to deliver a solo No. 1 debut entry. He told Billboard that “the hopelessness and frustration of our times resonate in the response to this song,” and said he didn’t regard the song itself as “anything special, but the people who have supported it are incredible and deserve to be heard.”

Anthony currently has 13 tracks sitting on the Digital Song Sales chart. He is the only living solo male artist to ever achieve that in the top 50 of the survey.