Jelly Roll spent last week guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He told jokes about Donald Trump, MAGA media went after him for it, and on Thursday — his last night in the chair — he stopped doing the show and spent several minutes explaining himself.
“For the last six months, I’ve watched people decide who I am, what I am, what I believe, what I support, and what I don’t support,” he said. “And I felt that even more this week just because I told a couple of jokes.”
He traced it to February, when he won his first Grammy and was immediately asked to say something about American politics. He asked for more time instead.
“Looking back, I don’t necessarily regret asking for more time before I spoke — I wish more people took more time before they spoke — but I do wish I had found the words to express my heart just a little bit sooner,” he said. “And ironically, by trying so hard not to make a political statement, I became one.”
One reason for the silence he mentioned in passing: “I spent my entire career trying not to belong to a political party — partly because until March of this year, I wasn’t even allowed to vote.” November will be his first election.
“That night at the Grammys, I had an opportunity to speak up for people who were scared, hurting, and felt like nobody was speaking for them,” he said. “I had a microphone and I didn’t use it the right way.”
Through tears: “But my daddy always told me — it is never too late to do the right thing.”
“Human dignity isn’t Republican nor Democrat. Compassion isn’t left-wing, and mercy isn’t right-wing. Pain and healing knows no partisanship. Hurting hearts are more important than poll numbers, and there are no boundaries or borders for broken families.”
Then he went to the Gospels.
“I want y’all to know that despite the fact that I cuss and I tell jokes, I truly am a man of faith. And I can’t read the Gospels without being confronted by the words of Jesus himself when he said: ‘When I was hungry, you gave me food. When I was thirsty, you gave me a drink. When I was a stranger, you welcomed me in.'”
“He also gave us two commandments: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. And that’s what I should have said that night. There wasn’t an asterisk after ‘neighbor.’ There wasn’t a political party exemption. It did not require us to know what country you were born in. There wasn’t a sentence afterward that said, ‘Unless you’re afraid of them.’ It just said, ‘Love your neighbor.’ And I don’t know about y’all, but that’s the standard I want to be held to.”
He didn’t disown anybody. He defended having met Trump, citing his father, a Marine who died in 2019: “I will always shake the hand of the sitting president of the United States when asked… a handshake is not an endorsement, a conversation is not an allegiance, and a joke is not a political point of view.”
He was specific about who he thinks he works for — “the recovering addict, the felon who is trying to change his life, the single mama working a double hard for her family, and everybody else that ever felt forgotten.”
He closed on his father, Buddy DeFord, a blue-collar Democrat whose brother was a red-hat Republican and his best friend. In hospice, Jelly Roll asked him how that worked.
“Son, we agreed about hundreds of things. We only didn’t agree about a few things, and we were not going to let the few things we didn’t agree about define our entire relationship.”