Abney Road

Through a unique creative process, Tulsa-based singer and songwriter John Calvin Abney turned the pandemic into an opportunity to create something good.

- PRESTON JONES

EARLIER THIS YEAR, as the coronavirus pandemic spread, and the world gradually closed itself off, John Calvin Abney sat down and opened himself up.

With his musical commitments suddenly on hold for the foreseeable future—Abney’s scheduled slate of more than ninety shows, stretching deep into 2020, disappeared in a matter of days— the thirty-one-year-old channeled his energies into epistolary relationships.

“I was writing a lot of letters to a lot of folks,” the Tulsa resident says. “I think I wrote two hundred and fifty letters in those three initial months. I wrote so many letters that the post office gave me a big crate.”

That urge to connect didn’t stop at the mailbox.

Abney, working closely with fellow Oklahoma singer-songwriter John Moreland, also wrote and recorded a new album,