Kelsey Waldon Recognized by Hometown of Monkey’s Eyebrow
It’s a small, unincorporated region of Western Kentucky with a funny name, and it also happens to be the home of traditional country performer and Oh Boy Records signee Kelsey Waldon. They call in Monkey’s Eyebrow, and they recently decided to honor their hometown country music hero by erecting a sign at the edge of town.
“As a Kentuckian, I grew up seeing signs like this all over my beloved home state. ‘Home Of’ Merle Travis, Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Keith Whitley, Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Tom T Hall, all of Country Music Highway 23′ and countless others,” Kelsey says. “Add this to the list of proud moments. Thank you Ballard County officials for making it happen. It means a lot.”
There’s a lot of theories how the town got it’s curious name, from the fact that Ballard County is shaped kind of like a monkey’s head, and Monkey’s Eyebrow is where the eyebrow would be, or that the shape of the town kind of looks like an eyebrow from a nearby hill, or that the local general store back in the day was only considered good enough for “a bunch of monkeys” and the name stuck. Either way, they’re proud that Kelsey Waldon is from there.
“She’s recently done so much, and been recognized on CMT and different things, and her being part of the community, the court thought it would be good if she was recognized by putting a sign up,” Ballard County’s Angela Van Cleve tells Saving Country Music. “In the past we put a sign of for a girl who won Miss Kentucky, so we thought it was only fitting for Kelsey to get her recognition as well. People are even coming down to Monkey’s Eyebrow to see where she’s from.”
A court of five magistrates brought up the issue on January 7th, and made a motion to have the sign commissioned. It didn’t take long for the sign to get made and posted right at the limits of the little community.
Kelsey Waldon’s latest album White Noise/White Lines was released on October 4th, 2019, and includes the song “Kentucky, 1988” about her upbringing in Monkey’s Eyebrow and Kentucky.
Trigger
January 28, 2020 @ 8:47 am
BTW, the woman I spoke to at Ballard County to confirm the story is dating Kelsey Waldon’s dad. 🙂 Small world in Western Kentucky.
Tom
January 28, 2020 @ 9:30 am
I happened to see Monkey’s Eyebrow on a map years ago while planning a trip from Illinois to Tennessee and detoured through it on my way home just to see what was there. Where I grew up and currently live in the tri-state Illinois-Iowa-Missouri area there are a lot of “used to be” towns that can still by identified by a couple of houses at a crossroads or maybe a cemetery and a run-down commercial building where a bustling town used to be. But when I went through Monkey’s Eyebrow – which at the time was still marked by a road sign which as I understand it has been gone for several years now due to people taking them as souvenirs as fast as the county could put them up, at least until these signs were placed – there wasn’t so much as a single building that I could clearly identify as being within the “city limits”.
david
February 1, 2020 @ 1:07 pm
considering that monkeys don’t have eyebrows maybe it’s an intentionally ironic name for a place that doesn’t exist