Addiction Recovery · b. 1984
Jelly Roll
He was in a jail cell the day his daughter was born — and years later sat before the U.S. Senate and admitted he had once been part of the problem.
Jason DeFord spent his teens and twenties cycling through addiction and jail. The world knows him now as Jelly Roll, and as one of the few famous people willing to say on the record that recovery isn’t a reward for the deserving — it’s a road almost anyone can be helped back onto. He is turning that belief into a place: a free recovery campus on his own land.
Curated by
Shelly Frank
President, Creative House Studios
“I trust this one because he never asks to be called a hero. He says he was part of the problem, and then he gets to work on the repair. That move — confession into responsibility — is the whole reason the Recovery vertical exists.”
Shelly’s Take
Why we chose this story — Shelly Frank, Creative House Studios.
Primary Source
c-span.org
Jelly Roll’s Senate testimony on fentanyl (C-SPAN)
Open original on c-span.org ↗
The Voices for Good film
A Creative House Studios film · a true story, researched by hand and voiced with AI.
Watch on YouTube — @VoicesForGood ↗The film
“Save Me” — official music video, Jelly Roll.
The story
Washington, January 2024. A country singer with tattoos on his face takes a seat in front of the United States Senate. He is not there to perform. He is there to testify. He opens with a sentence most people spend a lifetime avoiding: I was a part of the problem.
He means fentanyl. The overdoses, the funerals, the people he had loved and buried. He does not soften it or trade it for a slogan. Then he says the other half — that he wants to be part of the solution.
Anyone can confess when there is applause waiting. What he did next is harder. He stayed, and he started building.
He knows the cost from the inside. He was fourteen the first time he was locked up. He was in a cell the day his daughter was born. The songs that made him famous never erased any of that. They carried it.
In the fall of 2025 he began describing what comes after the testimony: a free recovery and mental-health campus on a hundred acres of his own land in Tennessee. Treatment, therapy, twelve-step, holistic care — and somewhere to belong, the thing most people leave treatment still missing. Not a check. A place. The kind he says he wishes had existed when life was kicking him down.
A man who once helped feed the wound, building shelter beside it.
The cause, carried forward today
Mobilize Recovery ↗
The national recovery-advocacy nonprofit whose 2025 “Campus Surge” initiative Jelly Roll co-chairs alongside Melissa Etheridge — amplifying him amplifies their work, the way every Voice for Good carries an organization forward.
Further reading
More Voices for Good
This page asks nothing of Jelly Roll. For the recovery communities, treatment centers, and partners building what comes after crisis, Creative House Studios is developing Recovery Voice — a storytelling and distribution layer for recovery-centered media, music, and the connection people need once treatment ends.
Held to the Light
A quiet note when a new voice is lifted up. You’re in good company.