Artist Spotlight: Druby Stone
Meet Druby Stone
Druby Stone (also formerly known as Frank Be Stone, Ruby Stone, and Dru B Stoned) got his start in an unusual way at 15 when his Christian music YouTube went viral, but has since made his mark on the Huntsville area with genre-twistng music about the common working man’s struggles inspired by the likes of Jim Croce, Justin Townes Earle, and John Prine. Donning pigtails and occasionally arm-in-arm with his skeleton, Frank, Druby aims to create a safe space to bob your head while exploring the dark sides of the human experience.
Q&A with Sahana Parker, Music Editor
North Alabama Arts: Let’s start off with: where are you from?
Druby: I am from west Tennessee, this little rural community called Jack’s Creek. It’s kind of nestled halfway between Nashville and Memphis, kinda close to Jackson. I’ve been doing music for as long as I can remember. I grew up doing music in church with my family. I have a pretty musical family. It’s always been a huge part of my life.
NAA: You said you grew up doing music in church. How would you describe your style now?
Druby: That’s difficult. It changes all the time. Kind of a folk, Americana, some country, but it’s more on the alternative side of that now. I guess it focuses mostly on brutal honesty and a lot of working class America, and the struggles related to that now. I kind of resonated a lot with old ‘60’s, ‘70’s music, old country music and how it’s really, really, really honest about real people, real problems, real stories, and I gravitated towards that. Started shifting in that direction probably towards the end of college.
NAA: Did you study music at school?
Druby: No—I double majored in biochemistry and English [at UAH]. I realized through my fourth year of college that I didn’t really enjoy that, and music was kind of how I coped and stayed sane through the last bit of college…I had a contemporary Christian music career when I was 15. I burned out on that. Just wasn’t my thing anymore by the time I was out of high school. So I had been on hiatus for several years up to that point and hadn’t really picked up my guitar very much. End of college, I realized I didn’t like what I was going to school for and that was when I wanted to rediscover music and songwriting.
NAA: What was the scope of your Christian music career?
Druby: Not huge, but probably bigger than the music is right now. I had an album made when I was 15 or 16. It’s still out there under “Drew Greenway.” I had a YouTube channel that I posted once a week on, and I think it got to about 12k subscribers. For a teenager in high school, it was pretty good. I’m not going to say I was famous or anything, but I had enough traffic coming in from the Internet that I got paid to leave the state several times during that period, where I could go just play concerts different places. I entered a couple songwriting contests, and I think I have two international Christian songwriting awards from that time for indie music.
NAA: What happened next?
Druby: So that was really fun and grand and all, but kind of just hit this point in my life where I didn’t really relate with that type of music anymore. My faith was always a big part of my life, and I found that music was really watered down once I started making grown-up mistakes. I kind of just stopped posting…I did have a couple calls come in where people were like, “hey, I represent the number one songs on the radio right now. If you give us X amount of dollars, I can almost guarantee you’d be famous.” But I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to pursue a STEM degree, so I kinda turned all of that down to be a normal kid and go to school because the music thing kind of freaked me out a little bit at that time.
NAA: Your music expresses an interesting intersection of elements from rural and urban America. What inspires you?
Druby: I’ve always kinda been an awkward bird. That’s why it’s kind of hard for me to kind of describe my music at this point. It definitely does include a lot of urban elements, especially now I’ve kinda moved in an RnB direction, even have written a couple emo rocker songs on my electric guitar at some point. Song writing is just how I make sense of the world…I came to a point where I realized that most of the music I was listening to, everyone was happy, sexy, and rich all the time. I was none of those things. And a lot of that has been branching out from my own personal struggles with things. Early on, I wrote a lot of songs mostly about myself. But lately, I’ve been writing about other people and a lot of the problems in society that I’ve been noticing. I like how you can use music as a way to create visibility for something and help people feel seen.
NAA: Has there been any change to the way you started to think about music or your creative process when you started looking outwards more?
Druby: I’d say, embarrassingly enough, a lot of it happened when I decided to go sober. I stopped thinking about myself, and I really got out of my head during that time. I’m one of those people where I can’t sleep at night if I know the reality that someone within a quarter mile’s probably going to bed hungry…In the city of engineers where you see Teslas and everybody has their white collar jobs and most people are pretty well off, you realize there’s just this huge wealth divide…I think once I realized that, I realized I can write about my own mental health, and that is super helpful for me, but also those people need to have visibility too. Those people need to be seen. So I think just getting out of my house and getting out of my head and going out into the world and really seeing people struggling really put my own problems and my own struggles into perspective.
NAA: What about your style, with the pigtails, how did that start?
Druby: The braids kind of started it all because I have sensory issues and had to braid it. I don’t know if I would be who I am without that. Who I am on stage is probably the purest version of me. I’m not good at pretending to be someone else. I feel like I’ve done that most of my life. I feel like my Christian music career was me trying to dress up and put a really nice face on. I’ve always been a weirdo, especially when I finally went to therapy and had a psychiatrist and found out I was on the spectrum. I was like, I can’t be anything other than my authentic self 100% of the time. That is me. That’s my weirdness in full view for everyone to see. I call my genre of music “y’alltism.”
NAA: How does your experience being on the spectrum play a role in your creative process?
Druby: I tried to separate the two but then I realized they are pretty much intertwined. Music was always my way of being socially acceptable or successful, I tell people all the time who don’t listen to my music or know my music, I don’t make sense until you listen to my music. Because music is how I tell the stories, music is how I communicate with a communication disorder, it’s how I interface with the world...I think in musical notes too. My whole life, I’ve thought in music. I’m very bad with verbal communication. I’m so bad, I went to college for an English degree to try to overcompensate…But I tried other things. I’ve had many different jobs, I got two different degrees, I ran from music for so long. When I finally accepted it, it’s the purest form of joy. All of my mental health struggles, everything I’ve ever dealt with. I’ve struggled with suicidal ideations since I was 9 years old. For me, music was how I found freedom from all of that. As long as I was playing my guitar, as long as I was singing, I felt free, people didn’t call me a weirdo, it made sense. It is the peak of existence.
NAA: I can imagine the intensity of that experience has its challenges as well.
Druby: It’s everything other than writing and playing music. Social media overstimulates me like you would not believe…That’s why I have 32 songs that I’ve written, probably have over two hours of music, but none of it is on Spotify yet because I get in my own head about trying to do that. That is my biggest challenge as an artist, the human aspect of it. Because I love talking to people, I love putting my music out there, I’ll talk to you about anything that you want, I’ll answer any question, but as soon as I have to get on my phone and actually put my nose to the grindstone and interface with social media and stuff, I crumble like a dry cookie.
NAA: When you were in Huntsville, did you have a favorite place to play in the Huntsville area?
Druby: I love St. Stephen’s, hands down. They’re one of the few venues that says, “please give us all your original music.” I lived in Auburn for a while, and in the country bars, everyone says, “play Tyler Childers, play Morgan Wallen.” When you’re an artist, and you have music that says something very specific to you, to have a venue that just says “hey we love your music, play it for us,” that’s just what every artist wants.
NAA: St. Stephens really does feel like a welcoming space. For Huntsville overall, what could the city do to be better for artists to foster a sense of community?
Druby: Going out there and having more opportunities for house shows. That’s a really good networking opportunity and where you get to actually talk to people and meet humans. A lot of the venues around here are lovely places to play, but you need to balance playing your own music with playing music that makes the bar money that people actually want to hear which may not be yours. And also supporting the humans behind the art. Because if you’re struggling in your personal life, it doesn’t matter how much music you make, you’re going to burn out. I would like to see Huntsville have more of that so artists can keep doing what they do best and not be like Atlas from mythology, holding the weight on their shoulders.
NAA: And finally, what are you working on right now?
Druby: My music has really shifted lately. I’m really excited to debut a lot of the music that I’ve written since I started my sobriety journey. Part of the reason why I left Huntsville is I crashed out—my life fell apart, everything that could have gone wrong went wrong: I got dumped, I totaled my car, went to jail, my parents got divorced, all in just a three week span. I crashed out and I said, all right, I need to go home. But through that process, I feel like I battled my own inner demons and become the person I wanted to be but was afraid to be for fear of judgement…I’m trying to explore what it means to let yourself be happy. I’m really excited to share that with people and share that music of hope.
This interview was recorded on 08/18/2025.
Listen, Connect
YouTube: @DrubyStone
Instagram: @drubystonemusic
Image Credits: Druby Stone
