Swamp Dogg has written for Johnny Paycheck, landed a song on a Kid Rock blockbuster, cut tracks with John Prine, Jenny Lewis and Beck, and been the subject of a documentary about having his swimming pool painted. Across a career of more than seven decades and 31 albums, the man born Jerry Williams Jr. in Portsmouth, Virginia, has collected just about every badge of cult-hero status except one.

"I'd love to get a Grammy," he says. "I've never been up for one."

That could change this season. Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife, his debut for Steve Greenberg's S-Curve Records, came out digitally on Juneteenth, and his team is making the case for it as Grammy voting gets underway. It is a 10-song meditation on mortality from an artist who turned 84 in July, and who would like everyone to know he isn't going anywhere.

"You can't get Swamp out of here that easy," he says.

Swamp Dogg's records usually ricochet between genres. This one, he says, is different. "There was more emphasis put on lyrics than going into different styles," he says.

The lyrics lean toward death, though he is quick to say that isn't a premonition. Longevity runs in the family. "My family lives to be 103, 104," he says. "On my mother's side."

The album opens with "Searching for Heaven" and closes with "Final Approach," a shape that makes it feel like a deliberate arc. He credits that to Greenberg, who co-produced the record with Mike Mangini, Sam Hollander and Swamp Dogg himself. "That wasn't really what I had in mind, but it fell that way," he says. "Steve Greenberg actually did the sequencing, but he also loved 'Searching for Heaven,' and that ended up being the first song on the album. ... He loved that and he was crazy about his sequencing."

He is also quick to share credit for the ideas. "There's a lot of other thoughts from other people in this album," he says, "basically the way people feel about the afterlife."

"Final Approach" name-checks Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Chuck Willis, each of whom had a signature song come out after he died. Swamp Dogg doesn't read those songs as farewells. "I'm imagining that possibly they were rushing life and didn't realize it," he says. He knew Redding personally. "That's not where he was," he says. "He wasn't planning to be in no plane." The timing of those songs, he says, was "just a coincidence."

Nor is his own song a forecast. "I was just describing how it could happen," he says. "I'm not thinking about how it will happen." Asked whether the airplane metaphor puts him in the pilot's seat, in control of his own destiny, he agrees. "Well, yeah. My mind is free."

If the album has a heart, it is his late wife, Yvonne. They were together from the early 1960s until her death in 2003. "My wife was my life," he says. "She was my hero, and she helped me grow. She actually raised me because I had a boy's mentality at the time."

Sometime in the late 1970s, he recalls, she drew a line: "Hey, you are grown now. Act like it."

Yvonne had four daughters when they met, the oldest about six. "I fell in love with them right away, and I put them all through college," he says. A fifth daughter followed, and she now manages his career. He grew up the same way, surrounded by women; his mother's family brought him home to Portsmouth from Maine before he turned one. "I was raised in a house with just strong, strong women," he says. "That's where my inspiration comes from. ... Usually even when I'm collaborating with someone else, my mind goes back to Yvonne, my wife, and the women that raised me."

He doesn't expect to see them again in some heavenly reunion. "I don't believe it," he says. That skepticism has an origin story. In first grade at Catholic school, he talked too much in class, and the principal, a nun, took him into the hallway and paddled him with a yardstick. Then she put a finger on his nose. "Mr. Williams, you're not going to live to see 21."

At six, he shrugged it off. As 21 approached, he didn't. He spent the eve of his 21st birthday at a big party in Miami, anxious that a woman with what he assumed was a direct line to God knew something. "Once 12 o'clock passed, I felt so much better," he says. That was the moment he decided she was wrong.

Later revelations about abuse by Catholic priests finished the job. "The God that we speak of cannot be the God that these people are worshiping or trying to live like," he says. But he never stopped believing. "I'm not atheist material," he says. "I don't know how to make water, which is one of the simplest things we deal with. Just that alone lets me know that there's someone greater than me or something greater than me."

The rest is unknowable, and he's at peace with that. Nobody, he notes, comes back to report. "You just have to wait and see for yourself." Is he afraid of death? "No, not anymore. Used to be," he says. "I'm not looking for it. ... I'm really mellow."

The album's two covers come from friends. The first is Jenny Lewis' 2008 song "Acid Tongue," which Greenberg brought to him. "I was not aware of the song until he introduced me to it," Swamp Dogg says. "And when I heard it by her, I liked it ... and I could relate to it because I guess everybody has the same story."

His version of that story starts around 1966, when he says he was tricked into taking LSD from a spiked punch bowl. "I still blame the acid for a lot of the [things] that I did and a lot of the [things] that I didn't do that I should have done," he says. He struggled for years afterward and credits Yvonne with pulling him through. "Thank God for Yvonne again," he says. "I worked through it."

He met Lewis through producer Ryan Olson, and she sang on his 2024 album Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St. "I liked the voice," he says simply. "With what I wanted to do, she made it happen." She'll appear on the album he's working on now, too.

The second cover, "Please Don't Bury Me," honors a much older friendship. Swamp Dogg and John Prine go back to 1968.

"There's four songs out in the market with John and I," he says. "And I wrote them all. ... It says a lot about how John felt about my [music]."

Prine died in 2020, but he'll stay part of the catalog. "I'm going to always do a John Prine song in every Swamp Dogg album," he says. "I've got songs picked out now."

Swamp Dogg played five shows at AmericanaFest in Nashville this year. Why so many? "They were booked. I guess somebody wanted me," he says. "I'll do as many shows as people want. I like doing shows. Keeps me alive."

He defines Americana as "basically folk music and bluegrass and a little bit of blues mixed in." His own music he calls blackgrass: rhythm and blues and country thrown together, played on two guitars, banjo, pedal steel and sometimes horns. "To me, it's freedom," he says. "That's what blackgrass to me is. It's like musical freedom ... because I'm not just stuck to one thing. ... I may hit three, four genres when I'm on stage."

That freewheeling streak extends to his famously strange album covers, over which he usually has complete control. On 1970's Total Destruction to Your Mind, he's sitting on a pile of junk behind LaGuardia Airport in the snow. On 1971's Rat On!, he rides a giant white rat, which he says stands for the white man, with the Black man on top. Look closer, he says, and the rat is smiling, "because he knows or he feels that the black man is not going to be up on top for long." Gag a Maggot followed, its title a boast that the record was so funky it could do just that. "A maggot is one of the nastiest [creatures] you can get," he says. "And if you can make him gag, you got something funky."

The new cover, by designer David Gorman, renders him like a saint in a church painting, halo and all. "I love it," he says. "There was two or three passes on this, but the end result I'm happy with."

The rat, meanwhile, lives on at the bottom of his pool, the centerpiece of the 2024 documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted. The film didn't change his life, he says, but it helped. "I've got a bigger audience and people are learning more about me," he says. "Just the idea of [someone] making a movie or being in a movie piques people's interest."

Swamp Dogg has brushed up against the Grammys before. Doris Duke, an artist he managed and produced, was in the running around 1971, he says, and he made the shortlist as a writer on Johnny Paycheck's "She's All I Got." That one stalled, he believes, because Paycheck's wild reputation worked against him. "He had talent," Swamp Dogg says. "I liked him. We became friends."

He's also had his name called at the Americana Honors & Awards, where he lost. Still, he insists awards were never the point. "I've never been one to chase things like that," he says. "And I always like other people's stuff better than mine. There's so many songs that I wish I had written."

By that standard, Contemplates the Afterlife is the work of an artist still adding dimensions at 84, with another album already in progress. Asked whether we might finally meet in person at the Grammys, he doesn't hesitate.

"Ooh," he says. "That'd be great."