Jelly Roll may no longer be behind bars, but he’s still keeping in touch with his pals in jail.
“I still got so many friends from my old neighborhood [of] Antioch, Tennessee. I still accept collect calls from jail all the time,” Jelly Roll, 39, said on the Tuesday, June 25, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “They got iPads in there now. God, they are spoiled.”
Jelly Roll looked at the camera as he delivered a message to his pals. “They are watching this, by the way. This is basic cable, I love y’all!” Jelly Roll said, while guest host Martin Short waved and added, “Hey guys!”
During his appearance on the late night show, the “Save Me” singer also opened up about his time in jail. He explained to Short, 74, that he made “horrible decisions” leading to his incarceration as a juvenile.
“I ended up in kind of that rotating door of the system for, like, a decade,” Jelly Roll said. “And I had a daughter, and it changed my entire life, man.”
Jelly Roll “just wept” when he learned of his first child’s birth when he was in prison. He welcomed his daughter, Bailee Ann, with ex-girlfriend Felicia in 2008 and is the father of son Noah Buddy, who he welcomed in August 2016 with ex Melisa. He’s now married to Bunnie XO.
“It’s like the first time I cried,” he recalled of becoming a dad. “I can’t quit crying now. Now I cry if I see a squirrel in the street. I’m like, ‘The little squirrel!’ I spent 30 years not crying and now I can’t stop.”
The “Need a Favor” singer was initially arrested for aggravated robbery at 16 and served one year before being incarcerated for drug dealing at the age of 23.
While in jail, Jelly Roll created music. “I had a lot of time to kill. So I was like, ‘Maybe I should invest this time into something positive.’ And I wrote a lot of songs,” he said.
Since 2023, Jelly Roll has won several awards and opened a recording studio in his former juvenile detention center. He’s also testified in Washington, D.C., about the dangers of fentanyl.
“There were moments in my life that were so dark, there was absolutely no hope or sense of there being something else [other than] that,” Jelly Roll exclusively told Us Weekly earlier this month. “I wouldn’t have known to dream anything otherwise, and definitely not to the extent of what the past year alone has brought.”
