What happened with Ryan Upchurch? Retiring claim and Deardorff drama explored in wake of series of posts
American rapper and singer Ryan Upchurch recently made headlines by canceling his 2025 tour called 'The Civil Tour' and made several claims naming artists in a series of posts.
On June 10, 2025, Upchurch took to Instagram to post a video saying that he was about to show how to "make some motherf***ers mad" and announced that his tour was cancelled. In the caption, he mentioned that an individual named Deardorff was the reason for the tour's cancellation, adding:
"I’ll announce and put together a tour, when I got some people that wanna work & stop crying on the internet. Deardorff I suggest you tell the interwebz what business meeting you had with jellyrolls wife and what all that was about.. what business meeting was that?"
While there isn't any direct connection between Jelly Roll's wife and Upchurch, the rapper collaborated with Jelly Roll on a 2017 track titled Runnin on Fumes. However, multiple Reddit threads suggest that the feud between Jelly Roll and Upchurch started after the latter allegedly recorded a meeting in secret, held at his house with multiple artists present at the scene.
Upchurch reportedly leaked the recording, stating that he wanted to reveal the industry plants in the community. In one of his recent IG stories, Ryan Upchurch also said that Deardorff indulged in "business with the enemy", referring to Jelly Roll's wife.
"Him and his secret business meetings. lol like he can do business anyways. And ol pistol Pete driskell, you got some explaining to do to. Congratulations boys. You’re now gonna be extremely hated in this community and you f*gs both deserve it," Upchurch wrote in his caption.
It is not known at the time who Pete Driskell or Deardorff are, except for one blogger and motivational speaker called Robert Deardorff that Jelly Roll's wife follows on Instagram.
Is Ryan Upchurch retiring from the industry? Details explored amid tour cancelation drama
Shortly after posting about the cancellation of his tour, Ryan Upchurch uploaded two screenshots without mentioning who the texts in the picture belonged to. In his June 11, 2025, Instagram post, the rapper claimed that one of his associates affirmed that he didn't believe what people said about Upchurch but allegedly went on to badmouth him to someone else.
"This is why I'm not going on tour. 90 percent of my circle is acting like crackheads. The other 10 percent is wondering wtf is wrong with the other 90 percent."" the artist wrote.
Moreover, in another Instagram video on June 12, Ryan Upchurch described an incident that reportedly occurred at his house without giving a timeline of the same. The gist of his story was that Jelly Roll, Deardorff, and Adam Calhoun seemingly came to his residence and hinted at people wanting Upchurch dead.
Not paying heed to their alleged conversation, the rapper said that it was an attempt to make him paranoid and that all of it sounded "pretty suspicious." Following his claims of people in the industry turning against him, Ryan Upchurch posted a video on TikTok announcing that he was "getting out of the music industry."
"I'm putting out my last two albums...and your boy is retiring because the f*cking music industry is too much GD stress and I've beat the game, gotten as far as anybody ever has gotten before," Upchurch said.
However, in a recent Instagram Story dated June 13, 2025, Upchurch posted a screenshot of a comment section conversation. The rapper admitted that he wasn't retiring and that the announcement was to make fun of 'Adam', seemingly reffering to Adam Calhoun.
Jelly Roll and the other artists whom Ryan Upchurch has claimed to be allegedly conspiring against him haven't responded to the allegations yet.
Upchurch has a wide base of viewers given that his YouTube channel boasts over 3 million subscribers and he has been dropping new projects since the last month.
