Issue #5: Charley Crockett

Hi and welcome to Don’t Rock the Inbox. We both love country music and write about it (Marissa’s even working on a book about it!), but finding places to do the latter — especially in the thoughtful, inclusive, nuanced way we aim to — has become increasingly challenging. So we’re making something new: specifically, a semi-regular newsletter with essays, interviews and reviews that reflect what’s happening now in country music, using that term’s broadest possible definition. Put a record on and enjoy Don’t Rock The Inbox! — Natalie & Marissa

Q&A: Charley Crockett, contemporary country’s most prolific troubadour

Whatever you think you know about Charley Crockett is probably wrong. The Texas singer and songwriter has lived seemingly a dozen lifetimes in his 36 years, cultivating his distinctive country vintage on street corners and in dark bars across the world — it only makes sense that he’s developed not only a burnished, crowd-pleasing style but a true showman’s consistency, as displayed on his soon-to-be ten albums released over the past six years. Crockett’s voice, deep, warm and earnestly twangy, has a hint of hollowness that adds a haunting edge to what otherwise is a polished, gentle aesthetic.

He just released 10 For Slim: Charley Crockett Sings For James Hand, a tribute to the cult icon of the Texas honky tonk scene and one of Crockett’s close friends. That project was the latest in a series of successful cover albums; it’s his most recent album of his compositions, 2020’s eerily well-timed Welcome To Hard Times, though, that’s brought Crockett his most acclaim and sales to date. Here, he talks about what that’s been like for him, and just what it’s like to make country music right now, period.

How has the pandemic time been treating you?

I’m 36, and I’ve been playing music in front of audiences nonstop. I did the street for 10 years, I played the bars in Texas for years, and then I’ve been touring religiously ever since I got signed to my agent back in 2016, keeping a better than 200-plus show a year clip. I just about killed myself, because I had these heart problems where I didn’t realize how close I was to dying, and then I had these open heart surgeries, and then actually started playing even more shows. 2020 would have been really my busiest year, because my audience is expanding, the press was expanding, the record sales were increasing so we’d been invited to play more festivals than ever, the European and Australian audiences were growing, and I’ve just been the type of artist that always viewed my career as like…I couldn’t afford to say no.

For me, the only way I was going to get a chance to regroup was something beyond the control of even the powerful music business. It changed everything for me, and I have to say that I’ve gained a lot of perspective that I don’t think I could have really gotten when all I’m doing 365 days a year is like living on a bus just trying to keep my breath so I can play the show and be the man that they expect to see onstage, which is their right - and I need to be that person if I’m selling tickets, that’s my job. The break that I’ve been given, in a way, has been good for me, good for my personal relationships, good for my creativity and my health — I think I’m recording even better.

Is it bittersweet having some of your biggest success come during this time?

I had a hard time with it for quite a while. It was really painful. I had three festivals with Willie Nelson. I think I would have met the man, and now I’m not sure I ever will. Not that it’s about me meeting Willie Nelson, but that type of stuff…it was weird to have my highest-selling record in a time where I’m completely isolated.

The thing is, I love playing the shows, but when you play as hard as I was playing — you’ve got people coming into this business that will never play a fifth or a tenth the amount of shows I’ve already played and they’re selling more than all my records over the years have combined. As much as it’s hard not to be playing, it was really gratifying for that record to reach further than anything that I’ve done before.

Everyday, I’m still learning the lesson of what that means. I’ve been working harder than most everyone for a long time, but when I outsell everything I ever did while not being able to rely on what my whole career has been built on — just living on the road — there’s gotta be a lot of lessons in that. That’s what I’m trying to take from it. When you’re just holding onto something, squeezing it and squeezing it and squeezing it, and as soon as you let go, if you’ve got your fist out, knuckles up with this rock in your hand, the only reason it’s in your hand is because you’re clenching it. As soon as you let go, it’s going to leave you. But if you just turn your fist over and open it up, then that thing can rest on your palm. That’s that thing that I’m looking at: we’re gonna get back to it at some point, and I don’t think artists really make the times, I think the times make artists. It’s about the society, it’s about the culture and the economics and all of that.

I’m not a household name or anything like that, but with “Welcome To Hard Times,” my reach has greatly expanded just because of that song, which I’d already picked as the record title and all of that based on my own life up to the end of 2019. It didn’t have a damn thing to do with 2020. There was no way for me to know that America was going to be on her knees. I had been on my knees, and then it just hit, and it resonated.

I was able to pour all my energy into how we were going to get the word out about it. That really opened up my world from just trying to keep sane enough to play my shows. I’ve been able to spend the whole year not only thinking about how to get the word out about my records, but how to take better care of myself. That’s a big deal, because I’ve got this big scar down the middle of my chest that I’m looking at everyday. It’s easier not to worry about your health when you’re on the road 24/7, and you’re just trying to wake up to crawl out of your bunk and play the show. But my friend James Hand, who was like my biggest influence as a country music artist and a cult figure in the Texas honky tonk world, passed away unexpectedly this summer from heart stuff, and I don’t know that he would have died right then if not for the complications with the hospitals, and them being overwhelmed by the pandemic this summer.

When I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, it’s like man, you’ve got a cow valve in your heart. You’ve been given a second chance, you damn near killed yourself. What can I do better than before? Like, is the goal here always to work harder, or are you finally getting a little old enough to start thinking about how you can work a little smarter? I think I had this fear that I wouldn’t be as effective, or as good a singer if I wasn’t like, playing six nights a week, and none of that’s true. In some ways, I’m more creative because I’m not just in a bus, in a parking lot behind a venue.

I’m sure it still feels risky to perform.

I have a serious heart condition, a couple of overlapping ones. That type of thing makes you see stuff like this differently. And my mama works in healthcare, she actually works at Cook’s Childrens in Fort Worth. Because of my congenital issues, I’m not more likely to catch something like coronavirus, but I would have a harder time beating it. I don’t have the luxury of letting my politics convince me what is or isn’t real. I have to deal with the fact that I’ve seen people who are healthy and in their twenties die from this shit. My cousin in Austin got it, and she’s not necessarily someone who you would think it would be a big deal for. She was like, “Man it took me a month to beat this thing.”

I don’t mean to be political, but it’s like that MLK quote: “America has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” I hate to be preaching it, but ain’t that what 2020 has been? It’s like, well, if you’ve got money, you’re good, you’re out vacationing on the ranch waiting for the storm to end while all the fucking poor people are out taking risks in the street. That’s just real.

But the way that I look at country music, and the way that I blend styles to and the way I impact people, I don’t want to alienate people who don’t think like me. I would never tell any of those folks that I don’t agree with that I don’t want them paying attention to me anymore. That doesn’t mean that I want to censor myself.

It would be very easy for me to just build an audience that thought like me. But I think whenever you’re trying to go to a larger audience, to a more general audience in country music and Americana and roots and R&B and blues and soul, you’ve gotta have a way to communicate with people, and I want to be able to reach people that....we wouldn’t necessarily agree with eachother. That’s why I’m not necessarily out here picking fights, and I also really try to put a lot of it in the music.

I don’t know an artist trying to reach a large American audience who doesn’t walk a line. It’s a tightrope walk. I really try to channel it into the music, and I’m just being honest with you, I don’t want to spend all my time on my platform preaching to people. Because I want them all to listen to me, to hear the songs. If you want to impact culture, and I’m not telling anybody what to do, it’s their prerogative — I really try to put it into the songs as much as I can. I like to think that the way that I live, and how I run my business and conduct myself, and the message that I have in my music reaches people.

I was just listening to “A Stolen Jewel” this morning.

I’ve been thinking about recutting that one.

The fact that you released that in 2015, pre-Trump — obviously evergreen topic, but…

That’s a topical one for me. It’s so funny, they’ll call you a reverse racist. I would hear that type of shit, and when I’ve been accused of that — which doesn’t happen that often, because you’d be surprised how often that one goes over people’s heads in spite of how topical it is — I’ve been asked about that before, and I actually wrote that particular song thinking about the Native American perspective during the pioneer days. You might not like that, but if you look at the history, that was genocide. How many Native Americans are you hanging out with?

I’ve been doing these solo shows at these reduced-capacity venues, and just being really honest with you, of course I’m really nervous about all this stuff, but the way that I’ve been doing it recently, candidly…When I’m solo, in front of a sit-down audience, just me and the guitar, it’s not as easy to slip “Stolen Jewel” in there when you don’t have the full band and I can really throw my voice a little bit. To be honest with you, I also don’t want to get shot. Given what we’ve seen in the past four years, I think that there’s distinct possibilities of that type of shit when you offend people. What I started doing, instead of saying “White man is tradin’ land and gems,” I started going “That man is tradin’ land…” Just by going from “White man” to “That man” makes it to where I can still make some people uncomfortable who need to feel uncomfortable, and then I can get the other people, who probably should also be uncomfortable, loving it.

I’m 36 — when I was 26, I was a lot more angry. In my anger, I realized that people weren’t listening to me. They really weren’t. It’s not that I’ve toned myself down, it’s that I’ve learned to speak through my art. Everybody should go with where their heart is at, though. My goal here is to have an audience, and by selling records I get to continue to do this. On Welcome to Hard Times, I put my message throughout the record. People of all political backgrounds can relate to the message of the title track, which is like, “The game is rigged and the dice are loaded.” I wasn’t writing that song for conservatives or liberals, I was writing from my own life experience. In America, you have a better chance to make your way than anywhere in the world, and I’ve been in a lot of countries - but that doesn’t mean that the odds aren’t stacked against you. It just means that they’re stacked against you even worse everywhere in the world, and America has a lot to do with that. In America, the choice that you have is not freedom, it’s whether or not you recognize that you’re in a casino.

What I’ve noticed about “Blackjack County Chain,” whether they’re Black or white or Latino, that song can speak to people — if you’re African-American, that chain gang aspect is going to have a different significance. But no matter your background, people relate to being unjustly incarcerated and used. The blue collar white working class, no matter what you do, you can’t convince those people they’re not in a rigged system as well. That’s again, there’s social privilege there that a lot of people are blind to. But what I’ve really noticed about America, shaking hands in every city, every state, meeting every kind of person, is that whether I agree with it or not, all people feel like they’re fighting great battles and feel like they’re being discriminated against.

That’s not my opinion, that’s just me seeing how people feel. That’s one of the great challenges of America. You just have to kind of decide at some point: do I want to speak only to an audience that thinks like me, or do I want to speak to a wider audience? That doesn’t mean I’m going to censor myself. But I’m not going to stop anybody from listening to me, because I actually want to change people’s minds about the world! Not just about racial issues or gender issues, but I want to change people’s minds about their viewpoint of the world.

It’s interesting too, moving from New York to Texas and seeing with my own eyes that a lot of the people who listen to your music are not the people I would have expected — not, basically, people like myself, who consider themselves progressive and live in major cities.

It surprises me too. At first, when I was playing in bars for free, the audience was just different. When you go to a larger audience, what you end up having is what you’re talking about. We have all this demographic data from social media and streaming services, and it looks incredibly spread across the spectrum. In country music, or in roots music, I have people that are listening to me for the really rootsy classic country sound, and then I have a lot of people that really want to hear more of the soul and blues side. But I’ve always blended them together — and whenever you do that, you end up speaking to a lot of people with really diverse viewpoints. It’s kind of like with politicians, and the only difference is because of our art, we get to tell the truth.

I was listening to your podcast with Diplo, and I loved how you brought up early Willie Nelson and his pre-outlaw career, and how even though that period isn’t necessarily given as much critical respect, it actually contains a lot of interesting experimentation.

That’s all I really listen to, to be honest with you. I have somewhat of an unpopular opinion: I’m not really that interested in what those guys started doing when they went outlaw. Some of what Willie did in the outlaw movement is what I would call the very best of that stuff, but with Johnny Paycheck and Waylon and them, those guys were far better singers before they really hit the gravy train. These guys weren’t selling records in the ’60s, particularly Waylon and Willie. As soon as you put on the earlier stuff, people just tune out.

I was up in Nashville a little while ago, sitting in this really important dude’s mansion, and it’s just that same shite. They start playing outlaw Waylon, and there was a well-known guitar player in there, and they were all like nerding out over Waylon. As soon as you start playing “Stop the World (And Let Me Off)” and any of that stuff, they just gloss over it.

How do those influences fit into your sound?

James [Hand] had this ability to record and write songs that sounded like Hank Williams wrote ‘em — and then he could also tap into like, Gary Stewart. Or even the early ’80s George Strait stuff. I’m really, really proud of the people who are like, “I always felt excluded from country, but I love what you’re doing.” That’s huge for me. I also have the people who grew up on classic country, and who are like, “I left country music behind a long time ago, but I like what you’re doing.” That’s why I go back to that type of stuff.

The only songs I’ve ever had in a Billboard top ten were “Good Time Charley’s Got The Blues” and “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” I’m probably most well-known for Tanya Tucker’s “Jamestown Ferry,” which was ‘72; and if you want to really talk about a kind of pop/r&b/country crossover synthesis there’s Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” which is the first song I’ve ever had register on the AAA charts. Because of that crossover! There was a very cool thing happening in the late ’60s, early ’70s with country music, and even past that. I’m like, maybe people are put off by the production or something, but I’m going to re-record this, and they’re going to love it.

They call me country now, which I’m not mad about — I really love the fact that I get to like, have a say in what country music sounds like. To me, that’s a very cool thing. It’s very hard to impact American music under the label of pop or Americana. I’m grateful for Americana music, even though I just thought it was a breed of chicken until five years ago. Country music, to me, it is Americana, it is American. You can come at it like Ray Price, who sounds almost operatic, or you can come at it like Hank Williams or George Jones and sound bluesy. In this era, you just put a cowboy hat on and that’s it — or you have a snapback and a gun on your hip or something.

I mean, talking about labels - do you see the degree of acceptance in country for Black artists shifting at all?

I don’t think you could categorize me as a Black artist, because I’m majority white. People will just see me and automatically call me half-Black, or mix all that up. A lot of people call me African-American, and I’ve never claimed to be that. I have that heritage in my background, but it’s a minority part of my blood. I’m mostly white but I’m just different enough that country people are really weird about it. In country music, people just look at me and it’s like, “What’s Steph Curry doing wearing a cowboy hat?” A lot of people see me as white, a lot of people see me as Black. A lot of people see me as somebody safely in-between, which just kind of makes you like a weird outcast.

How has your own identity impacted (or not impacted) your career?

I’ve got country boys in West Texas that don’t see me as anything but a cowboy like them. Then there are urban people looking at me as like, representing diversity in country music. As I got older, and got a larger platform, it was kind of shocking how much people projected their viewpoints or stereotypes of what I am. Growing up I got that stuff, and on the street I got it a little, where Black people always looked at me weird, and white people would kind of think of me a certain way without saying anything, but it wasn’t really until I got a much larger audience that I realized just how much people got confused by my unique look.

Then there’s the weirdness of the Jewish heritage on my mother’s side — for some reason anybody and everybody can make fun of Jewish people pretty safely. It’s very uncommon and taboo to be Jewish at all in roots music. Bob Dylan, he changed his damn name. All my family on the West Coast were Russian Jews that immigrated here to escape the oppression that goes back to the original Exodus. The shit that people said about Jewishness when I was growing up in the South, made it to where you just didn’t bring it up, to be honest. Jewish people are white until those people seize control, and then you’re not white anymore. It’s a weird thing. Nobody really wants to talk about that, they just want to talk about the Black and white stuff — which I understand. But everybody else is kind of left on the outside. —NW

Some new songs we like:

“Don’t Let Me Die In Waco,” Croy and the Boys: It is not even a slight exaggeration to say that this song has been in my head for three straight weeks — and I’m not even a little sick of it. In fact, whenever I hear them sing the chorus (I won’t spoil it for you), I feel a practically pre-pandemic level of glee. Maybe it’s because I live in Texas now and am fairly immersed in the minutiae of local college sports, or maybe it’s because I’ve driven through Waco like six times in the last few months. I think it’s probably just because this is an extremely good and, more importantly, fun song. —NW (I know it’s not that new but it’s important)

“Paradise,” Sturgill Simpson: I’m not sure if there is a tribute album that I’ve listened to as much as Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows, which found the likes of Conor Oberst and Justin Vernon offering their renditions of John Prine songs - it’s a testament, perhaps, to just how damn good Prine’s writing was that his words could live in so many bodies, through so many different voices, and sound both them and him all at once. We’re getting a second edition soon, and this cover of “Paradise” by Sturgill is the perfect, wrenching introduction. As the last song recorded at the Prine and David Ferguson-operated studio, the Butcher Shoppe, it embodies the sick human paradox of repeatedly destroying beauty in favor of progress. Luckily, no wrecking ball can tear through the strength of a song. - MRM

“See You Around,” Tebey: Pretty sure we’ve established at this point that if a song has a good bounce and a banjo lick I am sold — but there are so many substandard takes on that formula floating around right now that this one made me extra happy. —NW

“In His Arms,” Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, Jon Randall: Am I extremely, beyond-words excited for this trio’s project, The Marfa Tapes? Oh yes. But I am also just simply in awe of Miranda Lambert, who can go from singing with Elle King about getting hammered and sloppy one moment with a rock n’ roll growl to a stripped-down Texas folksong the next. How can one person have a talent this vast, this flexible? She does. - MRM

“Hold It Together,” Miko Marks: A necessary, groovy reminder from a friend of the newsletter — go listen to her new album! —NW

“Heard It Through the Red Wine,” Charlie Marie: I was a huge fan of Charlie Marie’s 2019 EP, and this steel guitar-heavy twanger gives her honkytonk a gorgeous warmth that could exist both in Lauren Canyon or East Texas. But, I cannot empahsize this enough, a fuckload of twang. - MRM

“Texas Swing,” Triston Marez ft. Squeezebox Bandits and Jessica Roadcap: Just good vibes (and the Squeezebox Bandits play all over DFW! Huzzah for local bands). Two-stepping with Tejano flair is my personal 2021 mood board.—NW

“Oklahoma,” Grace Pettis: Loose, bright and expansive — a pitch-perfect windows-down-on-the-highway feeling. —NW

“Hell You Raised,” Mae Estes: I was initially a little too embarrassed to cop to liking “Best Side,” but both songs are smart, fun and make me optimistic to hear what else Mae has in store.—NW

“Blueneck,” Chris Housman: Apparently this song blew up on TikTok, which is not something this ancient person understands. What I do understand is the fun and truth in this song that includes the lyric “George Strait or George gay, there’s no difference.” I mean, come on! I love it. - MRM

“You Can Have Him Jolene”, Chapel Hart: I think I cheered out lout when I first heard this trio play their own “Jolene” response song, in which the protagonist stops worrying and pining about the man and tells him to nicely fuck off once and for all (“he’s your problem now,” they warn). I think Dolly would approve. - MRM

“Fist Through This Town,” Charlie Worsham: Anyone can write a song about the frustrations of making it in Nashville - and many have. Few are willing to write, though, about their frustrations with the fates of others, too. That’s the empathy of Charlie Worsham: he wants you to succeed just as much as he does. - MRM

P.S. Have you checked out Black Opry yet?

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