Issue #77: A case for local music, and thinking outside the hubs

Seeking country without limits, from North Texas to the world

By Natalie

What is your city known for? What does its local tourism board put in advertisements and on pitch deks intended to draw conventions and sporting events? Probably three to five simple destinations and themes, described with what any resident would know is a widely varying degree of accuracy. Unless you live in a few specific places — New York, Nashville, Austin…maybe L.A., Atlanta and Chicago — live music is probably not among them. At least where I live, in Dallas, the major metropolis' music scene is typically presented as a footnote rather than anything worth seeking out on its own merits. 

For context: Dallas and Fort Worth are two separate cities (Dallas is home to 1.3 million people, Fort Worth is about the same size as Austin at just under 1 million people) about a 40-minute drive from one another (we're not talking about a Minneapolis-St. Paul situation here). They have a fairly adversarial relationship in a lot of ways — Fort Worth leans a little more conservative, and many people in both cities go months or years without visiting the other. My husband was wearing an Old 97s (Dallas legends, in case you didn't know) shirt when we were at a bar in Fort Worth recently, and a person at the bar asked if they had played nearby; the answer was no, but they had a Dallas show coming up in a couple weeks. "I'm not going to Dallas," the guy said. Ok then!

But! My husband is originally from Fort Worth, and we basically try to approach the cities as one big musical smorgasbord — North Texas, while not particularly elegant, is the best way to talk about the region (and its many, many, many massive suburbs) as a whole. And to me, North Texas is a bona fide musical destination — a place with rich, specific culture that has had a tangible impact on the national and international scene basically since the dawn of recorded popular music. 

Sure, I'm biased; what I want to argue here, though, is that we should all be a little more biased. Boosterism for local music and art is of a piece with every other kind of local consumption, organizing and solidarity — one more way to counter corporate consolidation and our online world of unmoored algorithms, to ground in place, people and community. From what I've seen lately in my little corner of the world, that looks like an impressively expansive and inclusive vision of country music, one whose national success and impact everyone should understand and our region should be proud of. 

It looks like Ryan Bingham's new festival The Great Western, held in October at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth. Bingham is not from North Texas, but the band he's fronting these days — the Texas Gentlemen — are a crew of Dallas stalwarts (and he also just married a member of one of Dallas' wealthiest families, but I digress). The choice for the bonafide cowboy-turned-singer-songwriter-turned-Yellowstone cowboy to house his festival in Fort Worth was a significant one, driving home the city's enthusiastic embrace of the current cowboy renaissance (and all things Taylor Sheridan, who has shot a number of things around the city) and its accompanying, mostly country music. 

Bingham's vision of country and western, though, was not the Nashville bros as usual. Instead, it was thoughtful and intentionally diverse, spotlighting the transcendent, timeless dancing and drumming of the Indigenous Nations Dance Group right alongside country icon Tanya Tucker. He booked Shaboozey so presciently that country music's latest sensation canceled last minute — having the biggest song in the country makes being the fourth-billed act on a festival less enticing, I'm sure — and featured local boy made good Louie TheSinger, who brought out Paul Wall to perform their single "Down Here." 

During his own set, Bingham brought out another Houston rap legend, Bun B, to perform a full-band arrangement of the UGK classic "One Day" with Bingham singing the hook ("Who was that rapper you brought out? He was great!" someone asked later on Bingham's Facebook page). From top to bottom, the event was about bringing people in, rather than drawing lines around what and who are actually "country." The range of the lineup made the crowd more diverse, and the vibe of the whole thing that much better. It was a vision of a better and broader country music, rather than a shrugging acquiescence to an imagined status quo. 

“I think people just associate me with conservative values because I wear a cowboy hat, have a background of riding bulls, and I sing country music," Bingham said in an interview a few years ago, not long after he was playing campaign events alongside Joe Ely and Hayes Carll for Beto. He wasn't vocally political at the festival, but the space he created was a statement in and of itself.

Last Thursday, I saw T Bone Burnett at a small theater called the Kessler in Dallas — not his hometown of Fort Worth, but nearby. His performance was a testament to his own particular pan-genre perspective on American music, one that he most widely evangelized through the tide-turning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? He played through his entire just Grammy-nominated album The Other Side, stopping often to talk about his various musical theories and ideas and to wax nostalgic about his ties to the area — how the blues and country music, two of his biggest influences, were irrevocably shaped by the cities on the forked end of the Trinity River. 

The next generation of highly skilled North Texas nostalgists were showcased at Dickies a few weeks after Bingham's festival, when Leon Bridges headlined his hometown arena for the first time and brought along a musician he met playing on Deep Ellum street corners: Charley Crockett. The sold-out show was a coronation for Bridges, who is of course not really a country musician but decidedly a Texan one — evidenced by the fact that he brought out Charley to sing "Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?" as part of his encore. Both artists mine sounds of a different vintage that — yes, again, sorry to belabor the point — span genre, and both have become more and more popular doing so. Sounds that are Texan, and country, and blues, and old and new and everything in between.

It was remarkable and more than a little emotional to see Crockett playing to an enthused, arena-sized crowd when it was just a few years ago that he was hustling in Dallas bars, as my husband Jonny chronicled long before the Dallas-bred singer-songwriter was in Grammy conversations. Certainly the crowd wasn't interested in parsing any genre distinctions, as it was simply the place to be in Fort Worth that night for cowboy-hatted good ol' boys, hipster Americana heads and R&B fans alike. The mayor of Fort Worth declared November 15th to be Leon Bridges Day in Fort Worth as a storm of confetti rained down over singer/songwriter and his crowd; Charley and Leon sang together in what seemed like the triumphant closing montage in some too-cheesy movie. To me, the only thing that would have improved it is if they'd sang Charley's composition "Trinity River" together too — a pitch perfect homage to this place, and how its past is alive (to paraphrase our friend Hurray For The Riff Raff) in the great music of its present.

If you've made it this far, thank you! I wanted to write this by way of sharing some exciting news: I'm getting a (streaming) radio show!! On our wonderful local community radio station here in North Texas, KNON. It's called Nothin' But North Texas, and it will focus on the music of this region going all the way back to the beginning (and if you know, you know that the beginning here means people like Robert Johnson and Bob Wills). I'll keep sharing reminders, but it will be Thursdays from 10 am-12 pm CT starting December 5th on KNON Now. I truly can't wait! Already having a blast putting together playlists and doing way too much research.