Country star Charley Crockett stopped by WYEP for a Live & Direct session on Monday, July 15. Rosemary Welsch talked to him about his new album, “$10 Cowboy,” before he played Stage AE that night.
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Welsch: Charley Crockett is here with us. And I have to say, Charley Crockett is the perfect name for someone getting into the country genre. It’s just ideal. But that’s what you were born with. Before we went live on air, I asked if you ever get nervous performing, and you said you do. Are you serious about that?
Crockett: I’m not lying.
Welsch: You’ve literally played everywhere — from subways to street corners. When do you not get nervous? I mean, you’ve been in every situation a singer could be in.
Crockett: You know, it sounds strange. I remember when I first learned how to play music in front of people. I taught myself guitar and played on street corners, in public parks, on the highway side, sitting in the back of people's cars, and on ranches and farms. If you weren’t thinking about it too much and you were listening to what I’m saying, you’d think that those places would be nerve-wracking — playing and panhandling in subway cars in New York City or San Francisco probably sounds pretty scary. But the thing about that is, there’s a lot of laws you’re breaking, but there’s no politics. There’s no parlor floor or social scene to worry about. When you step off a street corner into this part of it, there’s a lot more of that to deal with.
Welsch: Am I correct in thinking this is your 15th album that you’re releasing?
Crockett: Yes, that’s right. Rosemary, the “$10 Cowboy” was number 14. We haven’t told anyone yet, but my 15th album is coming out in a week or two. I cut my 16th album with a guy named Shooter Jennings. You know who that is? We did that back in March.
Welsch: Wow. I have to ask you about your work ethic. To put out that many records — first of all, a lot of people have only been discovering you in the last few years, but you’ve been recording albums for a long time. I’m curious about the conditions under which some of those albums came to be.
Crockett: The first album that anyone would be able to find is Stolen Jewel. I recorded that in an old farmhouse with a few other hands working for a farmer in Mendocino County. We cut it after the harvest season. The farmer’s boss lady was out of the country for a month, which was the only way I could have recorded it. It was kind of like working on Maggie’s farm, but not that bad. It was a cash crop.
Welsch: So now you’re talking about recording at Sunset Sound. That’s quite a change. Were you nervous about going into such a legendary studio? Did it feel like you had to approach things differently? What was the atmosphere like?
Crockett: For “$10 Cowboy, the album I put out in April, I recorded it at Arlen Studios. I’m from South Texas, from the Rio Grande Valley, and now I live outside of Austin. I’m proud to be based in Texas. The music business hasn’t really grown up in Texas, and what’s seen as a blind spot in Nashville, L.A., or New York is actually one of the best things about Texas. Bands in Austin aren’t working a scene like they are in those other towns. I think that makes us sound different.
Arlen is the best studio there, hands down. To answer your question, I didn’t feel like I had any business being in Sunset Sound for a long time. I was so nervous and didn’t think I deserved it. But when we recorded $10 Cowboy, it wasn’t about arriving or feeling important. It was about shaking off all the industry pressure. The better you do, the more industry people show up, and the more you tell them no, the more they want you. It’s strange. There’s a lot of pressure to do things a certain way, to write songs by committee. In Nashville, someone brings you coffee, and their name shows up on the song. I was bucking against that.
What I wanted to do was record my songs the way I like them. I can start songs but have a hard time finishing them, so I book many sessions. There’s nothing like a studio session where you’re paying a lot of money to finish a song on the spot. I wanted to have 8 to 12 people recording live. Arlen was the only studio in Austin that could accommodate that many people on the floor together. That’s why I went there. When I went to Sunset Sound, it was similar. I was so happy with the sound I got at Arlen and was surprised by it. I wasn’t in my head because we bought the place out. We locked it out, and there wasn’t anyone in there I didn’t know or who was there because some suit in L.A. said they should be. Well, there was for a minute, and I kicked them out.
Welsch: I’m sure there’s a story there. Also, working with Shooter Jennings—he must have something to teach you. I’m sure of it.
Crockett: You know, I signed my first deal with a booking agent right off a street corner in Central Texas. We have a famous dance hall called Gruene Hall in Gruene Texas. We mispronounce everything in that state—it’s spelled G-R-U-E-N-E, but don't get me started on the Spanish pronunciation. We always get them wrong. When I sang “Brazos” on The Man from Waco, I didn’t realize they say “Brazos” in that town, and they corrected me, which is ironic.
I got my first booking agent while handing out CDs across from Green Hall because I couldn’t afford to get in. It was $40, and I didn’t have it. I was handing out Stolen Jewel CDs, still working street corners, playing all my songs in front of Moses’ bar, and handing out CDs. If you even looked at me, you got a CD. If you made a mistake giving me money, we had a conversation.
One day, Evan Felker of the Turnpike Troubadours, from Oklahoma, stopped to talk to me. I didn’t know who he was at the time or that he was headlining the hall across the street. Soon after, I ended up with his same agent, John Folk, a Texan based in Nashville. I opened for Turnpike all over America, including Pittsburgh, over the course of a couple of years.
Another artist booked by John Folk was Shooter Jennings. He was one of the first guys to take me out. He told me, “When you get a bus, here’s a pro tip: you can park behind the Nashville Palace in that parking lot. You’re not supposed to, but they won’t kick you out.” I told Shooter the other night that he doesn’t realize how valuable that advice was to me. We pitched a tent and lived back there.
Short story even longer: Shooter and I had been talking about making a record for years. I think I wouldn’t have been worth much early on when he was talking about doing it. I had wanted to record at Sunset Sound for a while. A guy I’d made a couple of records with named Mark Neal from South Georgia—he’s the one I made Welcome to Hard Times with in Valdosta, Georgia—had told me about Sunset Sound. Bill Withers cut some of his biggest hits there.
I got it in my mind that I wanted to record there. Mark backed out and got nervous; I think he was afraid to go in there with me and do it on my terms. He wanted to prepare everything up front and control it, which is fine. I learned a lot from him. But that fell apart. A few months later, almost a year later, Shooter mentioned offhand that he had signed the lease on Studio Three at Sunset in downtown Hollywood.
I said, “Man, I can’t believe that. I was trying to cut a record there last summer, and it didn’t work out.” He asked if I wanted to do it with him, and I said okay. We didn’t think much about it; I just brought all my guys out from Austin. We got in there, didn’t really know what we were going to record, and put the album together in about ten days.
Welsch: A little album — “$10 Cowboy” — is out now. It’s no little album at all. Tonight, there will be a lot of people buying tickets to see you, so you’ll have plenty of conversations at the stage. If you’ve just tuned in, it is Charley Crockett, and we are thrilled to have you here.
Welsch: Charley Crockett is here with us. He's got a new album, “$10 Cowboy.” Tonight is the place to check him out. When did you know this was it for you, that this was what you were supposed to do? I mean, from what I understand, you’ve been doing it for a very, very long time.
Crockett: Yeah. My girl says I’m the second oldest man alive. So who’s older than me? She says Willie.
Welsch: Somebody you have played with, you know, your life. People like to talk about your life because it’s quite the story — an itinerant lifestyle for so many years. What’s the biggest misconception people have about living an itinerant life?
Crockett: Oh, I don’t know about misconceptions. When you see somebody who’s truly itinerant, you often think of people panhandling. It’s a career of last resort. I’m not talking about a college-educated musician who goes down to the street corner in the afternoon to make some money and buy a beer. I’m talking about hard luck and circumstances. I didn’t have it as hard as some people, but my mama got me a guitar out of a pawn shop. We lived in a tiny place, and I didn’t want to mess around. So I learned how to play outside and kept going in that direction.
I always say I didn’t have a choice, but anything could have happened differently. I had gotten into so much trouble that I didn’t think there was another way to go. So I stayed out on the street at first. Being in New Orleans late at night playing music was the closest I got to the idea of being free. At least in pursuit of what they teach you in school. I found it on the street corner, and then you just keep going once you’re out there in that wilderness.
Welsch: You’ve recorded a lot of other people’s music, done covers, and played on the street. That’s a good place to start. How did covering other people’s music help you when you wanted to write your own? Probably the toughest thing is having something to say and knowing how to say it. When did that start happening for you? When did you figure out what you had to offer?
Crockett: I remember when I was falling in with the street crowd in New Orleans, in the French Quarter. We were playing on Royal Street. I met one of my very best friends, Charlie Mills Jr., on the corner of Toulouse and Royal. He’s from Algiers, across the river from downtown New Orleans. I ended up living with him and his then-girlfriend, who later became his wife.
We would walk a mile or two to catch the streetcar, ride it to the canal, walk into the Quarter, and play all day at different spots. I carried an electric guitar to push our way onto stages at blues clubs and jams around the Quarter and Saint Roch neighborhood. There was an older generation of street players who could remember a time before the streets were paved. They talked about all the players who came before us.
One woman, Doreen the Jazz Queen, led a family band that held down a corner in front of Rouses. They had become world-famous. Her husband played tuba, her daughter played drums, and Doreen was a masterful clarinet player. They took a liking to us early on and let us play there when they were out of town or done for the day. We’d pick up where they left off.
Doreen’s husband told us, “You boys pay attention to this traditional New Orleans music. It doesn’t matter where you want to go. This foundation will get you there. You can do anything you want, but you need to get this traditional music in you.” I took that advice to heart.
I started trying to play music immediately, but I couldn’t hold the regular chords. I kept showing off these other chords. Jazz was natural for me, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. My early songs weren’t any good, and I hope nobody ever finds them. Once I started learning Jelly Roll Morton songs, young Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and other early New Orleans material, I began to understand how to grasp it.
You think you can come up with art out of thin air, but it’s really about what’s been passed down to you. It’s about having something to say and saying it, built on the foundation laid down before you. I found a lot of songs and a lot more bourbon whiskey on the street. Those songs are floating around in a river of amber.