MADE IN THE USA

Charley Crockett confounds expectations once again on his latest album, Music City USA.

By Denise Hylands

““I have never lost

my love for writing songs, learning songs,

and playing at places. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing except I’d like to “

have some horses.”

MADE IN THE

Charley Crockett is the man behind his guitar with a musical education that came from playing on the streets, busking in subways, hopping freight trains, hitchhiking across the country travelling from New York to New Orleans to Paris, France. He plays real country music, reviving it and keeping it alive. “Country music to me is folk music, American folk music that expresses the struggle, the toil of everyday Americans,” says Crockett, the 37-year-old of mixed black, Cajun, Creole and Jewish heritage who was raised by a single mother in a Texas trailer park. “When I was on the street, I came to be known and associated with country music because of the storytelling. Where people can hear I’m telling my story and people can relate to that. Hard issues of love and loss, of tragedy. I guess that’s part of what I like about country music is the tragedy and the longing, or the struggle that those stories tell.” The struggles of life come up many times in Crockett’s songs. He has endured the collapse of the recording industry, no money, petty crime, COVID 19 pandemic, open-heart surgery, one-night stands, long distance rides in a van, loud truck stops and diners serving stale lukewarm coffee to get to where he is now. “Yeah, Hank Williams said in his short life, ‘You’d have to have surveyed a whole lot of countryside on the back of a mule to know something about country music and being able to sing it’,” remarks Crockett. “They told me the whole way that, ‘You can’t sing like that,’ ‘You can’t put out records like that,’ ‘You can’t play guitar like that,’ ‘You can’t work with these independent agents.’ I was just told the entire way that my style of doing things wasn’t going to work. But I was largely being told that by people who had never done any of it. “I found myself with a guitar on a street corner, that looked to me like the only way to go. I would never have it any other way. The business is hard, the music business is shady and it’s difficult. It’s full of hucksters and shysters and a lot of people in positions of power who think they got a magic wand, and they don’t. I have never lost my love for writing songs, learning songs, and playing at places. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, except I’d like to have some horses. I just don’t really have time to take care of them.” “I’ll tell you my secret,” he continues, “My secret is I’ve never been able to afford to say no. I don’t see that changing. You got to make hay while the sun is shining, and God led the people that have come before us in music, and America, and in the soul circuit, and the blues circuit, in the country world. They work hard, and those folks came from nothing, and if they could work as hard as they did, I can too.” Unfortunately, last year, Crockett’s friend James ‘Slim’ Hand, another Texas singer songwriter, passed way and he recorded the album 10 For Slim as a tribute album to him. “In my eyes, he was the king of Texas honky tonk music,” says Crockett of his friend. “I first heard about him, I just started seeing posters of him around Texas, this mysterious cowboy that had a hunched over gait like Hank Williams. There was a quote on these posters by Willie Nelson, it said, ‘James Hand is the real deal.’ I thought, ‘Who is this guy that looks like Hank Williams that Willie Nelson is signing off on?’ He really set me on a path of identifying more and more with country music that I’ve been associated with from time to time. Being a street guy that was trying to come into the bars, I only really knew how to identify myself with the blues. I never saw a performer really in my life that struck me, that affected me the way that James did. “I saw him, as a street guy, as a self-made person, that wasn’t getting any favours done in my name. He was somebody that I looked at as truly the real deal, like Willie said. He became my friend and we got to play together, and I promised him I was going to record his songs. He had decided that he was going to come out on the road with us last year, and let the band back him up, and then, the world shut down, and then he went on up to the house, and it affected me so heavily.” When we think of Music City USA we tend to think Nashville, but for his album Crockett went down to Georgia to record with his good friend Mark Neill, who also produced Welcome to Hard Times and the great videos that accompanied the songs. “It’s kind of strange,” says Crockett. “Mark Neill, in a similar way to James Hand, was this elusive character, that the deeper I went into touring in the South, the more his name mysteriously would come up. And, you’d hear the name and people would act funny, or look at you sideways, like he was some kind of secret. Then eventually after years of hearing about him, he just reached out to me and he said, ‘Would you like to shake up the country music world and make a record with me?’ “I was so deeply impacted by the high art that country music had achieved in the sixties, that it was as if he could see it in my mind. So, I took that dive with him and now I’ve recorded something like 35 songs, 40 songs with him down there. My experience with Mark Neill is, that in a lot of ways he represents what it would have been like to work with the old school, classic country engineer, producers of that great era. For better or worse than the insanity of maybe Nashville, and Bakersfield, and the Texas sound and stuff. He had that effect on me, and I’m sure glad that I’ve had the opportunity to make these records with him. He’s a fascinating individual, and you’d have a hard time finding somebody that cared more about country music than that guy right there.” Neill has co-written many songs with Crockett for the new album. “When you work with Mark Neill, he’s a wild character, but he has a childlike excitement about making music that is really rare in people,” notes Crockett. “And, we have that thing. Writing with him was just a good time. He’s kind of a hillbilly Shakespeare in his own way. I’ve never been interested in the Nashville chop shop model of these co-writes that they do up there. I’ve never had any interest in that. But I have started to write more with my friends, and several of my good friends have co-writes on Welcome to Hard Times, and on Music City USA. So, it goes without saying that I consider Mark Neill a very good friend and, for that reason, I’m very comfortable writing with him. For example, the song ‘Lies and Regrets’. The verses are just me remembering these things he says every day. Every day he’d joke and say, ‘You know Charley Crockett, there isn’t no right way to do a wrong thing’.”