, Charley Crockett is reaching his broadest audience yet by doing the same thing he's always done — telling his own idiosyncratic story of America and its music.With his 11th album,, Charley Crockett is reaching his broadest audience yet by doing the same thing he's always done — telling his own idiosyncratic story of America and its music.
Crockett's past does seem larger-than-life — like fodder for the tall tales and gossip of some frontier town. It's not just, busking to get enough money for food and little else, that seem like they could be exaggerated. There's the fact that Crockett claims relation to folk hero Davy Crockett, who inspired the name of the independent label upon which he releases all his music, Son of Davy. He shares his border hometown, San Benito, with pioneering Texas genre-bender Freddy Fender.
Learning music as a persistent and curious busker meant that Crockett's first text was the broadest possible version of the American Songbook, one that he took in almost exclusively aurally. As a result, it is not only the songs he sings that tie him to another time but the pragmatic, casual, offline way he adopted them — hearing, learning and performing those songs without much context, a friendly audience or the pomp of a traditional venue.
But there is not even a little stylistic difference between the covers albums and the ones that include original songs; instead, they are presented as he learned them, a glorious all-American mish-mash of genres and eras and styles. Like his audience, he often hadn't known who wrote those songs or who originally performed them when he first heard them.
The man is genuinely talented. Country isn’t dead. It’s busy being reborn. Check out “Drunk Again.” Instant classic.