Blues Drifting Cowboy: Charley Crockett lands at the Longhorn Ballroom

"I'm not a cowboy, I'm a cowboy singer" declares latest country music phenomenon from Texas

May 06, 2024

Charley Crockett and the Blue Drifters 5/2/24 Photo by Jason Janik courtesy of Kessler Presents. Nathan Fleming on pedal steel, Alexis Sanchez oh guitar.

I gave her control of the car’s Spotify and said “show me why you love Charley Crockett.” This was my friend Miss K from Albany, who I’ve known daily since she was 18 and I was 25- that’s 43 years. This retro queen has been bugging me for a couple years to go with her to see the dapper soul cowboy, who swept the Americana Awards last year, winning artist, album and song of the year with Bruce Robison-produced The Man From Waco.

Concentrating on history, I don’t listen to much new music at all, usually just long enough to dismiss it, so I can go back to newspapers.com. And I have to say the stylish Crockett didn’t do it for me. Sampled a couple tracks and decided he sounded like the Colin Farrell cut on Crazy Heart, and was done with him. Who has the time to be a committed fan of the prolific Mr. Crockett, who’s put out an average of 1.6 albums a year since settling in Austin in 2016? That’s even with open-heart surgery to replace an aortic valve in 2019.

Miss K, 61 and retired, has the time to be a Crockette. But like me, she doesn’t hit the venues like she useta, and had never seen him live. I have a standing assignment to do a feature on the Longhorn Ballroom, and her boy Charley was posted up there on Thursday night (May 2), so us Hays County hermits went on a 27-hour roadtrip to Dallas.

The legendary nightclub, built as the Bob Wills Ranch House in 1950, has been renovated and reopened last year by Kessler Presents, the Dallas production company which also owns and operates the Heights Theater in Houston and the Kessler Theater in Dallas. Crockett’s vintage “Gulf and Western” sound- Texas sprinkled with cayenne pepper- would be the perfect show to bring the 2,000-capacity dancehall, whose barn-shaped marquee once famously touted the Sex Pistols and Merle Haggard on successive shows in Jan. ‘78, to the present. Crockett’s mix of country and soul falls in with the Longhorn’s history of booking R&B acts on Sundays and Mondays- the weekend for the service industry. Crockett and his repertoire are both 1/8 African American.

Nat King Cole at the Longhorn 1954. Photo by R.C. Hickman courtesy of the Briscoe Center. Then-owner Jack Ruby is in the center of the standing whites.

The first album K played on the drive was In the Night from 2016, and I was unprepared for the luscious Al Green groove on the title track, followed by the Big Easy bar band gold of “Baby 1-2-3,” and then the melodic float of “I Am Not Afraid,” which I’d heard before (I think as background music on the Longhorn Network), but didn’t realize was a Crockett cut. K pointed out that this was the album Charley made when he was hanging out in DFW with a not-yet-known Leon Bridges. Damn! This guy is good! There’s only one weak track on In the Night, a hail mary revision of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” by Freddy Fender who, like Crockett, hails from San Benito, where Charley’s mom was a cocktail waitress for money and TV weather lady for fun. There’s not much country on Crockett’s followup to the Stolen Jewel debut.

“Let’s hear the new record,” I said. Charley CrockedHat has been promoting $10 Cowboy like it’s running for office and is two points down in the polls. An album of co-writes with former Nick Curran collaborator Billy Horton (and, occasionally, fiancee Taylor Grace), Cowboy is a mood piece that made the approaching Dallas skyline all the more inviting. It’s country to the core, with tracks that don’t stand out as much as stand together.

Crockett is not a great singer just like Ernest Tubb wasn’t. No one’s gonna compare him to Lefty Frizzell or George Jones. But you can’t separate the direct voice from the material. It’s the accents in his phrasing that give gallop to the loping pace. This country music comes out fully formed.

If my mind had a travel agency it would be called WCS Destinations, for worst case scenarios. We’re gonna hit a pothole on the exit ramp going 65. There’s only one bed in the hotel room. They forgot to put us on the guest list. No place to sit down and can’t see through the Stetson forest. Charley’s gonna be all hat.

But everything was perfect. We ran into Ballroom owner Edwin Cabaniss as soon as we were inside, and he invited us to sit in his box. And Kessler artistic director Jeff Liles gave us a tour of the memorabilia-filled back wing, whose Proprietors Club honors the four men who owned the Longhorn in its ‘50s and ‘60s heyday- Bob Wills, O.L. Nelms, Jack Ruby (!) and Dewey Grooms. There’s a walk of ten antique shadow boxes displaying photos, stage costumes, guitars and other memorabilia from acts associated with the Longhorn, from Willie Nelson and Ernest Tubb through the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith and the Ramones. There’s a box for Waylon Jennings, but it was missing the guitar, which the description says Jennings played with the Highwaymen from ‘90-’97.

From country to jazz to R&B to punk, the Longhorn hosted it all. In fact, they hosted it all on Thursday night. That trumpet sitting on “Man From Waco” co-writer Kullen Fox’s piano is not for decoration! Strutting onstage to “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy, who’d passed away the day before, Crockett got right to business, singing five or six vintage modern honky tonk songs with the Blue Drifters before he spoke to the crowd. He knew he didn’t have to. One word to describe a Charley Crockett performance? Command. He would do a little snake dance, or play his guitar like he was shooting a gun, but such showy, crowd-stroking moves were kept to a minimum.

First thing that struck me about the fresh-faced audience was that there were very few men wearing cowboy hats. This was not a country music crowd, though the women all wore cowboy boots with their skirts and blouses. Crockophiles aren’t genre-specific. They just want their Charley.

“I’ve always wanted to play the Longhorn Ballroom,” Crockett said after covering “Juanita” by the Flying Burrito Brothers. “My mother told me my Gam-Gam used to dance here when she was coming up.” He also recounted misspending part of his youth drinking jug wine under the overpass behind the Longhorn when Riverside Drive was called Industrial Boulevard.

Photo by Jason Janik courtesy of Kessler Presents.

At one point, Crockett talked about playing the Kessler, opening for Joe Ely in 2016. It was the first show the longtime busker had ever played where advance tickets were sold. Afterwards, Liles told him he'd done really well, but if he ever wanted to pack the house on his own he'd have to stop playing for free all over town. Looking out at the sellout crowd of the Longhorn, Crockett said, with a wry smile,"I think we got it figured out."

Late in the show, Cabaniss came onstage and lent Waylon Jennings’ guitar to Crockett, who seemed genuinely overwhelmed though it wasn’t a surprise. “Do y’ll know that Waylon song ‘Bob Wills is Still the King?,’” Crockett addressed the adoring. “To me, Waylon Jennings is still the king.’” Then he did “Good-Hearted Woman,” and played that guitar of white leather on “Trinity River,” with his New Orleans mentor Charlie Mills, Jr. on trumpet. The satisfying (and loud) set closed with “In the Night,” the song that began this charmed roadtrip.

Charley takes Waylon’s guitar for a spin. Photo by

I wasn’t expecting to go backstage, but Liles said “follow me” and there was Crockett, eating his post-show meal of vegetarian tacos with wheat tortillas. I felt bad about interrupting him, but he couldn’t have been nicer, even getting up to find me a chair. Like his mentor James Hand, Charley was over-humble, apologizing for his imperfections onstage earlier. His first encore was a solo acoustic version of Waylon obscurity “Sweet Mother Texas” that Crockett had to restart because he forgot the lyrics. I repeated what he told the crowd: “There are a lot of ghosts in this building.”

Miss K was in the t-shirt line, so she didn’t get to meet her hero, but I told Charley I drove three hours because my friend is such a fan, and now so am I. “What’s her name?” he asked. Then he signed the setlist to her.

When we were driving back to the fabulous Lorenzo Hotel (infamous as the Ramada Inn where Tina Turner finally escaped Ike, to declare independence on July 3, 1976), I said to Miss K, “Damn girl! We need to get out more!”