CHARLEY CROCKETT TALKS MUSIC, RACE AND TEXAS
Charley Crockett whirls his Freddy Fender and Davy Crockett ties into Lone Star sound.
You can’t get much more Gulf Coast than singer-songwriter-guitarist Charley Crockett.
His looming family tree, with its intertwining and overlapping European, African, Cajun, Creole and Jewish roots, plunges deep into the rich and loamy Texas and Louisiana soil, all the way back to distant ancestor Davy Crockett.
That heritage is not just evident in his bloodline, but in his South Texas hometown of San Benito — same as Tejano pioneer Freddy Fender — and his music, too. Though Crockett, 32, grew up on hip-hop, he quickly fell head over cowboy heels for the blues, country, jazz and gospel at the heart of popular music and, over the course of his four albums, has built an ardent following with his retro, rootsy style that blends Southern soul with Western twang and a frontiersman’s lyrical sense of wanderlust. He has been compared to another contemporary Texan with a foot in the past, Fort Worth’s Leon Bridges, who’s a friend of his.
Though he’s largely been known in Texas — especially in Dallas-Fort Worth, where he was living until relocating to Austin — that might be changing. His just released “Lonesome as a Shadow” album, his first to feature all original songs, is being issued through Nashville’s Thirty Tigers, home of roots-country star Sturgill Simpson. Crockett’s current global tour, which lands at the House of Blues in Houston on Friday and runs through at least September, is taking him to such noted venues as Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club, The Mint in Los Angeles and the Fillmore in San Francisco.
It almost feels like hitting the big time for a man who, until he settled in Dallas to be closer to family, was living on the road, hustling for stray dollars on the streets of New Orleans and in the subways of New York or working on a farm in Northern California. “I played on the streets for years and years. So when people say, ‘Touring must be hard on you,’ I say, ‘Man, I’ve got an RV now,’ ” Crockett said with a laugh from a phone in Mobile, Ala. “I feel like I can do it nonstop for the next 10 years. … When I’m singing, I feel the freest, and this is my way to do that.”
PLANTING ROOTS
Crockett became enamored of music early.
“Coming from South Texas, Freddy Fender was a big figure,” he said. “There’s a lot of Texas heritage music, and you grow up hearing a lot of Texas music on the radio. The classic rock from Texas is ZZ Top, there was a lot of old Freddie King on the radio.”
Then there was hip-hop. “Hip-hop is just one of those things in our generation,” he said. “You’re not going to grow up without hearing hip-hop.”
But he was intrigued by what was undergirding the tracks he was nodding his head to. “I got into Curtis Mayfield through samples of his songs by other artists, and Nina Simone was through a sample,” he said. “Even J. Cole, I was listening to a song of his (‘Kenny Lofton’), and it was based on the sample from the Manhattans (‘Hurt’), a soul song from the late ’70s, and he made it into his own thing.
“Hip-hop is no different from (contemporary) country. There’s a commercial aspect that’s 95 percent awful music … but the good music is connected to me like blues and jazz. Once I started listening to the throwback artists that these guys were sampling, I just never looked back.”
The sounds that inspired Crockett were also reinforced during his time busking.
“Playing on the street, I heard rap and zydeco all day and tons of old jug bands doing old drinking songs, swing bands doing ’20s and ’30s New Orleans jazz … I used to travel around with this fiddle player, and she was really Appalachian influenced, and I learned all kinds of
spirituals from her. … Some of them were 150 years old, and some of them were Tom Waits songs.”
TEXAS CALLS HIM HOME
Despite his global rambling, Crockett always carried Texas with him like a locket. The first line he sings on the new album, from the song “I Wanna Cry,” is “she was headed down to Texas, that’s the land that I love.” Another track declares its Lone Star infatuation in the title, “Goin’ Back to Texas.”
So he decided to return to his home state a few years ago after visiting his mother.
“I just happened to notice that Texas was coming back real strong. Dallas-Fort Worth was having this emerging scene, and there was an opportunity for me to get paid bar gigs that weren’t available to me when I was younger in Texas,” he said. “All of a sudden, Deep Ellum — the music neighborhood of Dallas — was coming back in a big way.”
He was happy to be part of Deep Ellum’s storied, though often neglected, musical history, even as its current building boom and spiraling rents hide that up-from-struggle past from the hordes of party people who now elbow their way into its bustling bars and clubs.
Decades earlier, Deep Ellum was a major black commercial district, and “everybody — Robert Johnson to Lead Belly to Bessie Smith to Lightnin’ Hopkins to T-Bone Walker — came up and played in those streets,” Crockett said. “I even dedicated this record to Henry ‘Ragtime Texas’ Thomas, and I wrote ‘Goin’ Back to Texas’ based off a song of his that I really liked. He used to play on the streets of Deep Ellum back in the day.”
In 2015, he even recorded a song about Dallas, called “Trinity River,” accompanied by a video shot on the streets of Deep Ellum in front of the landmark dancehall Sons of Hermann Hall and along the Trinity River bottoms. It was during Crockett’s time in Deep Ellum that he met fellow musical traveler and sharp-dresser Bridges, no stranger to street-corner busking himself.
“He’s somebody I draw a lot of inspiration from, seeing what he’s been able to build for himself,” he said. “He’s really put Fort Worth on the map.”
DEALING WITH RACE
Though Crockett loves Texas, it’s also a source of emotional conflict, much of it connected to race and identity.
As a mixed-race boy, he was proud of his connection to Davy Crockett, something he says he was ridiculed for it by friends. “As I got older, in my 20s, I was able to really look at that heritage and see it more for some of the contradictions about it and some of the myth versus reality,” he said.
And as a mixed-race young man, life is more complicated. “I’m always struggling with identity,” he said. “I’ve never felt comfortable with whiteness, but I have never been identified as anything but white (by others), and that’s a big thing in this country. People are so racially divided, and there’s so much pressure to identify as one thing specifically. I’m somebody who has benefited from my whiteness while having knowledge that my heritage isn’t all the way white. That’s a big conflict for me.”
Race comes into play in that the music he performs is liked mostly by young whites. His friend Bridges ran into a buzzsaw of controversy this spring in Houston when he was booked to headline the Houston Rodeo’s Black Heritage Day, as -African-Americans aren’t drawn to this retro sensibility in large numbers, even if it’s largely based on the music of black pioneers.
Crockett looks at this conundrum philosophically. “A lot of times, regardless of somebody’s background, if they haven’t heard of you as a mainstream artist, people are very resistant to you,” he said. “What makes a difference is when people see you live. I think Leon has got that figured out … I’m a modern man influenced by current times, but I still listen to the old-school music. I had a much more diverse audience as a street player than I do right now, but I’m only starting to do headliner (shows). If you come see me live … I might play a heavier soul song, then I might turn around and do a straight rockabilly followed by a honky tonk and then come back and do another soul song.
“I hope I can reach a young, diverse audience and expose them to a lot of this music that the modern-day mainstream is kind of lacking.”