Digging in
Oklahoma journalist Josh Crutchmer gets to the roots of `Red Dirt' music history with new book
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For more information about Josh Crutchmer's book "Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere," go to www.reddirtbook.com.
When Josh Crutchmer started digging into his red dirt music roots with the goal of writing a book, he was working in fertile ground that definitely isn't frozen in time.
“It basically started as one book and ended as another — and I don't even know that ending is the right term. The book ended because it had to and it needed to be published. Otherwise, I'd still probably be tinkering with it, because everything changes,” Crutchmer said.
“It was just always an evolving story — and it still is.”
After overcoming numerous challenges — and producing at least one big scoop — the Oklahoma native is releasing Saturday his deeply personal first book, “Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere.”
“As a fan of this music and this scene, I'm just elated that this story got told by anybody,” said Crutchmer, a former The Oklahoman staffer who is now the print planning editor at The New York Times.
“Really in the last five years — post the death of (Oklahoma Music Hall of Famer Tom) Skinner, when we lost Brandon Jenkins and Steve Ripley, too — I just really started feeling more of a responsibility than I ever had to actually write this because I knew that I had lived it. Not many people in the position to write the book also lived it, so that's what spurred it. It was really 20 years in the making.”
Fortunate timing
A 2001 graduate of Oklahoma State University, Crutchmer discovered red dirt music as the scene was flourishing in Stillwater.
“I had no problem really making my senior year at Oklahoma State kind of my own personal little Rolling Stone. I would go not just to Ragweed concerts but all over the state and do write-ups and columns. ... I was also becoming friends with them all,” Crutchmer said in a phone interview this week from his New York home.
After graduation, he would write the occasional feature on the scene for The Oklahoman or a regional magazine, but he also took his love for the music on the road as his career took him to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Omaha WorldHerald, The Arizona Republic and beyond.
But it was John Cooper of the venerable Red Dirt Rangers who convinced him to write a book during a 2018 pilgrimage to Eskimo Joe's.
“When he says things like, `If you don't write this book, no one's gonna write it and then it's just gonna get lost to
history' ... you can't help but feel that,” Crutchmer said.
Definitive guide
Crutchmer's book features chapters on the scene's icons like Skinner, the Rangers, Bob Childers, Jimmy LaFave, The Great Divide, Ragweed, Jason Boland & The Stragglers and Stoney LaRue as well as tributes to many more. Even Texans like Wade Bowen, Randy Rogers and Jamie Lin Wilson get chapters devoted to their red dirt ties.
“I've been one of those people that have been very, very, very particular about what is and isn't red dirt. And
I had to reckon with that in my own head that this wasn't how the rest of the world viewed red dirt now. The most soul-searching I had to do was `Do I want to be on a soapbox? Do I want to preach what red dirt actually is? Or do I want to accept the way that it is viewed now?' ... Let's explain that Wade Bowen was probably always destined to be this Texas crooner, this Sinatra of Waco, Texas, but that his career is so intertwined with Ragweed and a personal level with Cody (Canada, his brother-in-law) and his family that it's inseparable. The fact that Ragweed and Reckless Kelly their careers basically parallel each other and overlap so often, are you really going to say, `This is one scene and this is another?'” Crutchmer said.
His “Red Dirt” digs into places like the Wormy Dog and The Farm that helped grow the music, asks the tough question of why women are underrepresented and features an interview with the biggest musician to ever come out of Stillwater — and arguably the entire United States — Garth Brooks.
“I thought it couldn't hurt to ask,” Crutchmer said. “It was one email to his publicist, who responded within an hour and said, `Garth would love to do that.' ... I made this long list of notes. And within a minute of being on the phone with him, he's the same disarming, intimate guy he is on stage. ... And all the notes go out the window and you're just talking to him.”
Other interviews weren't as easy to pin down, especially as various bands weathered shakeups to lineups and struggles with addiction. The latter led to turmoil for the Turnpike Troubadours, whose chapter Crutchmer ended up writing three times.
The Troubadours announced an indefinite hiatus in May 2019 after a series of abruptly canceled concerts, tabloid headlines and concerns about the well-being of frontman Evan Felker. That left Crutchmer's Turnpike chapter in the same state of uncertainty as the band.
This summer, the writer managed to get an advance copy of “Red Dirt” to the singer-songwriter, and on the day he was sending the final version of the book to press, Crutchmer got a call from Felker's wife.
“With hours to go before I was done with it, that phone rang and it was Staci. All she said was, `Is there still time? Because the story's changed.' Well, if you're going to release a book independently, you may as well avail yourself of that independence to say, `Yeah, the deadline's not today anymore,' which is what I did,” he said.
“The timing for Evan was just wonderful. He was happy. He was talking freely of sobriety and of self-reflection ... and conveniently enough, also he's serious about music again.”
Although the band's future is still uncertain, at least the chapter has a happier ending. And so does Crutchmer's dig into “Red Dirt.”
“Even before that, the book was pretty successful. ... When that story got out, it made the book wildly successful,” he said. “The response to it has just blown me away. It's just been so well-received, and people seem so genuinely happy that it's out there.”