The Man From Everywhere
Charley Crockett knows his story seems far-fetched.
"People always tell me, 'Man, you didn't ride trains — that's not possible, no one does that anymore,'" he says, sitting at his tour bus's small table. Crockett is clearly frustrated – the fact that he's traded train cars for tour buses and street corners for venerable stages that he shares with even more venerable artists makes his improbable origin story even less likely. "I'm like, 'You don't know what the f*** you're talking about. You have no clue.' It's easier than ever to get on a f****** train, and there's a ton of kids doing it. I never intended to do that, I fell into it — and I couldn't believe it. I was so shocked at the amount of disillusioned kids coming from poverty in America resorting to riding trains."
It's a scorching July day that's even more scorching in the vast South Dallas parking lot where Crockett's tour bus has stopped for the afternoon a few hours before San Benito, Texas native and his band take the stage for their fifth set with Willie Nelson's traveling Outlaw Festival. Many of the Blue Drifters, as they're called, have been with Crockett since not long after he "came in from playing exclusively outside," as he puts it, and have been called on to corroborate his unlikely origins — which they do, willingly.
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 a cowboy.
