CHARLEY CROCKETT is the Cowboy Singer for the 21st century.
He possesses a husky voice with a slight lisp that every now and then breaks—a honky-tonker with vulnerabilities. He’s immediately recognizable, just like you know it’s Willie by the first two notes on the guitar strings. “Cain’t” really is in his vocabulary, belying his South Texas roots; “warsh” most definitely isn’t. “No, sir. That’s some Panhandle s--t,” he said to me in all seriousness.
Listen close and you’ll pick up whiffs of old country legends like Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, and Jerry Reed, from whom Crockett borrows. Listen closer and you’ll discover an exceptionally suave crooner who has crafted an original sound he calls “Gulf & Western.”
With his Blue Drifters band and a work ethic that doesn’t know quit, he plays venues around the world and attracts audiences of all ages, all while cranking out records at a prodigious pace. Instead of starring in movies like the original Cowboy Singer, Gene Autry (another native Texan), he stars in a string of his own western-themed music videos. At 40, Charley Crockett is an overnight sensation who has burnished a legend that happens to be pretty much true—a genuine Cowboy Singer.
He was born in San Benito, in the Rio Grande Valley of far South Texas—hometown of Tejano music giant Freddy Fender—and raised in trailer homes nearby on South Padre Island and Los Fresnos before moving at age 9 with his divorced mother to Irving, just outside Dallas.
The singer part of the proposition came into focus during teenage summers spent in New Orleans with a favorite uncle who worked as a cook in the French Quarter. That’s where Charley first saw guitarists, rappers, trumpet players, sax players, drummers, and tap dancers performing on sidewalks and street corners, making all kinds of music. The fire was lit.
With a guitar his mom bought him at a pawn shop in Irving, he taught himself enough to try to play on the street himself. In New Orleans, he
