Gettin’ paid to practice, now that ain’t bad.
That thought ran through Charley Crockett’s mind the first time he strummed a guitar and somebody tossed a few coins his way. The Texas songwriter vaguely remembers the moment, sitting alone in a park just to sharpen his chops.
“I didn’t think to try and play it for money,” he said.
But when he was in his early 20s, busking became Charley’s last resort – a hustle to make ends meet after he left home and his life disintegrated.
“For me, it wasn’t really a conscience choice,” he said. “I just became it.”
Today, the musician’s blend of blues, boogie woogie and rock ’n’ roll has propelled him from the sidewalk and onto concert hall stages across America.
We met at The Criterion a few moments before his band opened a sold-out show for Oklahoma’s own Turnpike Troubadours in downtown Oklahoma City. This spring he’ll be in Portland as part of his world tour. It only takes a couple of songs to realize Charley and his Blue Drifters were born to perform. There’s a deliberate nature not only to how they play but also to what they play. Their classic country covers and heartfelt originals germinate from Charley’s countless hours of studying street musicians in New Orleans and New York City.
Last year, he told Rolling Stone that his prolonged gig as a busker was the product of hard luck and a broken record contract. It wasn’t until he self-recorded his debut solo record, “A Stolen Jewel,” that his luck changed for the better.
Charley, now 34, has four albums under his name, is cooking up another, and has come a long way. He was raised by a single mother in rural south Texas, and his youth got harder as he got older.
“My mother was as strong as 10 men in the way she supported me, but I didn’t have any kind of family,” he shared backstage. “It’s not woe is me because I believe it’s an epidemic in the United States. It’s broken-up households, racial inequality and a decaying middle class.”
Charley’s growth as an artist and the distance between his near-decade-long run as an unknown busker to seeing his name atop glowing marquees makes for a noteworthy tale. How difficult was it to make a climb like that?
The following recounts the singer’s formative years in his own words:
On experiencing homelessness:
In my early 20s, I was on the streets all the time. My life fell apart. My brother and my sister, we all just took off. My sister passed away and my brother did a lot of time in prison. I narrowly escaped prison several times myself.
I grew up poor enough and isolated enough that I was gonna have to get out of there to change my situation. I felt like trouble had surrounded me. If I didn’t break away from certain family members, I’d be in jail right now. Anybody who’s going through that kind of trouble — to get out of that brokenness — you have to make a really drastic change. I felt like the options were limited, so I just started drifting.
On having a strong mom:
She had to educate herself after I was born to try to change her situation. She’s in her 60s and just graduated from college at Oregon State. She did an online thing. She’ll be the first person in at least a couple of generations of my family to get a degree. She was telling me that Irma Thomas, the great southern Louisiana soul singer, got her degree in her 60s, too.
My mother was really strong. I owe everything to her. Because my daddy wasn’t around — all the guidance that I was lacking — the only place I could find it in school was in athletics. When I was younger, I was hoping to pay my way by playing baseball and basketball. My momma knew I needed something.
She had been trying to get me to play piano, but I couldn’t focus on it. Then about the time I was 17, my momma went and got me an old Hohner guitar out of a pawn shop. She put that in my hands, and the time was right. It was compact. I could take it with me. I just started spending all my time messing around with the thing. From there, I started traveling.
On becoming a bandleader in Louisiana:
I was real nervous at first. I’d kind of just play my guitar in weird, little doorways. I didn’t wanna be on the corner and be seen. I wasn’t confident then. … I performed on the street by myself, then I started playing with other rough street players, kind of together-ish. (Longtime bandmate) Charlie Mills Jr. was the first person that put it in my mind when he said, “You’re already great. But as you get better, you’re gonna need to learn how to communicate with other artists.” I really learned how to lead a band from the street level. On the street, I was getting a lot of my ability to talk to an audience, collect money and pick good songs.
On the songs and ghosts of New Orleans:
I learned Ernest Tubb’s “Driving Nails” and Hank Williams’ “I Saw The Light.” Lots of old spirituals like “March Winds Gonna Blow My Blues Away” and “You Reap What You Sow.” I remember playing two years straight there and getting to the point in the evening that I started feeling like the spirits of the city were starting to take over. I’m not even that spiritual of a person. That was probably around when I stopped performing on the street there.
On busking in New York:
I remember hitchhiking up there and sleeping upright on park benches and riding the subway just to get a nap. I remember playing in Central Park. I was sitting under a tunnel because it sounded good. I was just practicing, and nobody was messing with me. People started giving me money. I can’t remember how much I made. Even if it was only like $10, that was a big deal. I know that sounds like no money at all, but it made a huge difference to me. Around that time, I was stealing out of the grocery store – just a little bit, something to eat. I didn’t feel good about it. I started realizing I could practice and work on my songs and make some change. Whatever I was eating, I could pay for. That’s when I was like, “I’m doing this all the time.”
On the math of playing subway platforms:
While some things in music seem like they’re very different, a lot of it hasn’t changed. I get a lot of comfort in understanding it from a simple place like that. That was one of the reasons I played in the subway for so long — on those platforms and those trains. Say there’s a 100-capacity venue in New York City that I had a residency at every single night of the month, and I could get 100 different people to show up in that club and pack it out 30 nights a month.
That’s 3,000 people, right? I was reaching 3,000 people playing on the platform of the G Train within a couple of hours. The way that I looked at it was, I’m just gonna play for all these people on the street all day long and reach them in a place where they’re actually at. They may even be more likely to hear me. And if they stop and pay me, that means I definitely got their attention. People knew who we were. We played so hard on those subway cars – eight hours a day.
On busking vs. stepping onstage:
The irony is that it’s not that different. The venues I’m playing now are often right there on the same streets I was playing on. It’s like a block away, or I was out on the corner in front of the joint, and now I’m loading in the back.
Everything about the street, it’s all the real tools you need. You’re playing for money. You’re performing live in front of people. You’re getting them to stop. You’re getting them to pay you. You’re moving a demo or a mixtape. Going to shows and concerts, it’s the same model. We come here and play for an audience. Based on how we perform, they may buy stuff from us. That most basic model was started on the streets by street players.
On finding freedom in music:
I’d accidently found out how to be free in a place and time where I didn’t think I was. I was making my own way – playing all day – and I was getting a little change for it. There’s a lot of freedom in that. I have found that I’ve been my most free in following this. I think that we’re all bound to something, but I feel like my function is to make this music.
On his appreciation for old-time music:
To me, hip-hop was the folkiest thing. You can argue that it’s really folk music in a lot of ways, telling stories related to struggle and the stuff that people are really weighing every day. That was a big part of what I connected to. A lot of traveling kids were playing folk, old-time country and spirituals. I always liked that music and throughout my life, no matter what I was influenced by, that was always the music that came most natural for me to sing. I think it’s built into the DNA of all Americans — across all our backgrounds — with all our major racial, social and class issues, there’s something really comforting about old-time music.
On nostalgia and hard work:
It’s weird. I miss it. I have all this nostalgia toward busking. Every once and a while, I’m at home in Austin, and I’ll go out on South Congress at night when I know it’s completely dead. I’ll play out there next to the Guero’s Taco Bar outdoor stage and enjoy doing that. Maybe I’m missing the freedom from responsibility that I had at 25? That was a great feeling. But at the same time, I couldn’t do it again – squatting in warehouses and not getting good sleep.
The street seems really far away from me in some ways. It’s definitely bittersweet. There’s a lot of people who rely on me now. The guys in my band, and my whole team work very hard for me. They’ve all given up stuff because they believe in what we’re doing. I owe it to them to be working hard.
On making a living as a touring musician:
It sounds like a hard life, and it is. You gotta be discerning, you gotta be strong, and you gotta be adaptable. For a young person — who has so much desire in them that they can’t stand it — traveling is the smartest thing you could do because you’re bound to figure out if you can last.
The way to really make it as a musician — on any level — is by keeping your life really, really simple. One of the reasons I was a street performer for so long was because I could keep from being tied down by all these other things in life that would’ve most surely led me down a path away from becoming a stage performer.
I knew I needed to be a touring musician. I always believed I could do it, but I could never see a clear path to it. I knew I needed to be playing all the time, like nonstop. To be honest, I always thought it would happen faster and easier than it did. I always thought it was around the corner.
On getting discovered, then walking away:
In New York, I got discovered by the majors up there and got a recording deal. I signed it, and thought I’d made it. I thought, “I’m off the street. This is it.” But the label was like, “Hey, we have this model. We need you to be moldable.” It crushed me. I didn’t have the ability to shut off my own creative vision. That deal fell out.
Even my mother, she thought I was walking away from the golden opportunity of my lifetime. The industry people I was dealing with said it was the only chance I would ever get. I moved to California for the next three years. I waited out the contract. No phone. No guitar. I was living in a teepee on my friend’s land, an hour drive up a dirt road from a remote valley.
I really got it together. I decided I would lead my own band, record and do everything myself while I was out there in California. By 2015, I had recorded “A Stolen Jewel,” and some friends really believed in me and gave me money to press it up. I printed 5,000 CDs and drove back down to Texas. I started handing them out on the streets and playing at open jams. That very quickly led to me getting the band together in Dallas and getting booked in the beer joints and honky tonks. It went national from there. ... The way I got here sometimes seems like it took really long, and other times it seems like it happened in the blink of an eye.
Courtesy of The Curbside Chronicle / INSP.ngo
IF YOU GO
What: Charley Crockett World Tour 2019
When: April 25
Where: Polaris Hall, 635 N Killingsworth Court, Portland
Tickets: www.ticketfly.com