Charley Crockett draws on the romanticism of the Wild, Wild West for his songs and persona. A new documentary, A Cowboy in London, follows his visit to the U.K. and three sold-out shows at Hoxton Hall.UMUSIC/Supplied
If a man is from Texas, he will let you know. Breakout country music artist Charley Crockett is hardly the state’s lone star, but he’s not shy about broadcasting his heritage.
It’s part of his persona. The $10 Cowboy singer is a “y’all”-saying rebel from the Rio Grande Valley and a tall drink of water who wears a 10-gallon hat. On his new album Age of the Ram, there’s a loping song titled Fastest Gun Alive, and on the swamp-rocking Kentucky Too Long he sings, “Ain’t running from no Johnny law, please believe me.”
In interviews, Crockett often says he’s “bringing Texas to the world.” But what does that mean?
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People hear Texas and think of J.R. Ewing, big cars with longhorns attached and barbecue spelled with three letters. People there say, “Remember the Alamo,” as if they would ever let anyone forget it.
“Texas means something to everyone in the world,” Crockett told The Globe and Mail, calling from Seattle. “Mention it and it paints a picture in someone’s mind. So, I feel I’m representing that any time I go anywhere.”
The California indie rock band Pavement has a song called Texas Never Whispers, which is the truth − even the belt buckles are loud in the Lone Star State, and the myth-building there is the noisiest around. (Crockett claims to be a “true descendant” of Davy Crockett, who took part in the Texas Revolution and died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.)
The photogenic former busker is on a roll, having released six albums since 2022. Last year’s Dollar a Day, his second LP on a major label, earned a Grammy nomination for best traditional country album.
Age of the Ram is the final instalment in his Sagebrush Trilogy that includes Dollar a Day and Lonesome Drifter, also released in 2025. Recorded at the legendary Sunset Sound in Hollywood and produced by Waylon Jennings’s son Shooter Jennings, it’s rich in cowboy lore, pedal-steel guitar and saloon piano.
Crockett draws on the romanticism of the Wild, Wild West for his songs and persona. He wears his Texan mystique like a Texas Marshall wears their badge.
“It has a real currency to it,” said Texan Jared Christopher, who directed the new Crockett documentary A Cowboy in London. “It’s different than saying you’re from Oklahoma or Arkansas.”
Christopher’s verité-style film chronicles Crockett’s visit to the British capital and three sold-out shows at the city’s historic Hoxton Hall. Fans there are seen wearing dude-ranch duds.
“The cowboy boots had no scuff marks on the bottom of the soles,” Christopher said. “I think they’re having fun with it.”
Crockett’s Age of the Ram tells the story of Billy McLane, a fictional cattle rustler in frontier-era New Mexico pursued by bounty killers working for a crime syndicate. There’s some Crockett in McLane. Like the characters he writes about in his Old West story-songs, his own bio is not clean.
Crossing the border into Canada for a performance at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 2023, the singer-songwriter asked for prayers on the tour bus.
The immigration officials let the singer into the country back then, but in late February, he wasn’t so lucky. Scheduled to play Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre to kick off a Canadian tour, Crockett was refused entry into Canada because of a 2016 felony drug conviction.
“Everybody’s got a past,” the singer-songwriter wrote on his Instagram account. “Mine’s still haunting me.”
In 2014, Crockett was arrested in Virginia for felony possession and trafficking more than two kilograms of marijuana. He later received a 10-year suspended sentence and a US$10,000 fine, and was placed on probation.
“I’ve lived my whole life outside the law,” said the 41-year-old native of San Benito, Tex.
He grew up in a trailer park. As a teenager he was involved in a stock fraud scheme orchestrated by his older half-brother. Although Crockett avoided jail, he couldn’t get a bank account for 10 years. That led to a no-fixed-address lifestyle that took him to Paris, New Orleans, Northern California and New York.
The street-corner troubadour depended on the kindness of strangers. An older woman who promoted clubs on the West Coast financed his first album, 2015’s country-blues record A Stolen Jewel.
“I’ve been on the scenic route,” he says of his colourful life and times.
Crockett spoke with The Globe on the day before his entrance into Canada was denied. A request for a follow-up interview to discuss what happened was not granted − a hardscrabble life has taught him to keep moving forward.
He said Age of the Ram is his most concerted attempt at a true concept record: “I tend to write each song almost as a plot summary for a movie, which I think comes from overwatching films on the road.”
He favours westerns, but not the John Wayne kind: Hud, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man are among his most-played DVDs. These are films about mavericks, and the candid Crockett is certainly one of those.
After Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show was criticized for being un-American, Crockett took to Instagram to defend the Puerto Rican superstar. He has also slammed U.S. President Trump as a “draft dodger” and a “grifter,” among other things.
Last summer, Crockett feuded with Georgia country-rocker Gavin Adcock, who questioned the Texan’s country music bona fides by calling him a “cosplay cowboy.”
Crockett calls himself a cowboy singer, not a cowboy. Truth is, he is as much a folk singer as he is a country artist, his edgy Americana often marked by historical settings, populist themes and songs about oppression. His 2020 album, Welcome to Hard Times, addressed lynchings (The Poplar Tree) and chain gangs (a cover of Red Lane’s Blackjack County Chain).
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He is of Black, Cajun, Creole and Jewish heritage. He is not what traditional country audiences are accustomed to seeing. “I shouldn’t have come here in the first place, ’cause folks in here don’t like my kind,” he sings about Nashville on the title song to his 2021 album Music City USA.
In interviews, he doesn’t hide his disdain for the country music establishment and its homogenized approach to artists and repertoire. He purposely signed with the non-country label Island Records, home to pop stars Sabrina Carpenter, Shawn Mendes and Chappell Roan.
“I don’t try to be outspoken,” he says. “I just feel country music is in the same place it was 50 years ago, with narrow limitations on how they play the game in Nashville.”
Crockett is comparing the industry today to the way it was in the 1970s, when his Texas heroes Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and others affiliated with the outlaw country movement bucked the system and made the music they wanted to.
He identifies with outsiders and renegades, then. What could be more Texan than that?