Charley Crockett Speaks Up For the Little Guy on $10 Cowboy

Over the past decade, few musicians have been as dialed in as Charley Crockett. On all fronts, the Texas country singer-songwriter delivers with uncommon consistency: He always looks dapper, in a cool thrift-store outlaw sort of way. He has released one or two albums per year since 2015, all through his own independent label, Son of Davy. His songs never stray too far from their comfort zone, instead finding new ways to fuse country, folk, blues and soul over and over again. And his concerts are masterclasses of efficient entertainment, with rarely a note, a vintage shirt collar or a toothy smile out of place.

Crockett is a machine, in other words, and that machine has a name: Jukebox Charley—dependable, irresistible and seemingly stocked with an endless supply of terrific tunes. His new full-length, $10 Cowboy, adds a dozen more to his arsenal, this time inspired and informed by his extensive travels, first as an itinerant young man busking on street corners and more recently as a busy touring act. “This material is written at truck stops, it’s written at casinos, it’s written in the alleys behind the venues, it’s written in my truck parked up on South Congress in Austin,” he has said. “A ramblin’ man like me, a genuine transient, is in a pretty damn good position to have something to say about America.”

On $10 Cowboy, Crockett’s stories often revolve around hard-living folks, people just scraping by and those on the wrong end of the war on the American dream. In “Hard Luck & Circumstances” – an album highlight – he laments their plight against a gospel-tinged chorus and classic honky-tonk: “For folks like me / There ain’t no justice / Only the road and it’s long / You might find it funny / My line of thinking / But that don’t make me wrong / It’s hard luck and circumstances / That brought me here / And if they hang around much longer / I might just disappear.”