At least, he believes in hard luck and circumstances. And well he might. Picture the country-blues musician’s past as one of those maps you’d see in the early Hollywood shoot-em-ups – the ones filled with the promise of treasure, peppered with burn marks.
Born in 1984 and raised by his mother in a trailer park in San Benito, Texas, Crockett has been busted for possession, narrowly avoided involvement in a stock fraud operation, grieved his sister who died from a meth overdose, and spent quite a lot of his younger life as a vagrant, riding trains around the US like a latter-day Woody Guthrie. It’s those circumstances that keep him in perpetual motion.
Over the years, that peripatetic life has become less about running away and more about collecting stories to feed his music-making. For Crockett, a distant relative of (famous adventurer and king of the wild frontier) Davy Crockett, every day on the road is a new opportunity to write a song. “I hit the highway when I was young just to be able to play music. The one way to make music all the time was to stay moving,” says the musician. “I just had to lose my circumstances.”
“There are a lot of things about life and society that I’m no good at. But travelling almost every day of my life allows me to think of songs, record them and play them for people,” he says.
You might call it itchy feet, Charley Crockett calls it ‘crazy leg’. “I mean, lucky for me, I don’t have to stay put,” he says, sinking back and resting a well-worn brown suede cowboy boot over his knee. Crockett is self-made, self-taught with a gift for the two-and -a-half-minute song, and – the way he tells it – lucky as hell.
“I’d rather be lucky than good,” he says. “I’ve thought about this. While it’s admirable to be good – and I would like nothing more than to be good – you can’t compete with someone that’s lucky. You can’t beat it.”
His albums reflect that crazy leg ethos. “In the US, I know every back road,” he says. “I’ve played every room in Texas, all the ones in California and a fair share of all the fucking states in between. The mountain ranges, the deserts and the rivers… they stay with you.”
Crockett has always drawn great inspiration from his travels. “I don’t know how somebody could travel as much as I do and see as much as I do and not be inspired.”
“The stories that you hear about the San Juan Mountains of Western Colorado. Those were the early gold and silver mining of the United States as it expanded westward. I can see ladies of the night standing in doorways, and prospectors and gamblers and in those gaming halls are the superstitions around the mountains in Arizona in the Sonoran Desert.”
When he takes to the stage, he’s magnetic. He breathes down the microphone with a deep, raspy Texan drawl – “They call it country but underneath it all, it ain’t nothin but the blues” – and then bursts into song, barely pausing for the next hour and a half.
He holds his guitar like Johnny Cash, dresses with the flair of The Flying Burrito Brothers and whips through songs like it’s a country jamboree, shuffling and twisting in Cuban heels and pearl snaps. And the largest set of teeth I think I’ve ever seen.“Oh, they’re not real,” says Crockett. “I actually need some new ones.”
Crockett is wildly productive. He’s a constant creator, releasing 12 records over the past eight years. You hear about those artists sometimes – the guys that produce music so quickly that it’s a challenge to keep up listening. “I have put out a lot of records,” he says, “because I’ve never listened to anybody who told me I couldn’t.”
There’s an immediacy to his music. A quality that he credits to finding the magic in the first few takes, and learning when to stop recording. “I can just notice, early on, when the song is fresh,” he says. “There’s a kind of luck to that. It’s very mystical, the power of performing something with an intent that you are just discovering as you record it. And maybe that doesn’t always work.”
“It’s the immediacy of capturing a performance. A couple of takes later, it doesn’t feel like that anymore. And then that’s when you need to just move on.”
He argues that people aren’t listening for precision, they’re listening to the character and story behind the recording. For him, the beauty is in the imperfection. “There’s all kinds of flaws, right? But if it’s real, if it’s believable, if it has the power and magic in it, people won’t mind that. People love that.”
It’s all of Charley Crockett’s flaws that make him such a force.
“I’ve got my thing down, you know, I’m living my life,” he says.
“In the end, you can’t take anybody with you. There’s a road that you’re on that ultimately, you’re walking by yourself.”
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