This story aired in the August 8, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
Outside Lands, the three-day music festival in Golden Gate Park, is back this weekend for its 16th year. And, as usual, there’s no shortage of stellar artists slated to perform, from Post Malone, to Grace Jones, to Killer Mike. And one out-of-town musician brings a special reverence for the Bay Area.
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Playing an eclectic blend of country, blues, folk, and soul–something he dubs “Gulf & Western,” and the music industry more reductively labels “Americana”–singer and songwriter Charley Crockett has always defied easy categorization.
Born in the economically depressed border town of San Benito, Texas, Charley went on to busk in Dallas, New Orleans, and New York City. He mostly played covers on an old acoustic guitar his mother had purchased at a pawn shop when he was just a kid.
But nowadays, 40-year-old Charley Crockett puts out multiple albums a year, and accompanied by his exceptional band The Blue Drifters, sells out large-scale music venues from coast to coast.
I sat down with Charley to hear how the Bay Area played an especially pivotal role in the development of his style and sound. Backstage before a show in Brooklyn, swiftly signing posters with a silver-ink Sharpie, Charley details the circuitous events that sent him out west.
“I was a young, desperate man,” Charley declares. “I was exactly who they were looking for. And in my desperation, I think I was maybe a bit blind. I've got to take some responsibility for that.”
He’s referring to the record deal he scored as part of a ragtag collective of musicians and rappers called the Train Robbers after they’d caught the attention of some Sony Music executives while playing the New York subway. It proved to be fool’s gold, forcing him to suppress his unique, genre-bridging approach.
“I remember when that deal fell apart,” Charley continues. “I was so depressed that I just couldn't go back to playing on the street in this town. We ended up hopping a freight train out of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and eventually ended up in the Bay Area.”
Charley’s arrival to town, circa 2012, wasn’t by happenstance. The Bay had long held a mythical standing in his imagination, and a more tangible one in his family’s lineage.
“See, my mama was born in Denver, but she was raised in the Bay,” he explains. “She grew up around Concord, Vallejo, Benicia. And the way that she used to talk about Northern California when I was a kid, it sounded like Big Rock Candy Mountain! Probably from the time I was 11 or 12, all I dreamt about was packing my grip and hitchhiking to California, to Northern California specifically. I just knew somewhere deep in my heart that I needed to go there, above anything else.”
Between busking on BART’s yellow line and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Charley crashed with some distant cousins. But the street singing hustle had taken its toll by then, and not long after getting to the Bay, Mendocino’s “greener” pastures came calling.
Brooks Burris
“I was a farmhand working for a couple different ranchers, a couple different ganja farmers,” Charley discloses. “I was doing fence work, cleaning up after cows and horses, picking grapes, any kind of side handiwork. It's funny, ’cause I'm from South Texas. I’ve got a lot of cowboy roots on my daddy’s side…”
That’s the side from which Davy Crockett hails–yup, that Davy Crockett!
“But I learned about horses, ranching, and farming in Mendocino County.”
For a while, Charley regularly made trips back and forth between the redwoods and the city, moving significant quantities of cannabis, well before legalization. Throughout, he was immersing himself in the larger culture of Northern California.
“Man, I used to hitchhike up and down the 101 with all kinds of Hare Krishnas, and Rastafaris, all kinds of people on pilgrimages, people from all over the world,” he recalls. “And we would go down to San Francisco, and see the free concerts in Golden Gate Park.”
Charley says his exposure to the radical politics and counter-cultural lifestyles of the Bay had an enduring impact on him.
Fletcher Moore
“Those revolutionary ideas and people's movements!” he emphasizes. “I remember being in Golden Gate Park, and people were thinking differently because of the Wall Street crash, and Occupy, and all the homelessness–the war veterans that were living on the street. I had never seen anything like that. And that's when the seeds were planted in my mind, cultivating my ideas of being able to write my own songs.”
Sure enough, tales of economic struggle and survival have proven to be a cornerstone of Charley’s catalog.
“Anybody that I was related to, besides my mama, thought I had lost my damn mind,” he admits. “And maybe, as Waylon Jennings said, ‘I've always been crazy, but California kept me from going insane’–the Bay Area and especially Mendocino County.”
During this period in the Bay, Charley moved from being a street musician to hitting stages at bars and clubs.
“Probably the first time I got up,” he recounts, “was [at] the saloon in North Beach–getting up with the rockabilly, and the older generation, all the Black blues players. And then all the old Black clubs in Oakland.”
“Just like I’d discovered in New Orleans,” he continues, “it was true of the Bay Area. People would ask you to play your music–if they saw a guitar on you, they wanted you to play. And I've carried that with me everywhere I've gone.”
But right as he was finding some traction as a stage performer, the plant-transport side of Charley’s life took a sudden left turn.
He got snagged by cops in Virginia, during one especially brazen contraband-carrying run. He did a month of jail time, managed to make bail, and promptly returned to Mendocino on a mission. He reasoned–correctly, it turns out–that the judge in his case would only let him serve his sentence on probation if he could show proof of a burgeoning music career. So after years of living as an outlaw, he devoted himself to recording his first album.
Bobby Cochran / Creative Commons
“It was what I needed to get my act together,” Charley relays. “I ended up cutting that record, A Stolen Jewel, in the farmhouse where I was working, in the winter after harvest.”
But completing a record and getting anyone to hear it are very different endeavors. While music streaming platforms had already taken off, in 2015 CDs were still a thing. And Charley knew he had to get his new songs out in physical form, as far and wide as possible. He drove his truck down to San Francisco, to get a bunch of discs duplicated, or as we used to say in those days, “burned.”
“I can't remember the name of that place,” he chuckles, “but I used to drive those people crazy, go down there and pay them cash. It was right near downtown, maybe near the Tenderloin? Eventually, I drove that truck down to Texas, with all them CDs on me, and started handing them out on street corners in Dallas and Fort Worth and Austin.”
Thus began Charley’s “above-ground” career. He started gigging in bars and clubs, and quickly got written up in Texas newspapers. That got him noticed by an agent, who he says “worked me like a racehorse on the Hank Williams circuit for about five years before the big dogs came in.”
As his notoriety’s grown in recent years, so have the music industry’s attempts to label him in sweeping or simplistic terms.
But Charley, of mixed racial heritage and multiple cultural confluences, tends to laugh off inane attempts at classification. He’s as influenced by Bill Withers as he is Hank Williams, Sr. He’s almost always sporting a wide-brim cowboy hat, dapper ’70s threads, and a stunning necklace with the falcon image of Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess. To him, this aesthetic amalgamation is nothing if not natural.
Fletcher Moore
As he gets ready to take the stage in front of 3,000 adoring fans–just days before the release of his 15th album–I ask Charley to encapsulate the Bay Area’s imprint on his artistry. Despite a fast-growing following that runs the ideological gamut, does he feel a responsibility to espouse any of those revolutionary ideals he was first exposed to in Golden Gate Park?
“Well, this life that I live is a tightrope walk,” he confesses. “It is walking the line. I'll just say this: If I can't tell the truth as I see it in my songs, then I ain't worth very much.”
And with that, the griot from San Benito’s off to sing to his faithful, accompanied by a crew of ace musicians coloring his tales of life on the margins with some of the smoothest country blues this side of South Texas.
