“America, I wonder if you remember me,” croons the Son of Davy on his 13th LP’s second track. Only five minutes into $10 Cowboy, Charley Crockett is already brandishing the scars of a cowboy singer who’s refused to be beaten into a corner by the industry. Over a dozen records and almost a decade into the game, he finally has some real estate to show them off at the top of the mountain.
As the track suggests, the Stars and Stripes have always had a love-hate relationship with their proudest participants. Charley Crockett came up busking America’s darkest corners, cutting his teeth on its most celebrated of songs, incessantly tiring over a people and a place that seemed reluctant to give that vagrant his atta boys without stipulation. But does he even want them? Does he need them to feel some satisfaction?
The answer to both of those questions is probably not, though it certainly doesn’t stop him from trying to come to that conclusion on his own path as he does with just about anything else in his life. $10 Cowboy, while maybe being a moniker for self-prescribed worth, comes with an air of acceptance under his now casual desperation. Crockett is content in knowing he’ll never be what they want him to be, so maybe it’s best to stop trying. Perhaps it’s time to be who he wants him to be. And maybe all that means is to be all this traveler has ever been: A small yet stout piece of every piece of ground trod on.
Crockett spent his early years trying on several different hats, literally and figuratively. He’s been a sleazy, blues-laden bandit on In The Night, a spiritual successor to Hank Sr. through his Lil G.L. series, and most recently kicked his spurs toward the sound of trouble as the murder-manic, Texas two-timer on The Man from Waco.
It wasn’t necessarily that Crockett was never understood, but more that the moment you thought you had him, he’d slither away into a new pocket of the underbelly he was growing fond of at that moment. He’s like a chameleon, or maybe just like a guy who got too cool to stay more than five minutes at one party. While four genres and over a dozen records prove his versatility, $10 Cowboy boasts his entire range in just a tight twelve tracks. It’s a thesis statement of Crockett’s whole career packed into a neat forty-minute cruise in his Cadillac, booming with authority yet still wary of the way to go.
There was a two-year break between this and his previous record, The Man From Waco. That’s the longest stretch of time without an LP release for Crockett in the better part of a decade. The record’s title track immediately knocks the rust off; out-of-work guitar strings loosened with every pluck and drum that thump as if they have dust flying off of them. While all this complements his retro mantra, it also emphasizes that Crockett isn’t returning to the studio out of a lust to work but because he finally feels he has something to say again.
And honestly, there’s a little more punch to be packed in Crockett’s classic adages now that he’s been around the block a time or two. “Hard Luck & Circumstances” backdrops his mo-town-equipped baritone with a gospel choir amplifying the chorus and the promises it’ll keep should struggle to continue to befall him. “Good At Losing” is a contemplative, Highwaymen-adjacent outcast ballad. He’s rattling off a laundry list of places he’s not wanted, leaving him, like most drifters, out in the cold to fend for himself. “Solitary Road” tells the tale of where that artistic exile has led him, to the edges of the earth where piercing guitar solos circle him like vultures and keys screech and cry out seemingly to no one. Our hero has never been more alone, yet he’s also never felt more comfortable.
If anything, an increased budget and a budding bromance between Crockett and producer Billy Horton have helped concentrate this Creole Cowboy who’s itching to tell the story of every outcast East and West of Texas. “Spade” recalls the bloodlust of gambling tricksters that populated the careers of early troubadours like Marty Robbins, its galloping arrangement whisking us off into the night with that embarrassment of riches. The saddle-straddler seems to find solace in the journey on “Lead The Way,” where it’s iterated that the road ahead is long, but it’s the only one Crockett cares to know. He’s spent a chunk of his career primarily driven to preserve his spiritual successors who were left in the dust they bit, only for him to piece those skeletons together in the form of an entirely new body: His.
$10 Cowboy reverberates all the ideals Crockett has bellowed for his entire career. That rusty megaphone of a voice is booming with authority here, not just because he’s vocally operating an octave below the wallowing wails of his days in the Train Robbers. The performer is still a constant spokesperson for the downtrodden, a Southern Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again. Sadistically, he seems to thrive under pain. It’s made him who he is and continues to be a driving force in the personage that almost feels fictitious in its beaming showmanship. There’s nothing fake about how this wanderer goes about his business. This record solidifies Crockett as what they call in the industry “The Real Deal.” Not that he would care what they say about him anyway.
