The Ballad of Charlie Crockett
"A Paen To The Weirdos"
The Ballad of Charlie Crockett
The musical weirdo is indispensable in the scope of things. Some of these weirdos are radicals playing an oboe with a 4 iron and a buzz-saw. Other weirdos are traditionalists, with an ear and eye for the past, a sense of yesterday as imagined by whatever weirdo impulse that drives them. Charlie Crockett is just such a weirdo. He latches onto the musical long-gone past with fists clenched, grabbing it like an impassioned acolyte searching for the truth. And by golly, he finds it.
Crockett’s raison detre is the 1950’s honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb and Hank Sr., Lefty Frizzell and early rock & roll. He also does some Hi Records style soul music, stripped as a bare as a goat caught in an H bomb blast on The Bikini Atoll. His approach to these forms transcends slavishness and evokes (with all the youthful exuberance of the real deal) a time-traveler, landing in a slightly off-center American past. I can’t explain it any other way. Which, does not mean I won’t try, regardless.
Part of Crockett’s mystery is the rhythmic feeling he sings and plays with, which grooves and dances like a natural-born Cracker with a hankering for The Grand Ole Opry. That’s the thing most revival acts miss, which is why we call them revival acts, to begin with.
Crockett is more like a time machine, promising a visit back home. But this time we find that you really can go home again. For as long as the song lasts, at least. That is a joyous thing.
It’s this eccentricity—that is in no way innovative—but it still feels like it, anyway. Probably, because this kind of authentic, musical, time-traveling experience almost never happens so effortlessly.
There appears to be no struggle to evoke the past, for Crockett, it’s just what he hears. I don’t know how true that is. If it’s not, he’s a magnificent method actor, posing as a musician. Either, way, it works.
To me, Charlie Crockett singing Hank Williams “I saw The Light,” seems as natural as rain. And, in a way that it almost never does, if your thing is hearing Hank, done like Hank, the Honky Tonk King yodeling the blues with a lap steel echoing in the distance.
Charlie Crockett, on the other hand, sounds more like Hank’s hobo 2nd cousin, paling around with Sonny Boy Williamson no. one—speech impediment and all. Add a little Hi Records, Al Green, grits and gravy to Crockett’s musical pastiche, and you have an ace “Weirdo,” soulful, funny, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and grooving. This makes for time travel magic, and dang good music.
It makes for Charlie Crockett.
Mark Magula
The musical weirdo is indispensable in the scope of things. Some of these weirdos are radicals playing an oboe with a 4 iron and a buzz-saw. Other weirdos are traditionalists, with an ear and eye for the past, a sense of yesterday as imagined by whatever weirdo impulse that drives them. Charlie Crockett is just such a weirdo. He latches onto the musical long-gone past with fists clenched, grabbing it like an impassioned acolyte searching for the truth. And by golly, he finds it.
Crockett’s raison detre is the 1950’s honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb and Hank Sr., Lefty Frizzell and early rock & roll. He also does some Hi Records style soul music, stripped as a bare as a goat caught in an H bomb blast on The Bikini Atoll. His approach to these forms transcends slavishness and evokes (with all the youthful exuberance of the real deal) a time-traveler, landing in a slightly off-center American past. I can’t explain it any other way. Which, does not mean I won’t try, regardless.
Part of Crockett’s mystery is the rhythmic feeling he sings and plays with, which grooves and dances like a natural-born Cracker with a hankering for The Grand Ole Opry. That’s the thing most revival acts miss, which is why we call them revival acts, to begin with.
Crockett is more like a time machine, promising a visit back home. But this time we find that you really can go home again. For as long as the song lasts, at least. That is a joyous thing.
It’s this eccentricity—that is in no way innovative—but it still feels like it, anyway. Probably, because this kind of authentic, musical, time-traveling experience almost never happens so effortlessly.
There appears to be no struggle to evoke the past, for Crockett, it’s just what he hears. I don’t know how true that is. If it’s not, he’s a magnificent method actor, posing as a musician. Either, way, it works.
To me, Charlie Crockett singing Hank Williams “I saw The Light,” seems as natural as rain. And, in a way that it almost never does, if your thing is hearing Hank, done like Hank, the Honky Tonk King yodeling the blues with a lap steel echoing in the distance.
Charlie Crockett, on the other hand, sounds more like Hank’s hobo 2nd cousin, paling around with Sonny Boy Williamson no. one—speech impediment and all. Add a little Hi Records, Al Green, grits and gravy to Crockett’s musical pastiche, and you have an ace “Weirdo,” soulful, funny, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and grooving. This makes for time travel magic, and dang good music.
It makes for Charlie Crockett.
Mark Magula