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Country breakout Charley Crockett celebrated his 36th birthday holed up in South Austin alongside his girlfriend and dog – and a new album, Field Recordings, Vol. 1. The digital release offers 30 lo-fi recordings of unreleased originals and deep-cut covers, captured over the past year at the farm of a compatriot in Northern California's idyllic Mendocino County.
I was born in 1984, in the old Dolly Vinsant Memorial Hospital, in San Benito. Me, my mama, and my grandmother lived several miles away from there, outside of Los Fresnos, in a trailer on Old Port Road. Rte 3, box 87 was our address. Our trailer was parked on the edge of a resaca, where we were surrounded by grapefruit orchards and sugarcane, big agave plants and mesquite trees.
My mama did the weather on KVEO, a TV station out of Brownsville. She would sing Billie Holiday and ZZ Top around the house, and I’d sing along with her; that’s when I first started to get into music.
Charley Crockett lives out some childhood cowboy fantasies in the new video for "The Valley," premiering exclusively on Billboard today (Feb. 27).
"Getting to do that cowboy s--t on film...I've been trying to do that since I was a little boy," Crockett tells Billboard of the video, which is for the autobiographical title track from his latest album.
The San Benito, Texas native is, in fact, an avid Western film fan and boasts that "one of the two TVs on the bus has to be on Encore Westerns, 24-7. Those [films] are whitewashed and have a lot of f---ed-up situations and a lot of it bothers me, but I still love it for the attitude, the motifs, the cinematography, how they use nature to sell the picture. I love that stuff."
The 2020 Ameripolitan Music Awards returned for the seventh year running on Monday night (Feb. 24), following a busy weekend of live performances and festivities. Western swing bandleader Big Sandy returned to Memphis' Guest House at Graceland to host the festivities, alongside model and producer Doris Mayday.
This year's Ameripolitan Awards brought some updates to the festivities: Prior to the event, the awards show announced its decision to omit the Outlaw category this time around, instead consolidating that group into their Honky-Tonk category. "These two categories are so intertwined that it has become difficult for nominators to determine which category best suits an artist," an Instagram post explained. "There will now only be Honky-Tonk, Rockabilly and Western Swing categories."
By Thomas Mooney
For the first time in years, San Benito native Charley Crockett returned home last fall for a look around his old stomping grounds. The country crooner grew up in a rural part of the Rio Grande Valley, a region of Texas he describes “as isolated, unique, and as misunderstood as they come.”
Crockett was raised by his single mother, with the help of his grandmother, in a faded trailer off Old Port Road, outside of Los Fresnos. Though he and his mother relocated to Dallas when he was a teenager, his grandmother mostly resided there until she passed away with cancer, when Crockett was in his early twenties.