Name a city — any city — and Charley Crockett has probably been there.
Born near the southern tip of Texas, the singer spent his early childhood in a trailer park with his single mom near Brownsville. In his late teens and 20s, he “hoboed” around the world, playing in subways and on street corners and crashing wherever he could in Spain, New Orleans, Copenhagen, New York City, Paris and Morocco.
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He lived in Northern California, where he worked on a marijuana farm and got busted for selling the harvest. Since 2017, he’s settled in Austin, although his roots there are still loose, since he’s on the road half the time.
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But of all the places he’s been, perhaps the key spot in the picaresque story of Charley Crockett is Dallas, which is why he named his latest album after Big D.
![Charley Crockett comes to grip with his North Texas past in ‘Visions of Dallas’ (1) Charley Crockett comes to grip with his North Texas past in ‘Visions of Dallas’ (1)](https://i0.wp.com/dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/JO63X22IRZD5HCOXF43NPQBR3Y.jpg?auth=5bdbc135f8a76713ab7c477da0b3208749229fef5ff58810449db97a8c0c1cac&width=430&quality=40)
The singer, 40, released Visions of Dallas on Monday, a companion album to his 3-month-old $10 Cowboy and featuring songs from the same recording sessions. Visions of Dallas is classic Crockett, an uncompromising blend of Texas country and blues marked by the singer’s unique phrasing and smooth-as-scotch baritone.
“I’d be lying to you if I said it hadn’t been suggested to me before,” he says with a laugh, when asked about the Dallas title.
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He’s speaking by phone before a show in Cleveland, where he’s about to do a VIP meet-and-greet — a long way from his days playing for spare change on the grimy streets of Deep Ellum.
He admits putting Dallas in the title was a repeated suggestion of his fiancée, Taylor Grace, a Houston-born singer-songwriter whom Crockett calls “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Grace co-wrote the title track to Visions of Dallas.
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“She really loves the city,” Crockett says. “She was staying at the Fairmont Hotel downtown, looking for wedding dresses with her mama and looking out on the Dallas skyline from her hotel room, and she just wrote a song off the top of her head, thinking about my life. [The rest of the song] just jumped out of my guitar when I heard it, and we came up with a melody together.”
Well the first time I left Texas, I promised not to return
But in spite of all of my efforts, there are some bridges you can’t burn
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No I can’t shake that city, and all the good she’s done for me
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Having visions of Dallas, late at night in Tennessee.
Visions of Dallas is an eclectic album, with six original songs mixed with covers by the late Fort Worth native Townes Van Zandt (“Loretta”), Bob Dylan (a retooled version of his 1973 outtake “Goodbye Holly”) and Hoyt Axton’s “Trouble and Misery,” a tune about escaping hard times in Laredo and moving to Dallas.
“I think all the songs on the record are tying back to Dallas,” Crockett says. “Dallas-Fort Worth is real important to me.”
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And for good reason. Crockett lived in North Texas longer than in any other area. Arriving in Irving with his mother when he was 9, he went to Irving public schools until he dropped out and hit the road with the pawnshop guitar his mom had bought for him.
After brushes with the law and an ill-fated contract with a New York music biz exec, he returned to Dallas in the early 2010s and re-launched his career out of Deep Ellum with a pair of self-released albums that earned rave reviews from Rolling Stone and NPR.
Seven years and an armload of albums later, he’s a star, though one who still flies under the radar of mainstream popularity. His 2022 masterwork The Man From Waco finally earned him a spot on the Billboard 200 — but just barely, scratching the surface at 199. $10 Cowboy upped the ante by a few nickels, making it to 168.
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Yet Crockett has emerged as a big deal among lovers of American roots music. This summer, he’s headlining major venues such as the 9,000-seat Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver and the Ryman Auditorium, the “mother church of country music,” in Nashville. His last Dallas show, at the Longhorn Ballroom in May, sold out well in advance.
He sings about his former home in “Avoiding Mirrors,” a song from Visions of Dallas about being haunted by lost love and sinking deep into depression. In the lyrics, Crockett tips his Stetson to Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the Trinity River, and Pegasus, the iconic flying red horse that’s been sitting atop the Magnolia Building since 1934.
You can find me on the levee, just praying for a flood
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While running from a red horse, still flying up above.
The song is a follow-up of sorts to “Trinity River,” his 2015 tale of heartbreak where he dreams of his corpse floating downstream.
In this river city, nothin’ ever lasts
Beside the lonesome blues, steady starin’ back at you.
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Like a lot of songwriters, Crockett refuses to analyze or over-explain his lyrics.
“It just kind of wrote itself,” he says of “Avoiding Mirrors,” adding that he often writes on a tour bus, late at night after a gig, “when I get low-down enough.”
Still, he admits that singing the blues on Visions of Dallas is his way of coming to grips with various memories — painful and otherwise — of his days spent in North Texas, just as past songs were about his poverty-filled childhood in South Texas.
“I don’t care who you are. You could travel this whole world over and you will never outrun it,” he says. “You’ll never get away from it. You just keep ending up there.”