Americana star Charley Crockett's wild journey to stay true to his music

The 39-year-old Texas troubadour is heading to Australia in January, playing 13 shows in 16 days, starting in Tamworth on January 27 during the country music festival and ending up at the Astor Theatre in Perth on February 14.

The tour is hot on the heels of Crockett's first trip Down Under in March of this year, when he and his band The Blue Drifters played shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Crockett has become a red-hot property in the US, drawing from a wide fan base. His new album, Live at the Ryman, was released at the end of September. Although he's got 12 albums to his credit, this one feels like the breakthrough. A combination of originals and covers, it sizzles with energy (there's also a film of the concert), and mesmerises with Crockett's distinctive voice and unique style that blends soul, jazz, blues and old-time country.

His band, The Blue Drifters, is tight, like you get when you tour for more than 200 nights a year across the world. His organ player Kullen Fox doubles on trumpet and accordion during shows, his pedal steel player, Nathan Fleming, is as smooth as they come. Lead guitarist Alexis Sanchez, hooked up with him years ago when he was working hard in the Dallas music scene.

Although he did not win, Crockett was nominated for the 2023 Americana Music Awards for Best Artist, Best Album (The Man from Waco), Song of the Year (I'm a Clown).

At age 39, it may seem like Crockett is late to the party of fame. But it just depends on your point of view. It's just as easy to argue that music fans have been slow to find Crockett, because he's been refining his own style since he was a teenager who taught himself to play on an old guitar his mum bought him at a pawn shop.

His story, now told many times over, includes spending summers as a kid with his uncle in New Orleans and learning to play music on the streets there, and leaving his Texas home as a teenager to hit the road, doing odd jobs and busking anywhere and everywhere.

Born in San Benito, Texas, he now calls Austin home.

At first, it bothered him when a feature story labelled him a "stylistic chameleon".

"I had been struggling for years, people saying 'we don't know what to call you, where to put you, we don't know what to do with you'," Crockett says a Zoom interview last week.

"Since they could not easily characterise what I was doing, I felt that people would get confused by me and therefore I did not get a lot of opportunities that I saw to a lot of people coming very quickly. And that was very difficult for me, it was really difficult for me to feel passed over time and time again."

But Crockett didn't change. He kept writing songs, and performing widely, finding musicians and producers who understood him, drawing the best of him, doing it his way.

"But as I've been able to endure all the changes, and the 'flavour of the week', and the different trends and popularities, kind of in being left to my own devices, I've been able to develop my sound and put out a lot of records," he says. "Not because I had a grand scheme to release all these records, but because kind of by virtue of being misunderstood I was left alone to develop, which I think is something that is not happening very much in this country in the business anymore."

Busking on the streets (and subways) of New York, New Orleans, Nashville and hundred other places will harden you up.

"I love blues music. I love soul music. I love old time storytelling folk songs. I love jazz," Crockett says. "I love all of those things. They call me country, but really, I've always done all of those styles, just like I learned to do them as an itinerant on the street. I always did all of them together."

And his own songs reflect that experience as well.

"I didn't make a legal dollar in my life until, I think, 2016. 2016-2017 was the first legal money I ever made," he says, stumped by the question of what was last job he had outside of music. "Everything was under the table. Everything I did, even playing music, was illegal then, because it was all panhandling. It was playing for tips. There was a million tickets they could give you' cause I was playing in public."

Travelling is now in his blood, it's his lifestyle, probably just in a more comfortable standard than he had for many years. It's also influenced his songwriting.

"I 've had a lot of trouble. I've had a lot of bad times, I have," he says. "But I've always lived. I feel, if I can't tell the truth in my songwriting I'm not worth very much... The thing is, by travelling, I've always got a new song to sing, I'm always inspired by the next song I'm starting to cook up in my mind, and, you know, I'll take on a lot of a trouble for the joy of writing another song."

Crockett was originally booked to tour Australia in 2018, but he had critical heart surgery that slowed him down. The next tour was cancelled due to COVID, so he was happy to finally get here this year.

"We were surprised by the crowds," he says. " I know I was surprised."

He's keen to build a fan base here. With his showmanship, craft and full band, he's got plenty to offer. He's playing big venues - like the Bar on the Hill in Newcastle, the Enmore in Sydney, the Forum in Melbourne.

"[We] really want to show the folks in Australia we ain't a flash in the pan, we're not just coming over for a novelty to say we did it, and you know, I'm the kind of guy who says yes until I can afford to say no. I'm not there yet."