$10 Cowboy

Charley Crockett specializes in roaming through the back pages of 20th century American music, taking his time to linger in honky tonks as he wanders the byways of blues. The Man from Waco, the 2022 album that helped expand and solidify his following outside of his native Texas, found him tying those strands together thanks to his decision to cut the album live in the studio with his touring band, an aesthetic he preserves for its 2024 sequel $10 Cowboy. Crocketts approach to $10 Cowboy may be similar to The Man from Waco, but the record feels considerably different thanks to the troubadour swapping country for soul as the albums connective tissue. With its loping, relaxed grooves and patina of sweetened strings, $10 Cowboy could be mistaken for a product of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, not an album originating from a small studio in Austin, Texas. Crockett hardly abandons country -- there are thick layers of steel guitar all over the record, along with such fleet two-steps as "Aint Done Losing Yet" -- but he does synthesize his particular interests, melding smooth soul rhythms and blues grit to hardscrabble country songs. Neither the singer nor his band lean into this fusion hard, preferring to play with a graceful ease that lends the album a timeless quality. Crocketts points of reference -- indeed, his enduring obsessions -- may firmly be in the past, yet he and his band are never encumbered by nostalgia, nor do they bear the collective weight of history. They play with an evident grin, digging their own interplay as they wring all the humor and pathos out of Crocketts hard luck tales of losers lost on the winding highways of America. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine