After 15 years, two months, and 30 days, Cross Canadian Ragweed’s hiatus is over.
The Oklahoma four-piece, whose mid-2000s heyday laid the groundwork for the current surge in popularity of Red Dirt music, reunited to play six songs late Thursday, closing down the main stage on a cold night at Mile 0 Fest in Key West, Florida.
“I was honestly nervous, and I didn’t think I was going to be,” frontman Cody Canada tells Rolling Stone of the set, “but, man, that felt great.”
Ragweed took the stage after a 14-song Ragweed tribute set, which featured artists from the festival bill playing a selection from the Red Dirt pioneers’ catalogs. “I guess it’s cold in Key West because hell froze over,” Canada told the crowd after the band’s opener, the rock-edged stoner tune “Number,” ended a hiatus that seemed permanent as recently as a year ago.
Canada, drummer Randy Ragsdale, bassist Jeremy Plato, and rhythm guitar player Grady Cross, last performed onstage together on Oct. 24, 2010, at Joe’s on Weed Street in Chicago. That show had the vibes and feel of a final concert and permanent end, but Canada’s last words to the crowd before stepping off stage were, “Stay tuned.” A decade and a half later, that off-hand declaration turned into prophecy fulfilled for fans gathered in Key West.
The adrenaline rush was met with some resistance from the same weather that has gripped most of the country in near-zero temperatures this week. A blustery north wind gusted directly into the faces of the band, but fans offset the conditions with the loudest cheers of the festival.
Their second song was “Lonely Girl,” from Ragweed’s Soul Gravy album, considered the band’s must-listen record. “What an honor to be on stage with my fucking friends again,” Canada told the crowd after the song.
They followed it with “Don’t Need You” and “Lighthouse Keeper” before kicking off “Boys From Oklahoma.” Canada invited several other artists out to sing or ad-lib verses — including Django Walker and Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly — in the process giving the Mile 0 crowd the signature song they hoped to hear.
Ragweed’s final song was a cover of Todd Snider’s “Late Last Night,” a defiant party anthem that has long been one of Canada’s favorites to play. The band left the stage to an ovation, and a promise that 14 more years will not pass between shows.
“There’s a whole lot of feelings in my head right now,” Ragsdale says. “It’s been 15 years. That’s a whole lot of time between shows — a whole lot of life. There was so much thinking that it would never happen again, and here we are. I feel like we’ve all grown up, learned a lot about ourselves, and now we get a second chance to get to do this.”
The performance was a preview of the four Boys From Oklahoma concerts set for April at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which will serve at Ragweed’s official reunion residency in the college town where the band first rose to prominence. The Turnpike Troubadours are co-headlining the shows with support from Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Stoney Larue, the Great Divide and the Mike McClure Band.
Mile 0 Fest showcases Red Dirt, Americana, and young country artists. Two of this year’s featured bands — the Red Clay Strays and 49 Winchester — had played the festival’s afternoon side stages in bars around Key West as recently as a year ago. Thursday night’s headliner was Shane Smith and the Saints, which is a band in the middle of its own sustained success but was heavily influenced in its formative years by Ragweed.
Festival founder and director Kyle Carter, a native of the band’s hometown of Yukon, Oklahoma, who once beat Canada in a talent show when the frontman was a teenager, tells Rolling Stone that Ragweed’s influence on Red Dirt made Mile 0 the ideal setting for the band to make a live return.
“To put this into Mile 0 lineup terms, last night we had Steve Earle,” Carter says. “Red Dirt, and to some degree Americana, doesn’t exist without Steve Earle. If you talk to Cody, or you talk to Reckless Kelly — hell, you talk to anybody — Steve Earle was it. Everybody here wanted to be Steve Earle once.
“Well, Cody Canada and Ragweed are the Steve Earle of this generation. They mean everything.”
The tribute set beforehand began with Jamie Lin Wilson — who was not on the Mile 0 bill and made a surprise appearance — singing “17” off Ragweed’s self-titled Universal South debut record. Other highlights included James Ford of Them Dirty Roses performing a Southern-rock-laced version of “Constantly,” and the Randy Rogers Band reprising “This Time Around,” which Rogers co-wrote with Canada.
In another Boys From Oklahoma preview, Great Divide frontman Mike McClure sang “Fightin’ For” off Ragweed’s 2009 album Garage — which ultimately became Ragweed’s biggest hit, topping out at Number 39 on the Billboard country singles chart.
There would have been a third taste of the April concerts, as Stoney Larue was slated to play John Hiatt’s “Train to Birmingham,” which Ragweed covered in 2009, However, Larue canceled on Mile 0 to recover from a bout of laryngitis. Lucas Jagneaux — a Louisiana native whose upcoming album is being produced by the Great Divide’s JJ Lester — played “Train to Birmingham” in Larue’s stead.
Two bands in the tribute stood out for bringing a full-circle moment to the stage. Waves in April turned the Ragweed staple “Carney Man” into a metalcore cover, and the Smokin’ Oaks followed it up with a high-energy version of “Suicide Blues.” Both Dierks and Willy Canada, sons of the Ragweed frontman, play in Waves in April, while Cross’s son, Slaid, plays lead guitar for the Smokin’ Oaks.
Waves in April is a metal band, and he Smokin’ Oaks fit in the freewheeling vibe that Koe Wetzel and Treaty Oak Revival have made cool to a generation of young fans. But both bands are showcased at Mile 0 this week, and their inclusion in the tribute put an emphasis on how much time has passed since Ragweed’s 2010 finale. Dierks and Willy Canada, as well as Slaid Cross, were young children at the time of that concert.
“What’s a trip is watching Dierks and Willy up there jamming,” Cross says, “or seeing Slaid while they are playing some of the same places we played. Slaid played the Blue Light in Lubbock, and he was up there playing on some of my same gear from Ragweed — same guitar, on the same stage, and they’d play a cover tune that maybe we used to cover. That’s a trip, and that’s full-circle.”
There will be more such moments for Ragweed, especially at the April concerts. But on Thursday night in Key West, the four men most credited with introducing Red Dirt to the world were together again, playing music while their fans lost themselves in the music. By every measure available on Thursday night, Cross Canadian Ragweed is not only back, but happy.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Plato says. “I always, in the back of my mind, thought that it might just happen, but now that it’s here, it’s unreal.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing.
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