Cross Canadian Ragweed sized up the expectations — months of comeback hype, a stadium filled with fans doing the wave, a five-band lineup of Red Dirt icons, and an introduction by Oklahoma State University football coach Mike Gundy — and then made a collective decision to blow right past them.
The Oklahoma four-piece credited with laying the groundwork for today’s soaring popularity of Red Dirt music capped a layoff of nearly 15 years on Thursday night with a blistering two-and-a-half-hour comeback concert at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater — the town where they got their start and paid their dues 30 years ago.
“It seems like it was a really long time ago, and not six or seven months ago, that we were talking about how we were gonna do this,” frontman Cody Canada told the sold-out crowd of more than 45,000. “Now we’re here. We fucking did it.”
Ragweed followed a scorching set from their co-headliners, Turnpike Troubadours, who announced a surprise new album onstage, plus shows from the Great Divide, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, and Stoney LaRue, at the first of a four-night concert event dubbed “The Boys From Oklahoma.”
Canada, along with rhythm guitarist Grady Cross, bassist Jeremy Plato, and drummer Randy Ragsdale, spent the weeks ahead of the concert raking in accolades like an induction into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame and the Icon Award from Texas Music & Radio Awards. Thursday night, they turned the fervor on its head with what might well go down as the most memorable concert in the state’s history.
In early October, Ragweed confirmed this reunion in an interview with Rolling Stone. In the eight months since, the four members have spoken to me in more than a dozen interviews — for this story and for a book chronicling their return, Never Say Never, which will recap all four concerts and is set for release on April 21.
From the start, the scale of the shows never actually set in with Canada. For all the credit Ragweed gets for exposing the world to Red Dirt, the group spent the arc of its career as a bar band. Canada’s current band, the Departed — featuring Canada, Plato, and drummer Eric Hansen — is still a bar band. Coming back, suddenly, as a stadium act is hard to comprehend for the Ragweed frontman.
“We got into Stillwater on Monday night, and kind of had the keys to the kingdom,” Canada tells Rolling Stone ahead of the show. “We walked around everywhere, and man, you can look at it all you want to on a piece of paper, but good Lord, it’s big. I’ve been to so many shows like this, but I’ve never done it.”
A year ago, such conversations would have been unfathomable, and the idea of a reunion residency at such a scale would have been laughable. Ragweed’s final show, in October 2010 at Joe’s Sports Bar in Chicago, capped a year of internal turmoil that left hard feelings and bitterness in the band. In February 2024, Canada — again speaking to RS — emphatically ruled out a comeback.
Photo: Todd Purifoy*
In truth, however, the notion had been on Canada’s mind for nearly two years. He saw the reaction to Turnpike’s 2022 reunion after a three-year break, and social media comments suggesting that Ragweed should be next. Jon Folk — agent for both Ragweed and the Departed, as well as Turnpike — had steadily fielded offers since Ragweed broke up, but he began receiving ones that crept into life-altering territory. Canada started running the idea of a comeback past his peers: Robert Earl Keen told him to take a victory lap; Great Divide frontman Mike McClure, whose own band once broke up for nearly a decade, told Canada he’d feel like a weight had been lifted.
“To be able to reconcile that, and to think about how happy this is going to make their fans,” McClure says, “I really can’t believe it.”
Felker echoes McClure’s sentiment but is quick to point out that Ragweed was gone a lot longer than Turnpike. That time away, he says, created an aura around the band which contributed to the frenzy surrounding their return.
“Theirs is very different than ours,” Felker says. “They’re almost mythical to us, to people who are my age and a little older who were there. They sort of sum up a generation. To see them get to come back like this, at some of the biggest shows in Oklahoma that have ever happened, it’s fucking insane.”
The path to the stage on Thursday night, in hindsight, was less of a road and more of a tightrope. With the exception of Plato, who says of a comeback, “I always thought it was bound to happen,” the tightrope began at OSU. Right about when Canada was swearing off a comeback, Darren Shrum was dreaming big. At the time, the university president was Kayse Shrum; Darren is her husband. In early 2024, he thought bringing concerts to OSU’s athletic facilities would help fill a need for name, image, and likeness money for the program. He tells Rolling Stone now that he ran the idea past Kayse. “She said, ‘Go for it,’” Darren recalls.
But Darren Shrum was focusing on Gallagher-Iba, Oklahoma State’s 13,000-seat basketball arena, not the massive Boone Pickens stadium. However, when he took the idea to Kyle Waters, the university’s athletic director for facilities, Waters, who once worked for Coachella, responded by sharing a years-old proposal he had made for a concert at Boone Pickens.
With permission to move forward, Darren — along with Waters and director of football business Kenyatta Wright, a former Oklahoma State and NFL player who is close with Turnpike — started brainstorming. They wanted a country show to be first and contacted Russell Doussan, whose company, Doussan Music Group, is currently producing and promoting Alan Jackson’s Last Call Tour. With Doussan’s help, OSU put out an offer for a concert featuring Jason Aldean and Miranda Lambert, but more than a month passed without an answer.
That’s when Waters suggested Ragweed. “I said, ‘Can they fill the Stadium?’ And Kyle said, ‘I don’t know, but I think so,’” Darren tells Rolling Stone. “So I said, ‘We’re gonna push forward.’”
They contacted Folk, who contacted Canada. This time, the idea of a comeback stopped Canada cold.
“I think there were some unresolved feelings around when and how the band split up,” Folk says. “All the guys in the band had regrets over how that chapter ended. I’ve always found that in life that time heals all wounds. If you were around back in the Ragweed era, you know how much fun their show was and how much happiness it brought to everyone in the room.
“Ultimately,” Folk continues, “I think after years of arguing with himself, Cody woke up one day and said, ‘I’m tired of being upset about this, and I’m going to do something about it.’ He told me, ‘If the guys are up for it, I’d love to add some more chapters to our story.’”
Folk reached out to Cross and Ragsdale separately. But Cross’s mind didn’t go to Ragweed; rather, he thought of his kids. His daughter, Charlie, and son, Slaid, were young when the band broke up. Slaid is 19 now and plays guitar in a hard-driving country band called the Smokin Oaks. Canada has two sons, Dierks and Willy, in their late teens. They play in Waves in April, a metalcore band based in New Braunfels, Texas.
Photo: Todd Purifoy*
Cross saw a chance for the band to show their children what their old men were capable of together.
“We were gone a lot, and when we broke up, we went home and raised our kids,” Cross says. “Instagram wasn’t around when we played. They never got to see what we were like. This really is everything.”
Cross and Ragsdale said yes, and a deal was made. Immediately, the ticket presale window revealed a massive demand for a Ragweed concert. One night became four nights, without a general public on-sale ever happening.
“I am still in the ‘is this real’ mode,” Doussan says. “Being in the business for almost 31 years, and having worked with many ‘level A’ artists and massive events, I have never been a part of something so explosive.”
In early November, Kayse Shrum invited Ragweed to Oklahoma State’s homecoming football game as the guests of honor. The Departed always play a concert the night before OSU’s homecoming in the parking lot of Eskimo Joe’s — Stillwater’s longtime bellwether bar. At that concert, the four members spoke as a group for the first time in more than a decade. Canada and Cross hugged, and Cross joined the Departed onstage at Eskimo Joe’s to play guitar. The next day, the band and their families took in the football game from Shrum’s suite.
One of the family members in the suite was JC Ragsdale — Randy’s son, who was born in 1999 with a form of epilepsy called Lennox Gastaut Syndrome. He used a wheelchair and was limited in his speech, and Canada delighted in embracing him, crying to himself when he saw JC taking in the scene.
“When Cody said yes, I could see a weight had been lifted in his eyes,” says Shannon Canada, Cody’s wife and Ragweed’s manager. “At homecoming, when I saw him with Grady and Randy, it didn’t feel like 15 years had passed. That’s when Ragweed really was back.”
Less than a month later, JC Ragsdale died. The band was devastated, but it put the members in a position of comforting Ragsdale and one another. After the funeral, Ragweed resolved: This comeback is for JC.
“You cherish a lot of the simple things that a lot of people take for granted,” Ragsdale says of JC. “You pay attention to what matters, and you just fucking learn how to soften up and have a heart, because some people have a hard fight just to get through the day. One little thing that you might think is small might mean the whole world to someone else. I didn’t realize what an impact Ragweed had on my own son until I came home. For the last 15 years, he was just watching videos of us over and over again.”
With a renewed friendship and a clear-cut motivation to set the bar for the Red Dirt concerts, Ragweed spent the end of 2024 and early 2025 rehearsing relentlessly — usually in Fort Worth at the studio belonging to Vaden Todd Lewis of the Toadies. They let Folk, Doussan, and Shannon Canada work out the details of the concert.
As city, Stillwater found itself in an unprecedented position. The town’s population is just over 49,000 — roughly the same number of tickets sold for each night of the Boys From Oklahoma concerts. Stan Clark founded Eskimo Joe’s 50 years ago and still oversees the company that runs it. His establishment is the most-recognizable bar and restaurant in Oklahoma. Still, he says this week is a new experience for everybody with an interest in Stillwater or OSU.
“Over 180,000 tickets sold,” Clark says. “I can’t even get my arms around what that’s going to look like or feel like. We’ve never had it. We’ve had game days, but that’s one-and-done. We’ve never had four in a row.”
Photo: Todd Purifoy*
By the time Ragweed stepped off the tightrope and into the spotlight Thursday night, the concert had already cemented its place in Red Dirt lore. LaRue kicked the night off and chose “Oklahoma Breakdown” — the Mike Hosty-penned river tune that was the top-selling single in Texas music in 2007 — to set the tone. Boland followed with a set heavy on the songs he wrote when he lived in this town such as “Pearl Snaps” and “Proud Souls.” The Great Divide led off the third set with “College Days,” which McClure wrote about Stillwater.
When the Turnpike Troubadours are in their element, they are one of the hardest bands in country music to follow. Thursday night, they were in their element. The co-headliners played a stomping, high-energy show for 70 minutes with a setlist filled with enough Turnpike standards that effectively dared Ragweed to try to top it.
“How does it feel to be a part of the biggest night in Oklahoma music ever?” Felker asked the crowd. “All of the bands on this stage are the reason we get to do this. I’ve had a lot of great nights in my life, but this is the best one ever.”
Ultimately, though, the night belonged to the garage band from Stillwater, and Ragweed played an hour longer than their planned set time. At one point, Canada pleaded with event organizers from the mic, “Y’all, don’t shut us off! We haven’t played a show in 16 fucking years.”
Ragweed didn’t just burn through their catalog, though. They laid bare for all in attendance the driving forces behind their comeback. The children whose own musical pursuits spurred the reunion all made it on stage, highlighted by Charlie Cross, who stepped to center stage with a harmonica to kick off the event’s title song, “Boys From Oklahoma,” that brought the loudest roar of the night.
There was also a steady stream of special guests. Dierks Bentley joined to sing his favorite Ragweed song, “42 Miles.” Felker sat in for a verse of “Brooklyn Kid,” Boland did the same on “17,” and Wade Bowen sang “Constantly.” Before kicking off “Carney Man” — the kitschy circus tune Canada and McClure wrote that put Ragweed on the map in the late 1990s — Canada smirked to the crowd, “This is what you wanted!”
The night ended with a cover of Reckless Kelly’s “Crazy Eddie’s Last Hurrah,” with Willy and Cody Braun from Reckless contributing on vocals and mandolin, respectively. The song itself is a fictional tale about a murder of passion, but fans sang the final chorus loudly and clearly, as though the lyrics were plausible to at least a few.
Then, Ragweed walked off the stage. Spouses, children, and fellow artists met all four men at the end of the stage with a mix of laughter and tears, along with an endless line of hugs. Canada cut through the euphoria just long enough to put the evening into words.
“What a good fucking time,” he said.
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose fourth book, Never Say Never: Cross Canadian Ragweed, Boys From Oklahoma, and a Red Dirt Comeback Story for the Ages, is set for release on April 21.
