Charley Crockett knows that many of you have seen the video of him busking on a subway. In the clip, he’s not the Crockett that fans recognize today: there’s no cowboy hat, no dapper suit, and no country-sounding songs.
But Crockett says that’s all part of his evolution, even if he’s aware that some detractors use the video — like Gavin Adcock recently did — to question his country bona fides.
“So much of my career, if you want to call it that, my pilgrimage, a lot of it is documented through user-generated video, when I was a hobo, an itinerant musician,” Crockett says during an appearance on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “My evolution is very visible for those that want to see it. And there are some people who point to that as a sign of my inauthenticity.”
But, according to Crockett, those early videos prove his commitment to music, not poke holes in it.
“In a world where we’re promoting amateur realism as the only version of authenticity, well then I’m going to be more complicated. Because authenticity is also perseverance. You’re just not automatically authentic because the world throws a reality camera on you,” he says. “It’s actually more like what happens after that.”
Crockett has been on a wild ride of late. He dropped his new album Dollar a Day, danced and twirled his way across the stage of the Nashville Palace in Music City during a special release show, and found himself in a beef with Adcock, a Georgia country singer who took umbrage with Crockett’s Instagram post about bro country.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, and Gavin Adcock.
