Songwriter Rodney Crowell sang about the first time he heard Johnny Cash on the radio as a young boy in his 1998 song “I Walk The Line (Revisited).” And in his memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks, Crowell wrote about the dramatic day that his father took him to a 1958 package show at Magnolia Gardens in Channelview, TX with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, whose "Pentecostal pyrotechnics” blew the crowd away amid a thunderstorm.
But in Episode 333 of The String, Crowell talks about a musical epiphany that was perhaps even more profound, because he was no longer a boy on his father’s shoulders, but a teenager crossing the border into Louisiana. He was on his own recognizance, on a true journey of discovery, heading to a roadhouse he was too young to enter legally.
“It had a gravel parking lot, and you couldn't get in, but you could hear the Boogie Kings wailing through the wall, and you could drink beer,” Crowell says. “They were a blue-eyed soul band. Their home gig was the Big Oaks Club in Houma, Louisiana, and G.G. Shinn and Jerry “Count” Jackson were the lead singers. And it was Motown and Stax - white boys bringing it, rocking in earnest. It was like a four piece horn section. And it was slamming. And it was romantic.”
Shinn gets name-checked in one of the lighter songs on Crowell’s new album Airline Highway, out last Friday from New West Records. “The Twenty-One Song Salute (Owed To G.G. Shinn and Cléoma Falcon)” is a rapid fire and clever assembly of lyrics, titles, and memes from the early days of blues and rock and roll. (“I know your poppa was a rolling stone/ And you don't need another man done gone,” he sings.) It’s a celebration of the songs that made him and set him on his journey to becoming one of the most respected songwriters in music, a double Grammy Award recipient, and an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award winner.
Singing along on that track is Crowell’s surprise new friend and collaborator. His new manager introduced him to Tyler Bryant, lead singer in a rock and roll band called the Shakedown and the early-30s husband of Rebecca Lovell, one of the sisters in the high-flying roots rock band Larkin Poe. Crowell remembers: “He said, ‘Look, there's somebody I want you to meet. I think that he will bring some energy that you're really going to enjoy.’ And it was the truth. Thing is, I'd met Tyler when he was like 14 or 15, out in California, and he was already a young guitar wizard. But he had become a producer, and we just hit it off. Just instantly.”
Bryant sings with Crowell on the Salute song. Larkin Poe joins him on “Louisiana Sunshine Feeling Okay,” drawing on the spirit and vibe of the Lafayette, LA studio called Dockside, where the team worked with famed deep-South recording engineer Trina Shoemaker. Other vocal collaborators include Lukas Nelson, Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr, and country star Ashley McBryde, who co-wrote and lent powerful vocals on my favorite track, “Taking Flight.”
Rodney Crowell let it drop early in our interview that he was turning 75 years old the next day. I’d meant to look that birth date up, but I forgot, and it was delightful to be surprised with it. Born on Aug. 7, 1950, he’d negotiate a complex and fraught youth to discover not just music but an emerging format of American literature. He’d master it by wisely finding mentors and a community of Texans and Nashvillians who put the song first. He soldiered through anonymity and dealt (not always maturely, he’ll admit) with sudden fame and fortune when his album Diamonds & Dirt became one of the biggest country records of 1988. He married Johnny Cash’s daughter and had a profound relationship with his father-in-law, which is the subject of his latest memoir-in-progress, he says.
Here on the eve of Americanafest 2025, where he’ll be performing (with “friends”) on Saturday at 8 pm at 3rd & Lindsley, Crowell reflects on the Americana movement, which was launched to support artists like himself - artists with a vision beyond the charts and artists as devoted to the work they do in their 60s and 70s as their youth. The new Americana Music Association honored Cash at its first awards show, along with Crowell’s great musical companion Emmylou Harris. It seemed like the right next step for country and American roots music. “I said, I want to put in with with this,” he notes in our conversation. “And (at) maybe the second or third convention they had at a hotel downtown, I remember getting up on a podium and declaring my allegiance to Americana music. It was sweet, and I was rewarded for it.”
