“I’m not a cowboy; I’m a cowboy singer,” Crockett tells host Jordan Klepper
Charley Crockett made an appearance on The Daily Show on Tuesday night, sitting with this week’s host Jordan Klepper to talk about his early days of busking in New York, hitchhiking through the Pacific Northwest, and the Bob Dylan song he reworked.
“I learned how to stand behind my guitar, playing on street corners, working farm parties,” Crockett told Klepper. “And I learned to hitchhike in the Pacific Northwest… People are more likely to make bad decisions and pick up hitchhikers out there.”
Crockett also talked at length about the Bob Dylan studio outtakes bootleg Pecos Blues, a series of recordings culled from Dylan’s sessions for the soundtrack to 1973’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. “I heard that Bob was fascinated by [Billy the Kid],” says Crockett, who added lyrics to an unfinished song from the sessions, “Tom Turkey.” “The story was speaking to me and I come up with a verse to add to a song, and this was a song he didn’t finish… I came up with this line, ‘People round here like to talk about you and I hope you like the legend you become,’” he said.
Crockett will rerelease his 2022 album The Man From Waco, No. 2 on Rolling Stone’s best country albums of the year, on May 26. The expanded edition, The Man From Waco Redux, includes updated versions of five songs. Crockett, in his cowboy hat and Western get-up, performed the Waco track “Name on a Billboard” on The Daily Show. “I’m not a cowboy,” he clarified to Klepper, “I’m a cowboy singer.”