Baylee Billings, our office manager, called me over to her computer the other day and showed me where Cross Canadian Ragweed would be reuniting and playing a showatBoonePickens Stadium in April.
Also on the bill: the Turnpike Troubadors, Jason Boland and The Stragglers and Stony LaRue.
“That’s cool,” I said, and made a mental note to check in a few weeks to see if Kindra might want to go.
Foolish me. The tickets were in such demand that the show was sold out almost instantly, and three more shows were added. Now, instead of one gig, there are four.
Cross Canadian Ragweed was one of the most popular Red Dirt bands before the members disbanded a bit more than a decade ago. One of their best-known songs was The Boys From Oklahoma, which became one of the anthems for Red Dirt music and is the name of the promotion in April.
I like Red Dirt music and would like to hear the bands, but I doubt I’ll try to snag tickets. Fighting the traffic, foraging for parking, then getting in and out of the stadium...
I’ll watch when the videos start showing up on Youtube.
Most people in Oklahoma are familiar with Red Dirt music. It started in Stillwater and has become an organic element of life here.
It’s harder to define as a genre than country music, gospel, rock or pretty much any other style of music.
“It’s kind of hard to put into words, but if you ever drive down on the Delta, you can almost hear that blues sound,” Stillwater native Jimmy LaFave was quoted on Wikipedia. “Go to New Orleans, and you can almost hear the Dixieland jazz. Go to San Francisco, and you get that psychedelic-music vibe. You hear the red dirt sound when you go through Stillwater. It has to do with the spirit of the people. There’s something different about them. They’re not Texans, they’re Okies, and I think the whole red dirt sound is just as important to American musicology as the San Francisco sound or any of the rest. It’s distinctly its own thing.”
I can dig that.Adistinctively Oklahoma sound, more rural than urban, not bound to a specific style or instruments. Above all, unpretentious.
I like many styles of music. Old-timey country, bluegrass, gospel, Delta blues. Cajun, Western Swing, ragtime, Irish, Scottish. All of those are in my playlist, with more bluegrass than anything else.
I don’t care for rap, jazz or soft rock or what they call New Country, but hey. If you do, go for it.
Oklahoma has produced an outsized number of musicians and styles of music, all the way from jazz guitarist Charlie Christian to Broadway’s Kristen Chenowith. And there are the country singers so popular that people know them by their first names: Garth, Toby, Reba, Vince.
For years, the epicenter of Western Swing Music was Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, where Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys played.
I’m not why so much music originated here, but I’m glad it has. It’s a great way to have fun,to communicate, to share ideals and to express what it means to be a native of our state.
Long may it play.