Charley Crockett: Dollar a Day

Charley Crockett never stops moving. Dollar a Day arrives just five months after Lonesome Drifter, the record that marked his graduation to the major labels after a decade cultivating a cult following on the fringes of Americana. It’s his 15th album in 10 years. Given this work ethic, it’d seem that the title Dollar a Day would be a confession of sorts—Crockett’s admission that he can’t stop grinding—but that’s not quite the case. Like several other songs, the title track is penned by another writer, one of a handful of covers that give the album shape, momentum, and color, while underscoring how Crockett is a magpie at heart.

Like so many troubadours before him, Crockett signifies authenticity—he dresses like a cowboy, sings with a deep twang that cuts against the grain—yet he’s constructed his persona from the detritus of 20th-century Country & Western pop culture, cribbing his style from dollar-bin vinyl and B movies. There’s a distinctly cinematic undercurrent on Dollar a Day, a record where the string arrangements suggest spaghetti Western and the funk recalls 1970s grindhouse.

Shooter Jennings, the co-producer who came aboard with Lonesome Drifter, adds light and shade to Crockett’s country without neglecting the gritty rhythms at its core. Occasionally, Crockett indulges in a straightforward stylistic exercise—“Woman in a Bar” is languid, after-hours honky tonk, and “Ain’t That Right” channels the swagger of Shooter’s dad Waylon—but he’d rather dwell in the places where country intersects with R&B, folk, and battered old 45s from the golden age of AM radio. “Destroyed,” a buoyant soul stomper written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham during their 1960s heyday, is given an exuberant reading flavored by funky keyboards and fuzz guitars—period affectations that feel alive thanks to their execution and surroundings. “Destroyed” glides into the closing “Alamosa,” which accentuates the soul instrumentation with silken strings that feel equal parts Blaxploitation and Western.

Crockett’s points of reference are deliberately old-fashioned—even the album cover is designed as a dollar-bin vinyl discovery—which makes the vibrancy of Dollar a Day such a pleasure. Utterly disinterested with “traditional country” in the conventional sense, he filigrees his outlaw anthem “Lone Star” with guitar that mimics psychedelic sitar, then pauses the proceedings for “Age of the Ram (Theme),” an instrumental by string arranger Stephen Barber that lends an air of majesty to these tales of rounders and roustabouts. Even with these grandiose flourishes, Dollar a Day remains rooted in the earthy sensibilities Crockett’s developed by recording and touring every spare moment over the past decade. This isn’t a grand statement or even a song cycle: It’s working man’s blues by one of today’s few practitioners of the form.