Charley Crockett & Abraham Alexander:
Everything’s Better From Texas
By: Gina DiLisio
It was Wednesday night that I found out Charley Crockett was coming to town and I thought I’d test my luck and see if any tickets were left for the concert. This time luck decided to be on my side and I managed to snag a last-minute ticket to go by myself. I had been waiting months for an excuse to throw on my boots and go out somewhere, and this was the best excuse as any to do so.
Saturday night rolls around and being the person I am I got there with 3 minutes before the performances were supposed to start. Everyone knows that performers are always either early or late. In this case Abraham was punctual… and I was not. I immediately sat down in the seat closest to me and watched the one man on stage with one of the most beautiful guitars I’d ever seen. His voice reminded me of his name: biblical. The kind of voice you hear in church that makes you think: “there has to be a God if someone sings his praises this well”. He stood alone and his voice carried through the theatre. From the back, all I could see was his hat covering the top half of his face, a sly sort of gesture.
Abraham Alexander is from Fort Worth, TX, and he has a kind of unique charm obvious from his easy-going attitude. He’d joke around between songs and had a kind of flow to how he talked that you could hear when he sung: it was the type of casual confidence and friendliness that makes seeing new performers so exciting.
I couldn’t help my jitters as I waited for Charley Crockett to go on, and I just kept sitting up and sinking back down into my seat waiting for him to come onstage. At around 10 the time had come. His band, the Blue Drifters, took the stage. Let me tell you: this was probably one of the most talented bands I’d seen.
Charley came onstage a while after and immediately jumped into song. Rapid fire, he sang what felt like a good half of his discography in probably an hour. And that’s what Charley does best: he keeps going and there never seems an end in sight. He can make you stomp your feet and clap your hands and feel like no time at all has passed. His voice and songs match exactly his name and the clothes he wears: a real southern charmer. He has a Texas-Cajun sort of
accent that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a dive bar in the middle of B.F. nowhere, in a wood shack with a tin roof that’s shaking because of all the dancing and singing. Yeah, he’s that good kind of timeless country. And just like what you’d find in that kind of place, after every song I heard a holler and a cowboy hat raised in salute to him.
Multiple times I watched as couples stood up and spun each other around in dizzying circles before staff had to tell them to clear out of the aisles due to safety hazards. And Charley was not shy at all about dancing along too. He moved like Chuck Berry and Elvis, strutting and shaking and spinning around the stage in outbursts that thrilled the crowd.
I was the second to last person in line, tired as all hell, nervous beyond belief, and there they were. I could barely say a thing. Immediately, Charley called me “darlin’” and I was starstruck to say the very least. I asked them to sign my poster and snapped a few photos and asked if they would mind me asking them a question or two. My mind was racing and all the ideas and questions I had seemed to have jumped ship and I was scrambling to think of something as the guy behind me finished his meeting so I could talk to them. I hadn’t thought I would make it that far. I had not planned a single thing about this whole concert and now it was suddenly very real that I was very nervous. I decided to ask only one question, mostly because it was only getting later and everyone seemed like they wanted to get out of there.
?: If you had one thing you’d want to tell your audience members that you’ve never had the opportunity to say, what would it be?
Alexander: Whatever it is you want to do, do it…Whatever that passion is, that’s what inspired me and Charley, it’s like, just following that dream and following that passion, and so I like want that feeling for everyone…
Before he left, Abraham gave me a hug, and I could not have said thank you enough to him as he left for the night. And then I was face-to-face with Charley. He sat on the counter of the bar and I asked him the same question. He had a genuine way of speaking, and I could tell that what he said, he meant.
Crockett: I’ve known a lot of people over the years that thought for some reason that they owned me…because I was just some kind of hobo…and sometimes it’s easy to see someone out on the street as though they don’t have any value. Sometimes the street teaches you everything, y’know and I found a way to break the chains off of people in society that maybe thought they had their thumb on me…
It’s easy to see from the songs that Charley sings that he has had a lot of years of people trying to tear him down or use him, but this has in no way stopped him from continuing. In some ways, I think this has actually made him a lot more determined. In Charley’s own words, he’s got a lot more coming and he’s not going to stop anytime soon.
After he finished talking I thanked him again and he walked me to the theatre’s doors. I swear I could’ve heel-kicked and hollered out of excitement. I am still so grateful to have been able to not only get to meet these wonderful people and see them perform, but have the opportunity to talk to them. No one else is ever going to sing to you or say “Until we meet again” instead of goodbye like these two, or make you feel like you should be dancing the night away.