Charley Crockett plays timelessly exciting country, soul music at Nashville's Ryman

On Friday evening, country soul superstar Charley Crockett headlined Nashville's Ryman Auditorium for the first of two nights. The set achieved peerless magnificence because it created bridges to moments in history that fans of blues, country, jazz and soul music have long imagined in their deepest, most honest inspirations and giddiest dreams.

Kashus Culpepper, a rising, Alabama-born folk-soul performer, opened. Similar to Crockett, he earned a standing ovation for embodying stylings and vibes that felt more soaked into the Ryman's walls than ever.

Charley Crockett showcases a uniquely different type of soulfulness

Aside from currently releasing an album just a hair faster than George Jones did at the peak of his career (2024 has seen a double album, "$10 Cowboy," arrive in April and July), the "I'm Just A Clown" vocalist has played the equivalent of three shows a week for a decade. He also busked streets worldwide — in France and the French Quarter, Music City and New York City, among many places — for 10 years before that. Thus, his show arrives with a deep knowledge of how music's colors and shapes impact the room in which he's playing and the fans cheering, hollering and stomping within it.

Pause and even more profound, note that when he holds his guitar like Johnny Cash, hiccups his voice like George Jones, offers homages to the Delta blues and Jimi Hendrix when playing guitar solos, takes an earnest tone similar to Bill Withers, or intimately revisits the stylistic legacies of performers seemingly forgotten in antiquity's pages like Arthur Alexander, G.L. Crockett and James Hand, he's now achieved impacting the spiritual planes on which their legacies are awoken and resonate in buildings during his performances.

At one point, as he and his band, The Blue Drifters, performed "$10 Cowboy" track "Midnight Cowboy," a middle-aged gentleman seated on the Ryman's floor felt so compelled by the soul apparent in their playing that he rose from his pew, beer held aloft for an imaginary toast. He then walked down the aisle, 10 rows closer to the stage, in hopes that the performer could see just how deeply he was moved by what he was witnessing.

Midway during an acoustic, solo portion of his set, Crockett paused and offered the following statement to the crowd:

"If you hang around on a French Quarter street corner long enough, you can see the ghosts walking around — I'm feeling something similar to that right now."

In a 2023 Tennessean interview, Crockett spoke of his time busking in New Orleans and how there, he first felt physically and psychologically overtaken by characteristic behaviors of departed spirits while having his musical constrictions and inhibitions removed when learning how to meld funk, jazz and soul music.

"I'm trying to go into weird, scary places with my music. There are cultural and political things that I'm still learning how to touch that inspire me."

Kashus Culpepper impresses

At present, Kashus Culpepper is in the midst of joining artists like Wyatt Flores and his Big Loud labelmate Charles Wesley Godwin to play live sets highlighted by a style governed by a controlled sound and fury that signifies everything.

The things that Culpepper's opening set at The Ryman unearthed were particularly significant.

At the time of his untimely passing in 1967, Otis Redding was scratching the surface of exploring the ties that surprisingly bound his sound to folk and rock audiences.

At two points in Culpepper's set: one, while playing his breakout, 2023 single, "Who Hurt You," and while strumming his guitar as his backing band locked into a rollicking hillbilly groove on soul stomper "Out Of My Mind," that Redding impulse overtook the vibes of being directly inspired by Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson in his work.

In the context of stunningly leaning into and emerging transformed by vibes almost a half-century old, Culpepper's closing with a powerful take on the Marshall Tucker Band's 1973 classic "Can't You See" made sense.

Charley Crockett explores what lies beyond past, present and future of country, soul, more

Crockett's recent success has seen him be the only artist to spend the past four months with an album and a single in the top five of the Americana charts.

This follows him closing 2023 as an Americana Music Honors & Awards-nominated Artist of the Year.

That level of acclaim — alongside the ghosts of yesteryear now synonymous with and fueling every fiber of his being — makes certain parts of his live set more potent than ever.

After telling the crowd that he metaphorically "(dug) a hole through the basement of the music business" to achieve his stardom, he sang Waylon Jennings' "A Dollar A Day," popularized in the Country Music Hall of Famer's 1984 documentary "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys."

He followed that with "Killers of the Flower Moon," a 2024-released song inspired by the events investigated in David Grann's 2017 book "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" and a Martin Scorsese-directed feature film. It tells the true story of a series of murders of Native Americans in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s.

Crockett co-wrote the song with legendary rocker T Bone Burnett.

The moment underpinned how every sudden and thunderous ovation Crockett received felt as if it arrived after he'd unwound the crowd being musically entranced by the past, present and future of multitudes of genres distilled into 3-minute songs.

Couple that with how songs like "The Man From Waco," "Trinity River" and encore "Jamestown Ferry" are benefitted by how his Blue Drifters' trumpet player (and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire) Kullen Fox has excitingly discovered the slip-stream between second-line Zydeco funk, Mexican mariachi stylings and jazzy Delta blues.

It's an overwhelmingly intoxicating blend.

Provocatively timeless music

Charley Crockett's set is moved by and removed from all known histories and predicted futures of blues, country, jazz and soul music.

Walk in aware of those histories and on songs like "I'm Just A Clown" and the thoughtfully soulful set closer "America," it is highly entertaining to watch how he and his band bend and shape them to meet their exacting standards. They're keenly aware that it is ultimately up to them how deep and far into space and time their brand of funky, rocking and roots-inspired country can head.

And, like many growing cognizant of Crockett's work, walking into the Ryman unaware of anything other than how provocatively timeless Crockett makes the musical essence of history and the future is also OK. When he and the band end the night by playing a take on Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Good Hearted Woman," neophytes to the power of the evening are assuredly starting, appropriately, as outlaws on the path to achieving something approaching the musical and social freedom that Crockett and The Blue Drifters currently enjoy.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Charley Crockett plays timelessly countrified soul at Nashville's Ryman