Ray Wylie Hubbard is simply too, effectively, wily to purchase the road about changing into an in a single day success in his 70s. However his affiliation with Massive Machine Information that led to the July 10, 2020 launch of his Co-Starring album made for vastly overdue mainstream recognition of a real American troubadour.
Hubbard solely looks like a latecomer for those who’re not conscious of a monitor report that has received repeated acclaim from his friends for many years, however it does really feel like he’s been catching up. In 2019, he performed on the Grand Ole Opry for the primary time, and this after the endorsement of a co-write with Eric Church, an avowed fan, on his No.1 nation hit “Desperate Man.” Church had already referred to him within the title track of his 2015 album Mr. Misunderstood.
The report took its identify from its spectacular invoice of collaborators and admirers, together with Ringo Starr, Joe Walsh, Ashley McBryde, the Cadillac Three, Tyler Bryant & the Shakedown, Larkin Poe, Chris Robinson, and nation long-runners Ronnie Dunn (of Brooks & Dunn), and Pam Tillis. Additionally on board have been Elizabeth Cook dinner, Don Was, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Paula Nelson, and Peter Rowan. The checklist was like a e-book of testimonials in album format.
Co-Starring represented a major-label return for Hubbard, who has had many recording properties, together with at Rounder and Bordello, however first rode into view as an artist on Warner Brothers within the mid-Seventies. By then, he had marked his songwriting card because the composer of the outlaw anthem “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” It was recorded in 1973 by fellow renegade Jerry Jeff Walker, a part of the identical New Mexico coterie, for his reside MCA Nashville LP ¡Viva Terlingua!
“I’ve never been a mainstream guy,” Hubbard advised The Boot. “I’ve always been pretty much to the edge. So I’m very, very grateful that…it’s happening now.” The Massive Machine liaison opened up in the summertime of 2019, when the singer-writer met BMLG supremo Scott Borchetta, who heard the report and advised Hubbard he wished to launch it.
‘I’m an previous folks blues cat’
“I went, ‘Well, you know, I’m kind of an old folk blues cat. I’m really not very mainstream at all,’” Hubbard stated in The Boot interview. “He said, ‘I really believe in your songwriting. I really believe in this record. I’d like to hopefully make more people aware of what you’re doing.’”
The native of Soper, Oklahoma, raised in southwest Dallas, made his first musical strikes within the folks idiom in Pink River, New Mexico, with a Nineteen Sixties group known as Three Faces West. It was Walker’s aforementioned cowl that led Hubbard to the books of Warner Brothers, and the album Ray Wylie Hubbard & the Cowboy Twinkies.
The band have been generally described as the primary country-punk outfit, and their reside reveals have been memorable to anybody who caught them. As Chris Tucker wrote in a dmagazine.com article in 1993: “The Twinkies in full flight defied classification, which is what happens when you run a steel guitar through a Leslie speaker, add vibes, bongos and congas, mix an electric saw with heavy reverb and toss in a theremin…imagine all that inflicted on a Hank Williams standard, and you’ve got the Cowboy Twinkies.”
One label to a different
The LP offered respectably, however Hubbard disapproved of its manufacturing sheen, and declined to make one other for Warners. As an alternative, he took the Twinkies to Willie Nelson’s short-lived Lone Star Information for 1978’s Off The Wall. Ray Wylie then recorded spasmodically for such labels as Renegade, Distress Loves Firm, and, later, Rounder/Philo.
All of the whereas, his popularity ran forward of his wider profile, however his relationship with alcohol started to get out of hand, till he turned his life round in his early 40s. By 2015, Ray’s adventures had merited a memoir, written with Thom Jurek and titled, with typical sprint, A Life…Effectively, Lived. In 2017 he launched the album Inform The Satan That I’m Getting There As Quick As I Can for Bordello. However as Co-Starring proved, Hubbard was removed from prepared for that individual encounter.
Co-Starring started as a collaboration with the Cadillac Three, with whom he had guested on tour, prompting the album’s “Fast Left Hand.” To Hubbard’s nice shock, subsequent invites to a bunch of different artists have been greeted with enthusiastic acceptance. Tillis, for instance, joins him on two songs, “Mississippi John Hurt” and “The Messenger.” She additionally accompanied Hubbard when he performed the latter track on his Opry debut, as did Larkin Poe.
‘I write for the privilege of writing’
“I’ve learned that as a songwriter it’s pretty much inspiration plus craft,” he advised American Songwriter not too long ago. “You get the great ‘Ah ha’ moment, and then it’s the craft that determines what kind of song it’s going to be. One thing I’ve learned about songwriting is not to doubt it. I’ve never been one to sit down and write a song for someone. I write and then see what happens to it. I write for the privilege of writing and not thinking about its future.”
A paragraph in Hubbard’s autobiography appears to tackle additional significance within the gentle of his eventual elevation to the standing of an all-star album, and certainly its 2022 follow-up Co-Starring Too. “There’s a fine line that does not need to be crossed as far as getting your songs heard,” he wrote, “and that line is the difference between being persistent and being a pest. However, it’s okay to promote yourself…just don’t let anybody see you do it on purpose.”
Purchase or stream Co-Starring.
