Photos by Deanna Glatczak
Charley Crockett brought his Age of the Ram Tour to The Sylvee on Tuesday, Sept. 15, filling the Madison venue with the country, blues and Southern soul that have made him one of roots music’s most distinctive modern performers.
Crockett has always carried himself like a figure transported from another era. With his sharply tailored Western wardrobe, weathered voice and theatrical stage presence, he looks every bit the wandering cowboy described throughout his songs. Yet Tuesday’s performance never felt like a simple exercise in nostalgia. Backed by the Blue Drifters, Crockett drew freely from the past while giving the music an identity unmistakably his own.
The concert arrived behind Age of the Ram, Crockett’s latest album and the concluding chapter of the Sagebrush Trilogy that began with Lonesome Drifter and continued with Dollar a Day. Songs including “Kentucky Too Long” and “Fastest Gun Alive” expand the cinematic mythology that has become central to his work, placing outlaws, drifters and working people against an endlessly stretching American landscape.
That imagery translated naturally to the stage. Crockett moved with a showman’s confidence, punctuating lyrics with dramatic gestures and flashes of understated humor. The Blue Drifters supplied the evening’s musical muscle, moving easily between honky-tonk rhythms, bluesy grooves and the traces of soul that prevent Crockett’s music from fitting neatly into any single country category.
Familiar selections including “$10 Cowboy” and “The Man from Waco” further demonstrated the range of his catalog. Crockett can inhabit a larger-than-life Western character one moment and sound strikingly vulnerable the next, delivering each song as if it were another story collected during a lifetime spent moving from one town to another.
Wisconsin-based songwriter Christopher Gold opened the evening with a stripped-down combination of folk, country and plainspoken storytelling. His intimate approach offered an effective contrast to the fuller production that followed while establishing the night’s shared emphasis on songs that feel lived rather than manufactured.
Crockett’s prolific output has become nearly as remarkable as the music itself. He has released album after album without sanding away the eccentricities that separate him from contemporary country’s center. Instead, his popularity has grown because of them. At The Sylvee, the cowboy hats, vintage arrangements and mythic imagery never obscured the substance underneath.
The result was a performance that felt both carefully staged and genuinely restless. Crockett may borrow the visual language of country music’s past, but Tuesday night made clear that he is not interested in simply reenacting it. He is using those traditions to construct a world—and inviting a growing audience to follow him wherever the trail leads next.
Check out Deanna Glatczak’s photos of Charley Crockett and Christopher Gold at The Sylvee below.
