Charley Crockett has seen his name in a lot of headlines over the past week, thanks not only to his funky new album Dollar a Day, but for an online feud with the country singer Gavin Adcock. After Crockett posted his thoughts about authenticity in country music on Instagram, Adcock accused the Texas songwriter of being a “cosplay cowboy.”
In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Crockett shares more of his take on what constitutes country music, and disputes the notion that “outlaw country” is a subgenre of today’s country. He says it’s the other way around.
“They call the outlaw movement a subgenre of commercial country, but today there’s no doubt in my mind, that what they’re calling pop country is most certainly a subgenre of outlaw,” Crockett says on Nashville Now, adding that he thinks the pop-country industry is mostly vacuous.
“I don’t think they stand for anything. They stand for Auto-Tune and songs written by a committee,” he says. “Outlaw was about standing up for your rights against a very rigid music business system. In a game where you throw money at a young artist, and if it doesn’t work out, no problem, because there’s 1,000 standing behind you, well, a controversial figure is unlikely to ever rise.”
Crockett and Adcock have gone back and forth for over a week now, with Crockett mostly refraining from answering Adcock’s salvos. But in a Sunday Instagram post almost certainly directed at his foil, Crockett wrote: “Black music made me. I will not apologize. Raised by a single mama. I am not ashamed. Many men have tried to destroy me. I will not lose.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, and Gavin Adcock.