Charley Crockett: That's kind of how I started out: standing around in empty doorways in Deep Ellum and you know, sliding into guitar pools on Saturday afternoons at, you know, in the back of Adair's Saloon there on Commerce. I used to be just this kind of annoying kid, you know, that those old timers, you know, I was just somebody that was kind of irritating them at first. I couldn't really play, or they didn't want to hear it.
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CC: You know, I had such a rough situation eventually where so many things hit the fan. The best idea going forward in my life at a certain point, as I was becoming a young man, was to just stuff my things in a duffel bag and take this pawn shop guitar my mama bought me, and I just started hitchhiking.
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CC: And I didn't end up at that conclusion easily. Lot of really bad things happened, a lot of tough breaks and family life and issues with the law and stuff like that. And I guess I always wanted to go to New York City because, you know, of Bob Dylan, because of, you know, Woody Guthrie. There was something there that I was looking for. Of course, it wasn't what I was looking for it is what I got trying to find this diamond in the rough, you know, in those streets.
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NS: I mean, at what point do you begin to feel like, "Oh, I could do this for a living, and maybe the way to go is folk and country music," I mean do you have like a realization moment?
CC: Man, I don't know. You know, there's so–
NS: Crept up on you.
CC: It crept up, it crept up. You know, the thing about standing outside–I'll make a short story long and put it like this: started in a park in New York City. But eventually I tried street corners, got ran off a lot of street corners, got the cops called a lot, you know. Then that drove me into subways, playing on subway platforms in New York City. Playing on the platforms is competitive, you know, I was playing at subway stops that weren't competitive, that didn't make a lot of money. But then I kind of started there, and no one would bother me. And I got a lot better by being able to sit in the same spot for hours at a time and work out music.
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