It might indeed be, as Mike McClure laughingly calls it, a signal that “the Red Dirt apocalypse is coming.”
For sure, it’s something that continues to amaze Cody Canada – who, like his good friend McClure, is one of its major participants.
“I honestly thought, ‘If we do this, we’re going to have a good crowd,” says Canada. “But I had no idea.”
What both musicians are talking about here is a massive event dubbed The Boys from Oklahoma, set to take place over four days, April 10-13, at Oklahoma State University’s Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater. All four shows at the venue, which has an official capacity of 53,855, have been sold out for months. And both Canada and McClure are part of the reasons for the sellout, with Canada sitting atop the multi-band lineup with his former, now reunited, group, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and McClure appearing with his own reassembled aggregation, the Great Divide. Other top-billed acts include the Turnpike Troubadours, Stoney LaRue, and Jason Boland and the Stragglers.
To find an antecedent for this level of concert success in Oklahoma, you’d have to go back to Tulsa a decade ago, when Garth Brooks sold out seven shows at the 19,199-seat BOK Center.
It may not be entirely coincidental that Brooks – like all but the Tahlequah-based Turnpike Troubadours on the Boone Pickens Stadium shows – not only came out of Stillwater, but was also deeply involved in that town’s unique music scene sometime in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s time frame, when what would become known as Red Dirt music had begun percolating around Oklahoma State. In fact, a case could be made that Garth Brooks was the first Red Dirt act to hit it big.
So, what is Red Dirt? Like a lot of our other musical genres and subgenres – the Tulsa Sound comes immediately to mind – it resists pinning down, no matter how hard many of us have tried to do just that over the years. Often placed under the country banner, it’s certainly music that’s lyric-based and close to the earth, more rural than urban, deeply sincere, often emotional without being maudlin, and carrying with it the kind of self-effacing sense of humor that’s deeply ingrained in the Oklahoma character.
After decades of trying to come up with the perfect Red Dirt definition, the closest I can come is to evoke the names of two more great Oklahoma music figures: First, Western-swing popularizer Bob Wills, whose love of musical experimentation is shared by the Red Dirt acts, as is his determination to help his listeners escape their worries, if only for a while. The other is Woody Guthrie, a musical populist, whose socially conscious lyrics were more often than not aimed toward pointing out social inequities and improving the lives of common people.
Those two giants are the sources of the musical rivers that flow through Garth and beyond, into every one of the acts on the Boone Pickens Stadium roster. And each of them is a major torch-bearer for the genre.
That includes the top-billed Cross Canadian Ragweed, which has gotten back together for the shows after disbanding in 2010, when Canada left to form a new unit, Cody Canada and the Departed.
“I figured that people would go nuts [for the Stillwater event] because Ragweed was going to come back together, on top of Turnpike being there,” says McClure, whose impressive list of musical achievements include producing tracks for Cross Canadian Ragweed and other acts. “Turnpike could come close to filling the stadium on its own, and you couple the magnitude Turnpike has reached with the excitement of Cross Canadian coming back – there’s so much nostalgia with that. A lot of people don’t remember how big they were, but they were really, really big, and then they called it quits and walked away. Now, you’ve not only got all those people they affected but also all their kids, who grew up listening to Ragweed in the background. The same goes for Great Divide.”
The Great Divide is another groundbreaking Red Dirt act. Coming up, like Ragweed, in the mid- to late-’90s, the Divide was the first in the genre to put songs on Billboard magazine’s national country-music charts (1998’s “Never Could” and “Pour Me A Vacation”). With McClure as singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter, the band continued until 2003, when he left to start his own group, the Mike McClure Band.
Then, in 2011, the members reunited, and they continue recording and touring to this day. Their second-time-around success, in fact, helped inspire Cody Canada to do some of his own fence-mending.
“Mike has always led me, from the minute we met,” he notes. “Everybody knows how much I respect and love the guy. When I met him, I was looking for something I didn’t know how to find. I was just playing Garth Brooks songs and stuff, trying to find my footing.”
Some thirty years after that initial meeting, in 2022, Canada once again went to his friend for advice. A few months earlier, he’d done a Rolling Stone interview in which he’d said, referring to a Cross Canadian Ragweed reunion, “Man, that’s never gonna happen.”
“Then I read that interview, and I thought, ‘How negative is that?’” he recalls. “I started waking up a little bit and realizing, ‘You know, I think I’m the one holding us back. Let’s go for it.’ I called Mike then, and I said, ‘Dude, I think I need to make a move, but it has to be right.’
“He said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You were bitter for so long. We both were.’ And now I’m so ready not to be bitter. And really, it wasn’t even anything toward any person. When everybody [in Ragweed] started talking, and it was all happy, I said, ‘You know, we can’t talk about the past, because if we talk about the past we can’t move forward.’ Everybody was real excited about that.” He laughs. “So Mike had a gigantic influence on this – he and my kids and my wife.”
“With the [reuniting of the] Great Divide, man, it was just so healing for me,” adds McClure. “And I know Cody saw that, and saw what it means to people who love the music and how important that is.”
Since getting back together, the Great Divide has continued to tour, with a notable recent appearance on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville (thanks to an invitation from country star Wyatt Flores, a Stillwater musician with ties to the band) and record, with 2022’s Providence its latest record. In addition to the original members – brothers Scotte and J.J. Lester on, respectively, guitar and drums and bassist Kelley Green – keyboardist Bryce Conway is now a part of the band, playing a Hammond B-3 organ.
“Having a B-3 onstage is just incredible,” says McClure. “A lot of the Great Divide records were heavy with B-3; a guy named Riley Osbourn, out of Austin, played all those parts. And man, it’s just that glue that holds everything together. And it frees me up, too. When I go solo [on guitar], there’s a rhythm guitar and that B-3 underneath. I can experiment and stretch out a little bit more.
“Bryce has always been a huge Great Divide fan, so he’s just excited up there, and that rubs off on us. And, man, it just makes it sound so much better.”
McClure is also busy writing songs for the group, which he feels is important to the band’s continued resurgence.
“Back in 2011, we came out and had a really big reunion show, and then we kind of fizzled out a little bit, mainly because we hadn’t put out anything new,” he reflects. “All the Great Divide songs I wrote in my twenties and thirties. And now, to be able to come from a 53-year-old brain – I’ve been through a lot more than I had when I wrote that stuff. I’ve also gotten better as a writer, and singer, and player. We set the bar really low when we were young,” he adds with another laugh.
His musical compadre Cody Canada, however, and fellow Cross Canadian Ragweed musicians Grady Cross (guitar), Jeremy Plato (bass), and Randy Ragsdale (drums) are taking a different tack – at least for the time being. In addition to not playing any jobs together before the four-day blowout at Boone Pickens Stadium, the members of Ragweed are going to stick to songs from their original repertoire.
“The first question I get is, ‘Are you going to tour?’” says Canada. “And then it’s, ‘Are you going to do new music [at the Stillwater shows]?’ I’ve said, ‘we’ll see what happens,’ to the first question, and ‘no’ to the second.
“I remember going on tour with [Lynyrd] Skynyrd, 35 shows, and every time they’d play a new song everyone would go to the bathroom,” he adds. “And I thought, ‘What a blessing and a curse it is to have so many songs.’
“So I said, ‘Let’s just play the songs that people know, get some shows under our belt, and see what happens. Let’s not get in a rush. Let’s have some fun with this.’”
And, as he reflects on the tens of thousands of ticket sales these shows have generated, he admits that the response “still amazes me.”
“I thought we would do 20,000 tickets,” he says. “I really thought that’s what it would be. I’ve been trying to talk about it without sounding cocky, but I really didn’t realize we had that far of a reach, and I’m extremely grateful.
“My favorite part,” he concludes, “is talking to the guys again, and everybody being friends and hanging out together. It’s all sunny. It’s all nice. It’s good for the soul.”
A Prolific Fountain
For most of the Boys from Oklahoma, their residency at Boone Pickens Stadium is a return to their roots – even if those roots first dug down into the red dirt a few miles outside of Stillwater, around a funky old yellow house jutting up out of the countryside. The place was dubbed the Farm, and for several years, from the late 1980s to around the end of the 20th century, it was a magnet for music and musicians. Singer-songwriter Bob Childers, known as the godfather of Red Dirt music, lived in a trailer on the premises. The members of the Red Dirt Rangers and Medicine Show, the two Red Dirt acts that carried the genre into the ‘90s, hung out there as well.
And so did a young OSU student named Jason Boland, who, with his band the Stragglers, would go on to become a leading light in the genre.
“It was something,” he recalls. “We were kind of toward the end of the Farm era, but luckily we got enough of it to drastically change the way we looked at music forever. The first time, you know, you sat around that campfire, and the song torch went around and got to you, you’d be like, ‘Oh, I thought I had some songs. But I need to go home,’” he adds with a laugh.
“Childers referred to it [the Farm] as a spring, or a well, that always drew people back to it. There really was something happening there. Who knows if it was something metaphysical or something tied to the earth? But it happened.”
It’s been a quarter of a century since Boland left the Farm and began touring and recording in earnest. And he admits with a chuckle that it’s “bewildering, flattering and embarrassing” to be coming back to Stillwater to play a series of stadium shows.
“You don’t realize what’s happening until you’re years into it,” he muses. “You’ve just got your head down and you’re making music. But I do think most people from the Red Dirt scene are first and foremost music fans, and they always want to service the song and service their style – the way they put out their music.”
To find the antecedents for all of that, he points to another Stillwater-spawned act on the Boys from Oklahoma show, the Great Divide.
“They were influences on every other band on this bill,” Boland says. “We’re looking at a time when Top 40 country was just this monolithic thing, and nothing could exist outside of it. They were the first ones to say, ‘Oh yeah it can. It can be from right here. And it can be completely do-it-yourself.’
“The friendship with Mike [McClure] and those guys was just really a pedagogical relationship,” he adds. They were teachers. I think Cody and Ragweed felt that way, too. And Stoney [LaRue] was in the same vein. It was about learning the artistic way of doing things. We were evolving at a time when you could take it out to the market. And we were trying to play both sides of the fence: Don’t compromise your music, but take it to as many people as you can.
“And then, here came the Troubadours to reset the bar on what was possible with taking it to the people. It was all just a healthy evolution of the sound, and everybody did a good job of getting it to a lot of people and, at the same time, keeping it true to the spirit of Red Dirt.”
It’s one spirit, he concludes, but many different styles, and he promises that those who attend one of the stadium shows will see and hear what he means: “Five wildly different bands – but all from the same fountain.”
Featured photo: Award-winning Red Dirt group the Great Divide, led by Mike McClure, returns to its original stomping grounds, Stillwater, for a 4-day concert series this April. Photo courtesy RPR Media
