Ray Wylie Hubbard has a gruff, raspy voice that sounds like he’s drunk too much whiskey too often and then been left to dry out in the desert sun. He plays his guitar as if his fingers are too big and clumsy to hit the right frets, so he makes up for it by playing loud and hard. Hubbard’s songs combine real-life lessons with tall tales and myths, actual people, and invented characters. After 45 years and more than 18 studio albums, he’s become a masterful Texas singer-songwriter like a rodeo star who has broken every bone on the way to the championship. Sure, it’s a spiel, but it’s a good one. Hubbard’s winning even when he’s taking a fall, and his audiences know and love it.
So do Hubbard’s fellow musicians. Co-Starring Too is his second recent release in which every new song features a different guest artist or two, paying homage to Hubbard’s distinctive Texas style. The songs are the stars. They are the typical Hubbard fare of the freaky and the sublime, the sincere and the sincerely bogus. They would sound good even if they didn’t feature a bevy of talents that include an ex-Beatle (Ringo Starr), Willie Nelson, a host of celebrated Lone Star performers such as Gurf Morlix, Eliza Gilkyson, the Band of Heathens, and Charlie Sexton, various alt-country giants (Steve Earle, Wynona Judd) and others (Randy Rogers, Cody Canada). The musicians all focus on serving the individual song and Hubbard rather than promoting their egos.
Consider the opening track, “Stone Blind Horses”, with Willie Nelson. Unlike most of Willie’s duets, the two don’t just trade off vocals. They start that way but soon blend their voices to create a mythical West of “wild young cowboys, old drunks, paramours, and thieves”. The fact that there’s no such thing as a stone blind horse (whether the foal are too intoxicated or injured by the rocky landscape is never clear) doesn’t matter. Hubbard and Nelson find relevance in the West of the imagination.
Hubbard is the kind of malcontent who paradoxically highlights the positives in life over the negatives. For example, on “Groove”, he glorifies past soul masters including Otis Redding, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples, Percy Mayfield, Al Green, and Sam Cooke over a bassline so deep one has to ask the Lord for mercy—and that’s just in the first verse. Similarly, he praises women in “Only a Fool” as God’s greatest creation rather than dwell on the men who would disrespect the opposite gender. Hubbard may superficially sound like a cantankerous complainer, but his hands are in the air and a hallelujah on his lips.
Still, Hubbard can’t help but take potshots at the “Fancy Boys” of Nashville with the help of Hayes Carll, James McMurtry, and Dalton Domino while reminding one of the fates of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, and other country heroes. Similarly, Hubbard name-checks Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joe Shaver on “Texas Wild Side” and praises the Outlaw country tradition that follows. While Hubbard has little patience for fakers, he’d rather celebrate than complain.
Taken as a whole, the lyrics of Co-Starring Too would provide a good musical education for those interested in rock and roll from the past 50 years with its explicit references to the people and places from which it emerged. But Hubbard does more than explain and provide examples. He sings and plays like a desperate man. It may be a schtick, but it’s a good act with solid roots in the music that came before.