The grateful ruffian: how the hell Ray Wylie Hubbard keeps getting better
RWH’s latest album “The Ruffian’s Misfortune.” The biography of the songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard is an unlikely combination of gratitude, grit and outright cussedness. It’s the story of a naturally brilliant man who wandered through a couple cosmically-inclined debauchery-filled decades, started paying closer attention, midlife, to a few crucial things — particularly that thing called a groove — kept learning, and in his sixth decade of life began producing some of the coolest, wisest, most poetic music around. Just don’t make the mistake of calling Hubbard a country singer. His name sounds country, granted, and once upon a long time ago he wrote a song called “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” that became an outlaw country anthem. And he is indeed originally from Oklahoma and now resides in a little Texas Hill Country town. All that said, don’t box him in, as a ticket agency recently did in dubbing Hubbard a country act. There’s a saying in journalism, “Don’t piss off a man with a bucket of ink.” Hubbard doesn’t need the ink — he has a deep bucket full of songs that defy any genre and he has a Twitter account and knows how to it: ““i ain’t country..use ‘cool ol low down dead…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com