Charley Crockett @ Café de la Danse, Paris - September 11th, 2023

Charley Crockett's show at the Café de la Danse in Paris has been sold out for weeks, a well-deserved pay-off for the past decade of hard road work and excellent releases and a measure of how far he's come since he used to busk the city's streets years ago.

His music covers a wide spectrum of what is being referred to as country or Americana: traditional Country & Western, ballads, cajun... But Crockett, while fully embracing the categorization, prefers to think of himself as a Blues singer, and even covers T-Bone Walker's "Traveling' Blues" to illustrate that fact.

Equally at ease on his own material or on proven Country standards like "Act Naturally," "I Fell For You" or "On The Road To Memphis," Crockett and his ace band The Blue Drifters played a few songs by James "Slim" Hand from his tribute album 10 for Slim as well as a few selections from his new album The Man From Waco, for a total running time of a little over 90 minutes during which the audience didn't stop dancing or tapping its collective toes.