Whitey Morgan Archive
Cody Jinks & Whitey Morgan
Cody Jinks
Conceived in a honky tonk long, long ago, Cody now makes his living in them. Accompanied by the Tonedeaf Hippies, he rolls across the land and the oceans onto other lands to sow a collective musical seed. Not like the brazen giant of “Texas/Red Dirt” fame, he is a fair-sized man with a Zippo whose flame longs to be ignited by the sound of real music.
“Keep that which is plastic, and the posers that compose for money. Give us your listeners, your dreamers, your huddled drunken masses longing to break free of the feces on our radios. Send these: the hippies and the cowboys, and we will flick our bics through those swinging doors.”
“Keep that which is plastic, and the posers that compose for money. Give us your listeners, your dreamers, your huddled drunken masses longing to break free of the feces on our radios. Send these: the hippies and the cowboys, and we will flick our bics through those swinging doors.”
Whitey Morgan
The history of country music has no shortage of characters hit by hard luck: the hard-working man who can’t seem to make ends meet, the heart-of-gold drunk who just can’t seem to put down the bottle, the woman who wants to do right but ends up, time and again, doing wrong. No matter the tragedies at the center of the songs, in most cases those characters come off like just that…
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Whitey Morgan, Zach and Cheyloe
Whitey Morgan.
The history of country music has no shortage of characters hit by hard luck: the hard-working man who can’t seem to make ends meet, the heart-of-gold drunk who just can’t seem to put down the bottle, the woman who wants to do right but ends up, time and again, doing wrong. No matter the tragedies at the center of the songs, in most cases those characters come off like just that – characters; inventions of either a particularly gifted songwriter looking to spin a tall tale or a lazy one looking to pad out an album. But in the case of Whitey Morgan, those characters – the drinker, the troublemaker, the struggling, hard-working man – all seem arrestingly real.
That’s largely because the stories on Sonic Ranch — a big, nasty, whiskey-slugging, bare-knuckle bruiser of a country record – are pulled from Morgan’s own back pages.
A native of the economically depressed city of Flint, Michigan, Morgan practically bleeds straight into each of the album’s 10 songs, making for a kind of rough-and-tumble honky-tonk noir record that can pack the dance floor while doing Bukowski proud. Morgan opens the record at a loss – “I gave up on Jesus/ When…
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