It's a big deal when Texas-born troubadour Robert Earl Keen plays at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.
Eighteen years ago, the singer-songwriter's show resulted in a live album subtitled "The Greatest Show That's Ever Been Gave."
Sunday evening's headlining set with Tulsa-born, 2024 Ameripolitan Award-winning Best Honky Tonk Female artist Kaitlin Butts as the opener was similarly excellent.
Retirement? Never.
In 2022, Keen, 68, appeared to be near retirement.
Two years later, he's still on the road he's been traveling since he was 25.
Keen, a poet since childhood, has sung "The Road Goes on Forever" for decades.
He's the hilariously humble guy who knows Ernest Tubb's trick of tipping a hat, winking an eye, and moving a crowd to tears locking a lyric with a groove, meaning that a hootenanny is afoot.
He also, in a respectful yet unserious tone, recalled — while working as a dishwasher just arrived in Nashville in the 1980s — taking $2 tours of the Ryman Auditorium to "breathe in four decades of old air and have fever dreams of hillbilly heaven."
'Shades of Gray'
Keen's songwriting works because he can craft words into humble, instantaneous iconography.
Nearing the close of his two-hour set, he turned the floor over to his band to assume the vocals for their additions to 2020's "Western Chill," his latest album.
"Let these songs drift into your soul, you don't have to worry about listening," he said.
It's advice he's taken well himself.
Keen's lyrics owe their lineage to the California-types who fell in love with folk music and wanderlust equally and birthed the free-spirited hippie movement of the 1960s. The words are simple but delivered with poetic meter.
"Shades of Gray" is an outlaw anthem delivered with an acutely-studied awareness of how to use place and space to locate the impact of a rhyme. However, thinking more in-depth about how the song works following that 60s-era standard yields a fascinating revelation.
The song — like numerous country, folk and rock anthems of years prior — offers a semi-rose-colored expectation of how guilt will be meted out for smoking marijuana, stealing cows, or tipping a port-a-potty at a 4-H rodeo.
However, unlike Johnny Cash's hero in "Sunday Morning Comin Down" (performed a quarter-century prior), these two kids aren't rewarded with a prodigal son's fried chicken dinner for their alcohol-soaked and narcotic-enhanced troubles.
Instead, they're stopped by the authorities.
The reason why the capacity crowd at The Ryman shouted along to "Shades of Gray" reveals his greatest songwriting strength: Flatly, yet positively, he resolves life's foibles, great and small.
"Right or wrong, black or white / Cross the line you're gonna pay / In the dawn before the light / Live and die by the shades of gray."
Outlaw anthems deserve to live. However, their purpose and resolution are rarely as well-explained as in "Shades of Gray."
Kaitlin Butts: 'If I don't sing about killing people, I just might do it'
Tulsa native Kaitlin Butts is a musical theater-loving Oklahoman who, as a lifelong trauma survivor, is unusually adept at singing gleefully windswept country anthems and delivering murder ballads with punctuating confidence.
"I like my men scared and quiet," she said onstage.
Yes, she covered The Chicks' "Sin Wagon," Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" and Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang."
However, because her criminal record is free from felonies, she's best regarded as an award-winning character actress, refitting the frame of her expectations to mirror her rising stardom.
"We're in a church singing about murder as the Lord intended," Butts joked early in her performance. "If I don't sing about killing people, I just might do it."
The accompanying smile was an intentionally uneasy one.
Her set played like it would cause a raucous party in a room half of the Ryman's capacity; Her favorite venue to play is Tulsa's legendary Cain's Ballroom, which seats 1,800 people.
In The Ryman, rows of Keen's fans growing in awareness of Butts' work seemed joyously incredulous. Impressively, she's ideally placed to continue a lineage that feels bittersweetly antiquated because it's as old as tintype pictures and slightly younger than technicolor film.
Picture the house playing Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Oklahoma" before her set. Her pink, red-fringed chain-stitch suit and band's matching gear contrast with Sierra Ferrell's intentionally gaudy stage wear and artists like Summer Dean co*cking a cowboy hat to the side and recalling honky-tonk songs relegated to yesteryear and hiding in plain sight as B-sides on 45 RPM records.
Couple that with Butts playing her 2022 family-trauma anthem, "Blood," followed by the ironically herky-jerky Western frolic "You Ain't Got To Die To Be Dead To Me."
The crew of female singer-songwriters writing the latest canon of timeless honky-tonk anthems could also represent yet another layer to country music's pop-culture redefining moment.
'The Party Never Ends'
Robert Earl Keen's catalog of music serves as a bridge within country music, connecting its traditional elements with its modern forms. Like a tree, the genre's style and traditions offer protection and shade for folk, rock and any artistry that counts 'three chords and the truth' in its lineage.
Sunday night at the Ryman Auditorium, 1998's "Feeling Good Again" was followed by 1994's "Gringo Honeymoon," which preceded 1993's "Corpus Christi Bay."
"Gringo Honeymoon" retells the story of Keen taking a stranger's suggestion to travel to a town just over the Rio Grande River's Mexican border.
Keen learned poetic meter in high school and the song's character "Captain Pablo" could easily be The Odyssey's Tiresias giving Odysseus advice regarding arriving safely back in Ithaca.
Given the non-radio-ready depth of "Gringo Honeymoon" and the other songs mentioned, 10% of modern country fans ambling down Lower Broadway would likely know them by heart.
But ask those fans if they know who George Strait, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson are and you'll hear at least a dozen commercially anthemic country songs.
The sextet of artists mentioned so dearly loved Keen's work that they covered it — often.
Notably, in 1995, the quartet of Highwaymen in that number named their final global top-10 album after the song, which they covered on the release.
Creators like Keen, Dean Dillon, James McMurtry and more were tearing up the club and honky-tonk circuit and sitting in songwriting rooms as much as artists like Cash and Strait were running tunes up the charts.
The tradition of being a touring troubadour enraptured by the power of the song, keeping the wheels turning — of the mind and of the tour bus in equal measure — extends that previously mentioned folksy wanderlust into a timeless domain.
As the crowd at The Ryman rose to their feet to stomp, clap and holler as Keen closed with 2011's "I Gotta Go," a chill crept through the old bones of country's Mother Church.
Being ailed by fever dreams of hillbilly heaven causes the road to go on forever so that the party never ends.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Robert Earl Keen keeps the party going at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium
