Rolling Stone writer and New York Times editor Josh Crutchmer has spent years in the Red Dirt music scene, from the back of bars and concert halls to being on stage at Cain's Ballroom. He also recently gave Oklahoma State University's fall commencement speech.
Matthew Viriyapah spoke to him about his journey from Oklahoma State University student to covering artists like The Great Divide, Turnpike Troubadours, and attending more than 30 shows of Wyatt Flores for his latest book, Red Dirt Unplugged.
What makes it Red Dirt are still these really, really personal and scene setting lyrics. And through those lyrics, I think you still get a real good sense of place, and that place is still Oklahoma.
On Red Dirt Unplugged

I wrote that original Red Dirt book in 2020 because nobody had, and I thought that the entire history of that scene needed to be documented. In the years leading up to that book coming out, there were some forefathers and major players in Red Dirt that we had lost. We had lost Tom Skinner and Jimmy LaFave and Brandon Jenkins in a really short time.
I just kind of thought, I should get this scene on record before there's any more losses of that magnitude. So I did that, and at the same time, didn't want it to be a history book. So you can also read that and learn about some of the artists that at the time felt like up and comers, like Kaitlin Butts. And you can read that, and you can get a snapshot in time for the Turnpike Troubadours who were on a break. It's history, but it's also where Red Dirt had landed by the year 2020.
Well, in the four years since, Red Dirt has just blown up.
You know, Zach Bryan's not Red Dirt, but he's got a lot of Red Dirt influences, and he influenced a ton of Red Dirt artists with the manner in which he wrote his songs and released them, in his approach to social media.
And so in the wake of that, there's just been a real blow up in Red Dirt music that I don't think will ever be undone, and we'll never see again. And I just thought there needed to be a four-year update to what I had written in the original book. And that's what Red Dirt Unplugged is. It's very much a book about Red Dirt music right now. There's very little history to it, and that's the big difference.
On Wyatt Flores
I spent the entire year with Wyatt Flores. I was with him when he went through some pretty dark moments and had to take a month off of touring altogether for his own mental health reasons.
And I was also there the day that he came back after that. And I was in the studio when he recorded his Welcome to the Plains album they put out this year. So his story is a big part of it, and it's in there.
When I first went to a Wyatt Flores concert, he was already on the rise. I missed his years touring around Oklahoma, largely because a lot of it was during the pandemic, and I just wasn't getting here a lot and I'm twice his age.
And to go to his show for the first time and become not just a fan of his music, but invested in his story. Because he's open and very personal with his music, but also in what he talks about in relation to his music, to his crowds, that I walk into his show maybe a little skeptical, like, let's see what this kid's really about.
And I leave feeling like the world needs to know about him and needs to know right this second.
And I don't know that I've ever had that. If I had that feeling, it would have to have gone all the way back to when I was in college and experiencing it with Cross Canadian Ragweed and Jason Boland and Stoney LaRue.
To be twice Wyatt's age and feel that invested in his music after one show, to me, was a signal that this person's story was worth not just telling, but telling in real time, and telling in a very, very deeply and thoroughly reported manner. So that's what I did.
And he's not the only one. I spent a long time with The Great Divide and Southall and Kaitlin Butts too. But Wyatt's going to be the one that thing people most remember just because of the range of stories in his life that I got to be a part of and to tell.
Red Dirt Unplugged is available now.