The Red Dirt

Pull off any highway in central or western Oklahoma and look at the roadcut through the shoulder. The soil is red, a rust-orange the color of old brick or dried blood or a certain hour of afternoon in October. This is the Permian red bed, sediment laid down roughly two hundred and fifty to three hundred million years ago, iron oxide leaching color upward through every layer. When it rains, red mud rivers run into the bar ditches. When it dries, the dust is the color of paprika.

The red dirt is more than a soil type. It became, over the last half-century, the name of a sound. Red dirt music is a genre that evolved in the bars and porches and farmhouses of central Oklahoma, centered loosely around Stillwater, where musicians who couldn't afford Nashville and didn't want to move to Austin began playing a mix of country, folk, rock, and Texas influence that didn't fit any commercial format. Bob Childers is usually credited as the godfather of the genre, writing and playing through the nineteen seventies and eighties in Stillwater. Garth Brooks studied at Oklahoma State and played those clubs before he became the best-selling solo recording artist in American history.

The red dirt tradition is informal by design. Songs circulate in cover versions before they are ever formally recorded. A song belongs to whoever plays it best tonight. Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker were considered honorary members of a community that had no membership rolls. What it had instead was a loyalty to a particular kind of plainspoken honesty, to songs that admitted that the land was hard and the weather was worse and the money was usually gone, and found something worth celebrating in that anyway.

The red dirt is not a metaphor, exactly. But it is the right color for a place that has learned to live with loss and keeps showing up for the harvest.