Austin-based THEO LAWRENCE is highlighted in Issue 25’s Honky Tonk Spotlight.

I sat at the kitchen table and I shook Kinky’s hand and he welcomed me. Phill sat beside me and the Friedmans, the extensive family of dogs that live in the house. The dogs laid on the floor all around us. Kinky started talking and adjusting with his cigar and his coffee.

It gets really old to be put in boxes. Then everybody seems so shocked that there are these different influences all on one album, but to me, it is just totally natural. A lot of my influences are like Linda Ronstadt, who had all those different elements. I feel like back in her day it was more common to have a total Rock and Roll album that included steel guitar all the way through it. Nobody thought twice about that being like a genre-bending moment. Now I feel like everybody likes to deeply understand all the boundaries and the boxes that everything is in, and I just don’t see it that way.

What happens when you put together a Country music superstar with argu­ably the greatest pedal steel player of the last few decades for a duet album? The world got the answer to that when Vince Gill and Paul Franklin released their Bakersfield album ten years ago in 2013. Now the magic has happened again in their new collab­orative effort Sweet Memories: The Music Of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys.

In August of 2022, a 30-something Florida native started a new Instagram account. The concept was simple — a low-tech “fit check” by Thomas Perkins, a banker for a national institution with a taste for Western wear — and then it was everywhere. Within a few weeks, major names throughout Country music, rodeo and Western wear social media jumped on the Tumbleweed Tommy bandwagon and he was off to the races.