Charley Crockett learned his vocation as a teen on the streets of New Orleans, where he resided with a gambling uncle who scarcely monitored him. Charley toured the country with a guitar acquired from a pawn store by his mother, honing his skills while drawing inspiration from other musical nomads. He returned to Dallas as a completed product, prepared to conquer the world by storm.
What is Charley Crockett’s Ethnicity?
Charley Crockett was born to a single mother in San Benito, Texas, on March 24, 1984. In Los Fresnos, Texas, he grew up with his elder brother and sister in a trailer park.
The country music superstar is of Jewish, Creole, Cajun, and African descent. He is a descendant of the celebrated American folk hero and soldier who died during the Texas Revolution, Davy Crockett. Before migrating to the United States, Davy’s French ancestors had settled in Ireland.
Charley’s grandmother raised white, took pride in Charley’s connection to Davy, he told Texas Living. “If you grow up in Texas, you cannot avoid this,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder, knowing the relationship and the actual blood in my veins, how much that has to do with the kind of life I’ve led.”
The singer told Chron that his classmates made fun of him because he was proud of his connection to Davy Crockett. “I was able to take a closer look at that heritage and recognize its contradictions and myths,” he explained.
Charley told the Dallas Observer that he is “one-eighth black” and that he grew up in a “conservative family in denial about their roots.” He stated that he identified entirely with his Creole and Cajun ancestry, but often felt “too white to be black and too black to be white.”
He told Chron about his struggles with racial identity: “I’m always struggling with identity. I’ve never felt secure with whiteness, but I’ve never been identified as anything other than white, which is a major factor in this country. People are so racially segregated, and there is so much pressure to identify as a particular group.”
Although Charley has benefited from passing as a Caucasian, he finds the misidentification unsettling. “This is a significant conflict for me,” he said.
No longer does Charley conceal his ethnicity. He is aware that, aside from his cowboy headdress and boots, he does not resemble a traditional country musician. However, he doesn’t care. Charley reported to The Guardian:
“I do not resemble what a traditional country audience anticipates or desires to see. When Hank Williams began making country music, they said a lot of the same things about him as they did about me.
