Red Dirt (music) - History

History

Oklahoma has been the source of several pop music movements that can be traced not only to a specific city, but a specific location within the city. Those music scenes include Kansas City jazz (attributed to an area of Oklahoma City called Deep Deuce), Western swing (attributed to Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa), and Leon Russell's Tulsa Sound from his Tulsa church-turned-into-studio. Like those three, Red Dirt music grew from a specific place in Stillwater. The place was an old two-story, five-bedroom house called "The Farm" - for two decades the center of what evolved into the Red Dirt scene. The house, located on the outskirts of Stillwater, was the country home of Bob Childers. Eventually Childers left The Farm, but the Red Dirt scene continued to grow and thrive. Childers said, "I found something in Stillwater that I just didn't find anywhere else. And I looked everywhere from Nashville to Austin. I always came back to Stillwater - it's like a fountainhead for folks trying to get their vision."

One of many bands representing Red Dirt music - as their name signifies - is the Red Dirt Rangers. The Rangers - John Cooper, Brad Piccolo and Ben Han - have been making music since the late-1980s and, along with Childers, were part of The Farm's earliest musical brotherhood which also included Jimmy LaFave and Tom Skinner. These musicians and others jammed in the living room, on the front porch, in the garage (known as the Gypsy Cafe), and around campfires in the yard where "the sheer joy of creating music with friends transcended everything else." Cooper said, "The Farm was as much an attitude as a physical structure. It allowed a setting where freedom rang and all things were possible. Out of this setting came the music." The physical structure burned down in 2003.