Americana Music Legend Ray Wylie Hubbard Tells All--Well, The Best Bits, Anyway--in Candid Memoir Out November 2nd

Courtesy Conqueroo

Acclaimed songwriter’s A Life ... Well, Lived traces his
remarkable journey from folk gypsy to outlaw country upstart to
wizened architect of grit ’n’ groove

WIMBERLEY, Texas — As a general rule, Ray Wylie Hubbarddoesn’t really cater to nostalgia. Although he’s been credited (or blamed, as he’s prone to put it dryly) for penning one of the defining anthems of the entire 1970s progressive country movement, the Oklahoma-born, Texas-reared living legend has spent the last quarter century in constant pursuit of new artistic vistas and challenges, reinventing and redefining his musical identity every step of the way.

Always a generous performer, he’ll still serve up that “obligatory encore” (all together now: “And it’s up against the wall, REDNECK MOTHER!”) with characteristic good humor, but he certainly hasn’t earned his laurels as one of the most respected artists in modern Americana — not to mention in the storied pantheon of Texas poet troubadours — by living in the past. Over the course of a dozen acclaimed albums going back to his early ’90s comeback, he has distinguished himself time and again as both a songwriter’s songwriter par excellence and as one of the gnarliest, grittiest Texas groovers this side of Lightnin’ Hopkins. Case in point: This year’s The Ruffian’s Misfortune, a record praised by American Songwriter as “a lean, mean set that wraps up in just over a half hour but whose raw reverberations last long after.”
 
All of which just begs the question: Considering he’s still raising the bar and releasing the best music of his life at age 68, what in the world could have possibly provoked Hubbard to lay down his beloved guitar long enough to not just reflect back on his past, but to actually commit it to page for his first memoir, A Life ... Well, Lived (out November 2, 2015 on Bordello Records, the label Ray Wylie and his wife and manager, Judy Hubbard, launched five years ago)? Chalk it all up to a whim — and the persistent prodding of a good friend, music writer (AllMusic.com) Thom Jurek. 
 
“We were emailing, and I wrote him some story about when Willie Nelson kidnapped me,” says Hubbard, briefly recounting a night somewhere back in his “honky-tonk fog” days when Willie Nelson’s road manager Poodie Locke and drummer Paul English pounded on his Dallas door at 3 a.m. and abducted him for a bus run up to Milwaukee for a beer festival. They didn’t even give Hubbard time to pack a bag; English told him he could “borrow Willie’s toothbrush.” 

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