Chris LeDoux

I'm all right, thanks, mate.

Last time I saw you, you were, um, getting everybody lathered up for Loathe just before Christmas.

Yeah.

That is true, and, uh, that was, that was a crazy time.

The legendary now, Chancey Williams, he's won a Wyoming zone.

I mean, he is, I don't want to call him Chris Ledoux 2.0, but he's very much followed the career path.

of Chris LeDoux as just a Wyoming-born cowboy who's turned a singing life, singing about rodeo and cowboying and singing about all the stuff he knows.

has parlayed that into national acclaim.

And he just keeps checking boxes off on his career advancement.

A great experience, and he really captures it in his story.

Rene Jean's story of Chancey Williams.

Catch up with the Moorcroft native and his music career, paralleling much of kind of the Chris Ledoux path to stardom.

And so, yeah, I mean, feeling that vibration is just like, dude, that's what drives me.

Like, uh, You know, one of the greatest that ever did it that way, Chris Ledoux.

I mean, Chris Ledoux, man, he, every show, like, he was a rocker.

You know, and I was a rodeo guy, too.

I rode bulls.

And I, and I say all that to say if you wonder why Drake had a stroke- ... on stage, go to one of his concerts.

Like, since I, one of the great concerts I ever saw was Chris LeDoux, and I just loved his energy and performance, and that's what Drake brings is just, like, an energetic...

I, I don't know if it was that way, you know, 10 years ago in 2016 when he performed at Pheasant Fest, but the amount of energy, and I'm gonna say effort, I don't...

You must sleep for, like, a day after your concert, Drake, just to, just to recover.

And I gave up country music for a little while and then I came back to write to it and fell in love again.

Did you ever listen to being around rodeos and Cowboys? Do you ever listen to Chris LeDoux? Oh,

I love Chris LeDoux.

Yeah.

I have a funny story.

When I was at the NFR this past year, they had the Chris LeDoux booth, and there was this lady working there, and I was telling her all about Chris LeDoux, all about Chris LeDoux.

Yeah.

And she let me go on for about five minutes, and then she said, oh, my brother just got done playing the stage here.

So what do I care if you go?

Now, before there were country stars buying ranches for Instagram photos, there was Chris LeDoux, a guy who actually smelled like hay, leather, and probably a little bit of rodeo dust.

This Wyoming cowboy wasn't just singing about the lifestyle, he was living it.

Chris LeDoux was a world champion bareback rider who recorded his own albums, sold them out of the trunk of his car, and built a fan base the old-fashioned way; one cowboy, one truck, and one dusty road at a time.

Then along came Cadillac Ranch, a song that feels like a Saturday night parked beside a bonfire with your buddies saying, "Hey, let's make some questionable decisions, but let's do it in style." Chris LeDoux didn't chase Nashville fame.

Nashville eventually chased him.

Here he is.

Here's Chris LeDoux and Cadillac Ranch, Exit Country.

It goes back to the early days when people were you know, early 2000s when people were burning CDs and, you know, stealing music.

And, but it was like, it was almost like this old school cassette deal with, you know, that you hear about with Chris LeDoux and like, he's great.

Oh man.

Amazing.

And, but like back then they would, you know, they would burn these CDs.

And so, you know, you hear them back, back in the day before that with Chris LeDoux, like he'd have those mixtapes and he, you know, pass them out and all these rodeo kids would go out and, And the next day, you know, they're handing these rodeo kids and these kids.

And so then it turned into CDs for us.

Like they were burning CDs and they were passing around these Casey Donahue CDs.