Country Musings: The Tractors

The most unlikely of country radio hits made momentary stars out of a ragtag bunch of rock veteran sidemen.

Aug 23, 2024

It was 30 years ago this month that a group of veteran rock’n’roll side guys whipped up a boogie-woogie throwback tune that mentioned Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, and choo-choo trains; included a solo by the incomparable James Burton; and hit the top 40 on the country charts. It was the most unlikely country hit of the year, and it was just one moment out of an album packed with the most fun you could have listening to a record that year.

The Tractors had come to town.

Country music was hot in 1994. It had been growing in popularity over the previous few years since the “Class of ‘89” had taken over from the New Traditionalists (who’d made their mark from roughly 1986 through 1988). After Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Foster & Lloyd, and kd lang gave Nashville what Earle coined “The Great Credibility Scare,” Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, and Travis Tritt laid the groundwork for the country format to explode in mainstream popularity over the next few years. (Carpenter straddled the line between both. Her debut was Hometown Girl in 1987, but her success came at the dawn of the ‘90s. Still, artistically, she was much closer to Earle and Lovett than to Tritt and McGraw - but that’s an essay for another day.)

While the hits started racking up for those guys, by the early to mid-‘90s, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, Brooks & Dunn, and Billy Ray Cyrus had joined the party. Record sales were up, country radio was flourishing across the US, and … everything was just so perfectly predictable.

So when this little CD passed across my desk at the little country station I programmed back then, I couldn’t believe my ears or eyes.

A major label like Arista Nashville was promoting a bunch of “old guys” that, let’s face it, didn’t have the looks of McGraw, Tritt, or Jackson? This was right around the time when country radio started turning its back on the old guard; artists like George Jones could only get airplay through embarrassing novelty tunes if they got noticed at all. So to see guys who not only didn’t have the traditional dashing good looks but also had rock’n’roll pedigrees was pretty doggone refreshing.

The credit goes to Tim DuBois, head of Arista Nashville and one of the main architects of country music’s success over those last few years. He’d guided the careers of Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Pam Tillis, Diamond Rio, Brad Paisley, and others. DuBois and Steve Ripley met at Oklahoma State University, where DuBois earned two advanced degrees studying accounting (and went on to work as a senior financial analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank in Texas). Ripley received a communications degree and built his first studio while in Stillwater.

DuBois ultimately decided to get into the world of country music, writing and co-writing a number of hits (including Alabama’s “Love in the First Degree”, Jerry Reed’s “She Got the Goldmine, I Got the Shaft”, and some big ones for Restless Heart, whom he also put together). He became a producer, talent scout, and label head, being named the top guy at Arista Nashville by Clive Davis in 1989…just in time for the Class of ‘89.

Ripley and DuBois kept in touch, and eventually, a demo reached Arista Nashville’s boss’s desk. It wasn’t just a demo delivery, it was a gradual and meticulous campaign, with mailings every few days/weeks of a map showing a tractor on a path from Oklahoma to Nashville with “The Tractors are coming!” written across it. The four-song demo finally arrived with a miniature cast-iron tractor.

"It wasn’t exactly country, but it was exactly great," DuBois was quoted as saying, a refreshingly open-minded attitude for a music executive in the 1990s (or in most any era).

Steve Ripley was the Tom Scholz of the Tractors. He was the spiritual leader, musical guide, lead singer, guitarist, and mad scientist. He’d toured with Bob Dylan during the second stint of Bob’s “born again phase” (specifically the Shot of Love jaunt, when Dylan had begun adding his earlier material back into his sets) and he founded Ripley Guitars. Eddie Van Halen, JJ Cale, Steve Lukather, Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, and Jimmy Buffett all used guitars created by Ripley.

Pianist Walt Richmond had played with everyone from Rick Danko and Bonnie Raitt to JJ Cale. Casey Van Beek backed Linda Ronstadt with Don Henley and Glenn Frey before the latter two left to form some other band in the early ‘70s. Ron Getman worked with everyone from Leonard Cohen to Janis Ian before ending up in Tulsa in the late ‘80s and co-operating Leon Russell’s Church Studio with Ripley. Then there’s Jamie Oldaker. One of an array of legendary Tulsa drummers that include Jim Keltner, Chuck Blackwell, Jimmy Karstein, and David Teegarden (all of whom show up here, incredibly, on the reprise of “The Tulsa Shuffle”), Oldaker can be heard drumming for Bob Seger, Leon Russell, and, most famously and frequently, for Eric Clapton throughout the ‘70s and beyond.

So yeah, the rock’n’roll bonafides were strong in the Tractors. But here they were mixing - and sharing a label - with the line-dance world of Brooks and Dunn on country radio in the mid-1990s. The funny thing is, “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” was originally demoed at the Church. DuBois reportedly told Ronnie Dunn to come to Nashville to record but advised Ripley and Co. to stay behind in Tulsa and record at the Church. DuBois (who paired Dunn with Kix Brooks, again helping to make history) knew the Tractors couldn’t be anything but Tulsa-bred rock’n’country soul. In fact, they put their mission statement on the opening track.

If you’re the kind of fan that reads the liner notes and credits, “The Tulsa Shuffle” alone boasts appearances from JJ Cale on guitar, Leon Russell providing the “synth lick”, Jim Keltner on drums, and Bonnie Raitt on slide. That’s quite the lineup on an opening track of a debut album by a country band in the mid-1990s - or anytime. Ry Cooder shows up later on “Blue Collar Rock” as well, but this isn’t just a laundry list of classic blues rockers converging in Tulsa. This is a celebration of American music in all its melting-pot glory. The country music that these Tractors play isn’t of the “Indian Outlaw” variety, nor is it the Hallmark greeting card pop sentimentality of John Michael Montgomery. This is stompin’ and swingin’ country that pulls equally from Hank Williams and Bob Wills, but adding an underlying soul and blues-soaked groove.

It’s a merging of Tulsa, Memphis, Chicago, and New Orleans. It was Americana music before they named a format after it. Also, in a time of slick Music City productions, The Tractors exhibited an air of loose fun, of jamming and cutting up in the studio, of get-it-on-the-first-take-or-bust. The count-offs and lead-ins were kept in. Oldaker’s drums would set the groove before the count-off on most every song. Detached voices and asides were heard throughout - like Pink Floyd down on the farm.

The Tractors’ debut reached number 2 on the Billboard country charts, top 20 on the pop chart, and hit double platinum by the end of 1994. An incredible feat considering it was a debut album by a group of old rockers. So what’d they do next? They followed it the next year with a Christmas album.

Marking maybe the only time a double-platinum-certified debut album by a major artist was followed by a holiday release, Have Yourself A Tractors Christmas still stands as one of the best albums of its kind. It’s loose, it’s fun, it boogies, it’s the Tractors.

It would be three more years, but in 1998, the Tractors finally released Farmers in a Changing World, their proper follow-up to their debut.

Staying true to their aw-shucks image and sound, the first single was an Okie-boogie update on the old Shortenin’ Bread song made popular by the Andrews Sisters back in the 1930s.

Again recorded at the Church Studio, and again with Leon Russell (on “Foot Stomp Stompin’”) and Bonnie Raitt (“Linda Lou”) sitting in, Farmers may not have had another “Baby Likes to Rock It” moment, but what was there worked and it was just as fun as their debut. If anything, knowing what to expect may have made it seem less than its predecessor, which is a shame, because one of its best moments was found in “The Elvis Thing,” where the Tractors teamed up with James Burton, Scotty Moore, and DJ Fontana to pay tribute to the King, and tagged a little “Mystery Train” on at the end. Righteous.

After Farmers, the original lineup splintered and Arista Nashville bid them farewell. By the time of 2001’s Fast Girl, Steve Ripley was the only remaining Tractor. To compensate, he brought in Leon Russell on keys, James Burton on guitar, Willie Weeks on bass, DJ Fontana on drums (on “Can’t Get Nowhere”), and Oldaker returned on the last song, a jam that coupled the Ripley/Oldaker original “A Little Place of Our Own” with Ripley’s ex-boss’s song, “On the Road Again”.

Russell’s most vocal contribution comes during “Ready to Cry.” Setting aside the boogie groove, the musicians dive into eight minutes of deep country soul worthy of early ‘80s Conway Twitty or maybe even Al Green sneaking away from Willie Mitchell for a few. Russell’s piano drives the track while Burton’s licks fill the space around Russell and Ripley beautifully. In the final minutes, Russell receives a phone call from his wife. He answers, gives her an update on how things are going, passes the phone off to Ripley’s wife, and then plays out the rest of the track as it fades. Any other “professional” setting may have edited such a moment out. Ripley leaves it in. He knew he’d captured an intimate and special moment. Why not preserve it? It also proved that despite the album not being populated with the original lineup that made the first two albums so special, Fast Girl is still a helluva fun listen.

Ripley spent the next few years putting out occasional records under the Tractors’ name including another Christmas release (The Big Night), a children’s album (The Kids Record), and the final full-length Tractors album in 2009, Trade Union.

It was a welcome return to the reliable boogie and old-school country of their first three albums, highlighted by the monster groove of “Rhythm Bone”, an Okie fan’s dream collaboration between Ripley and JJ Cale. (Ripley did release one last EP in 2020 with one original and three covers under the Tractors name.)

The Tractors - whether we’re talking about the band proper from their first two albums (or three, counting the first holiday one) or Ripley’s project from 2001 on - was ultimately a band that not only traded in good-time rootsy rock’n’roll with a country backbone (notice I haven’t mentioned “country-rock”, which this most definitely ain’t) but did so with a social conscience that championed “the little man” while playing the “Blue Collar Rock”. The Tractors played the type of country that celebrated working-class ideals - and workers’ rights - while singing about the plight of the homeless and downtrodden. Yet they never felt the need to wrap themselves in the flag, unlike many mainstream country artists post-9/11. Their ideals were more grounded in day-to-day reality: the mom-and-pop store being run out of business by the Wal-Marts of the world; the family trying to find the cash to pay the rent; and the farmers praying their crops don’t fail or the banker doesn’t come and take their land.

Ripley steered it all with a charming innocence and a sense of wonder. It was obvious why he released so many Christmas and kids albums, he believed in the joy and magic of not only the holiday season and childhood fun but that the music he created could and should actively spread that joy, making those who heard it just a little happier.

In 2002, the year after Fast Girl, he put out a solo album simply called Ripley. There was really nothing that separated it from a Tractors’ record other than maybe it was a little more personal, a little more spiritual. It opened with a seven-minute dirge that mourned the loss of old TV shows and Western heroes and country stars, namely from Ripley’s ‘50s-era childhood. What the song really mourns, however, is a loss of innocence. While the Tractors sometimes dabbled in serious topics (see “The Little Man”), they never went this hard. Which is probably for the best. What the Tractors did is celebrate a timeless boogie, a truly American musical gumbo that never failed to get feet stompin’ and heads boppin’.

Several of the Tulsa family that helped bring the Tractors thing to life have now gone away themselves. JJ Cale left us in 2013, then Leon Russell in 2016. Steve Ripley died in 2019 and was followed in 2020 by Jamie Oldaker and Ron Getman in 2021. Of the original Tractors, only Casey Van Beek and Walt Richmond remain (they both occasionally play around the area in the group Tulsa Groove). That Tractors sound, however, is something that’s not going away.

Years before, Ripley offered his vision for The Tractors:

It’s the original cowboy rock and roll, shuffle, blues, be-bop, boogie, big band. Take a drink and sing along. It’s Bob Wills and Bob Dylan, Merle, Elvis, Hank, Chuck, Buck, and the Beatles, Louie Louie, and Louie Armstrong. Make it go ’round cause that’s the deal so you mix all this together and you try to make it spin. You know, that’s my idea… it’s really autobiographical and it’s really true for me. Make it go round like a merry-go-round, make it spin with a sweet melody like I used to hear back when I was a boy, back when my mama was holding on to me.

That about says it all. Shuffle on, children. Shuffle on.