Race Ricketts - Exploring Texas Culture & Music | Rugged Revival
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When the world shut down in 2020, Race Ricketts found himself in possession of something unexpected: time, and a backlog of songs he'd been quietly writing throughout his college years. He wasn't supposed to become a musician. The plan was New York, Broadway, the full theatrical dream. But COVID had other ideas, and what emerged from those lockdown sessions with a friend would reshape his entire trajectory.
Ricketts is a creature of Texas through and through—born and raised in Allie, a small town in North Texas that sits closer to the Oklahoma border than anywhere else, caught between the flat redness of West Texas and the creeping sprawl of the DFW metroplex. His background is decidedly unglamorous: his father worked in an aluminum mill, his mother was an elementary school teacher, his brother became a firefighter for Fort Worth Fire Department. None of them were musicians. But somewhere along the way, young Race picked up a guitar around seventh or eighth grade and discovered something that stuck.
I was training to be an actor and the plan was to move to New York, and then the world shut down.
— Race Ricketts
What makes Ricketts' story compelling isn't just the pivot from acting to music—it's how authentically rooted both pursuits remain in his Texas identity. Speaking on the latest episode of the Rugged Revival Podcast, he speaks with genuine pride about his hometown, about the specific texture of growing up in that particular corner of Texas, about the way those experiences have crystallized into his songwriting. There's no posturing here, no reinvention narrative. This is a guy who was trained as a song-and-dance man from childhood, who spent his final semester of college hitting every open mic and cheap gig he could find up and down I-35, testing whether these songs he'd been sitting on actually resonated with anyone beyond himself.
What emerges from that description is a musician shaped by scarcity and necessity rather than privilege. Ricketts didn't have a family pushing him toward music, didn't grow up in a household where songwriting was the default creative outlet. He stumbled into it almost accidentally—as therapy, as something to do, as a way to process the absurdity of a world that had suddenly stopped. And when he started playing those songs live, something clicked. The people listening weren't hearing a polished product manufactured by the industry; they were hearing something raw and immediate, rooted in the particular experience of being from a small Texas town, of working-class origins, of discovering your voice when the traditional path suddenly became impossible.
I grew up in a very small town sandwiched between the flat redness of West Texas and the slightly greener parts of the DFW area.
— Race Ricketts
The podcast conversation with TJ reveals someone thoughtful about his place in the roots music ecosystem. Ricketts isn't making excuses or stories about struggle—he's simply reporting facts. His upbringing, his detour through performance training, the pandemic pivot, the relentless gigging across two states to find an audience. These aren't talking points; they're the genuine conditions that shaped his artistry. When he talks about Texas, there's specificity in it. Not the mythology of Texas, but the actual lived experience of it—the rain that came to North Texas on the morning of the interview, the character of different regions, the people who made the place what it is.
What distinguishes Ricketts in an increasingly crowded independent music landscape is that alignment between origin story and artistic output. Too many musicians perform their biography; Ricketts simply lives his and lets the songs follow. The COVID chapter that could have been a tragedy—the death of a Broadway dream—became a liberation. Forced to sit with himself and his guitar, he discovered he had something to say. Forced to test those songs in bars and small venues across Texas and Oklahoma, he proved it mattered to people beyond himself.
For anyone interested in the actual roots of Americana music, in how artists are genuinely made rather than manufactured, the full episode is essential listening. Ricketts represents something increasingly rare: a musician without an alternative persona, without a curated mythology, simply doing the work of turning lived experience into honest songs.
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