Yesterday Texas Country Icon Charlie Robison took to social media to announce that he’s retiring from touring and recording music due to vocal complications from a surgery earlier this year. Over Charlie’s twenty-five years in the business he’s had a major impact on many of our lives.

I still remember the first time I heard his music. I was in college in Lubbock and very homesick for the Hill Country when my brother, who was programming the music at the station where I’d also worked in High School, sent me a few CDs to cheer me up. Two of those CD’s had a note attached saying “Check out these brothers from Bandera”. It was Charlie’s Life of the Party album and his brother Bruce Robison’s album Wrapped. It’s funny how music has a way of finding you at just the right time. It made me swell up with pride to hear two guys who grew up thirty minutes from my hometown that could write such powerful, heartfelt tunes and sing them with a combination of honesty, sorrow, and incredible talent. I’ve never listened to two CDs more in my life and I instantly became a superfan, digging into both of their prior work.

When I moved back to Kerrville to program that same radio station, and fight to play as much Texas Country as they’d let me (We hadn’t added the Red Dirt part yet at that point), Charlie Robison ended up being my first on-site, in-person interview. I met him in the greenroom at the Cabaret Dance Hall, a musical landmark for nearly seventy years in Bandera that’s since burned down. I was unbelievably nervous, some of my radio pals had warned me that if you aren’t very well-prepared Charlie has no problem calling you out about it during the interview. I got even more nervous when he pointed out how young I looked, I was probably twenty at the time, but he couldn’t have been nicer. A few questions in I asked Charlie ‘Since you and your brother are both singer-songwriters is there any sibling rivalry or competition between you two?’ He didn’t even pause before replying, ‘No, not at all because Bruce is hands down a better songwriter than I am, it’s not even a competition.’ It was that rare combination of being humble but confident that made Charlie such an amazing and compelling performer.

But Charlie is no slouch as a writer either, for my money “Loving County”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “My Hometown”, “John O’Reilly”, “Desperate Times”, and “El Cerrito Place”, all of which he wrote or co-wrote, are some of the best country songs ever written and recorded. We’re all saddened by the news that Charlie is retiring from recording and playing, but I’m thankful for all the times I’ve gotten to see him on-stage and for his contribution of so many great songs for us to spin here on the Ranch. God bless Charlie Robison!