Born in Tulsa on June 7, 1969, Brandon Jenkins came from a house where music wasn’t a hobby, it was air. His father, Dean, was a Tulsa radio disc jockey who understood the power of the song, and his uncle, Gordon Shryock, recorded and performed with J. J. Cale and Leon Russell— guardians of the unhurried Tulsa Sound that made groove feel like gravity. Jenkins soaked up all of it: the economy of Cale, the churchy grandeur of Russell, and the plainspoken compass of Woody Guthrie. He learned horn lines in the jazz band at Central High, sang in the choir, and taught himself guitar. When Brandon graduated from Central High in Tulsa in 1987 and headed to Stillwater to attend Oklahoma State University, the stars aligned.
Stillwater's music scene in the late ’80s and early 90s was filled with promise as Steve Ripley, Bob Childers, and Jimmy LaFave all enjoyed wider regional success. Oklahoma State University and mentoring under these three masterful songwriters gave Jenkins the coursework; the Farm gave him his major, and eventually the Yellow House, Willie's Saloon, the upstairs Wormy Dog Saloon, and the legendary Tumbleweed Saloon became his on the job training. Brandon then fell in with a fresh new crop of songwriters and musicians who would become his life-long running buddies: the Red Dirt Rangers, Jason Boland, Cody Canada, Mike McClure, Tom Skinner, Stoney LaRue, Jeremy Plato, Grady Cross, Scott Evans, Randy Crouch, Roger Ray, Grantpa Tracy, Brad Rice, Randy Ragsdale, Evan Felker, Travis Linville and so many others - an eclectic mix who helped drive the next evolution of Red Dirt music. Brandon always bristled at trying to pin it down sonically. To him, Red Dirt music wasn’t a genre so much as a pact: a close-knit fraternity of songwriters from across Oklahoma (...Texas and beyond) who believed music ought to mean something, and that if you have a story to tell, you go and tell it.
Jenkins told his stories often. A typical year might find him playing hundreds of shows, bouncing from Texas honky-tonks to Oklahoma saloons, then hopping planes or his friend's tour busses for his annual pilgramage to Steamboat Springs, Colorado or to Europe where the audiences leaned forward and listened to every word. You could often find him with his acoustic guitar slung low captivating a room with a baritone equal parts gravel and velvet. Either way, the posture was the same: every night he was hanging with his people performing his dream job.
The records followed the mileage. Brandon first started performing in 1990, releasing his debut album Tough Times Don't Last in 1994. In 2003, Brandon made an exodus from Stillwater to Austin, TX to expand his touring base and soon released his most critically-acclaimed album, 2005’s Down in Flames. Faster Than a Stone came in 2008, lean, mean, and well-muscled, and his Brothers of the Dirt project in 2009 widened the circle with friends from across Red Dirt and Texas music. That album carried Jenkins’s restless conscience: “Out of Babylon” arrived as a 9/11 meditation; “Innocent Man” nodded to wrongful conviction in small-town America; “Blood for Oil” stared down the cost of a war in a country indifferent. When Brandon said songwriting gave him his deepest satisfaction, this is what he meant—the work of looking at a country he loved without blinking.
Brandon could also write the kind of melody that lands in another singer's throat and stays there. My Feet Don’t Touch the Ground, a song that was first brought to attention by Dwight Yoakum producer Pete Anderson in 2003, became one of those songs—covered, traded, reinterpreted, and cherished among almost everyone. Eventually this song became a staple for his best friend Stoney LaRue, who regularly turns into an Allman Brothers-esque jam with the crowd singing every word. Finger on the Trigger, a monster hit by Bleu Edmondson, went the same way. Jenkins didn’t guard his catalog like heirlooms; he wrote them to be lived in and encouraged his friends to record them.
Even as the music business shifted, Brandon kept experimenting with how to get songs to his fans across the world. Project Eleven (2011) was a digital-only release to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Blue Bandana (2015) was cut quick and honest at Yellow Dog Studios—one day with a full band for the live feel, another for the knobs and polish. That same year, Brandon Jenkins @ Radio Recorders, tracked in 2006 on the West Coast for Tulsa’s Explosive Records, finally saw daylight. The Flag (2016) followed, recorded in the Texas Hill Country with longtime collaborator David Percefull and a crew of Dony Wynn, Bukka Allen, Kim Deschamps - legendary sidemen who understood Jenkins’s instinct to let a lyric breathe.
If Red Dirt is a map, Jenkins traced most of it. After busting-at-the-seams in Oklahoma, he made his exodus to the music mecca of Austin, TX where his career started flourishing. In 2016, Brandon moved to Nashville to write with some top American songwriters and expand his footprint. The velocity never meant he forgot where he came from. He wore “Red Dirt Legend” like a borrowed jacket—proud, a little amused, fully aware that in their world “legend” doesn’t come with a valet; it comes with a load-in time. He never stopped paying forward, either. Jenkins raised money and lent his name to the Red Dirt Relief Fund and Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, understanding how thin the margins are for working musicians when the van breaks down, the bar owner vanishes, or the body starts to betray you.
That last part came for him early. In February of 2018, aortic surgery led to complications with a heart valve. He died in Nashville on March 2, 2018 at only 48 years old.
What remains is a body of work that is one of American music's most significant contributions to the Red Dirt genre. His song catalog deals with tough subjects, often too taboo for mainstream songwriters going for pop acclaim. Songs about hard work, bad luck, regret, suicide, grace, songs about hearteache that was real, and songs that try to make sense of the world we live in America. His best songs didn't fuck around. They move at a human tempo, with chords that lull you in, words and ryhmes that cut like a knife. The Tulsa Sound taught Brandon restraint; Woody Guthrie taught Brandon purpose; his Red Dirt brothers taught him to stand shoulder to shoulder and sing like there is no tomorrow.
There’s a photograph that encapsulates Brandon if you’ve ever seen him live: head slightly down, eyes closed against the lights, guitar slung low, a hand hanging the final note in the air just a beat longer than expected. It wasn't Brandon showboating. It’s a master craftsman at work, a road dog who gives the people 110% every single night. Brandon Jenkins spent three decades doing exactly that. He built a career the old-fashioned way: one town, one room, one crowd, one song at a time — and he left a blueprint of hard work showing how to lead with your heart, and how to write a great song without glossing over the truth.
Call it Red Dirt music. Call it Americana. Call it Outlaw Country. Whatever you call it, Brandon Jenkins lived it, breathed it, molded it, and mastered his own unique Red Dirt Tulsa Sound concoction that helped power Red Dirt music's path into the new millenia. God bless the Red Dirt Legend, thank you BJ for leading the way.
Brandon Dean Jenkins
(June 7, 1969 – March 2, 2018)
Forever the Red Dirt Legend.