Clay Walker’s been putting out music since 1993, when his first single, “What’s It To You,” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
And while subsequent success has ebbed and flowed, Walker is as enthusiastic about his career now as he was back then.
“Man, it’s been fun,” Walker, 56, says from Tennessee, where he splits time between there and his native Texas. “The fans have been good to me. The industry has been great to me — radio, media. I feel like I’ve gotten a fair shake.
“And I gotta say, I enjoy performing more now than I ever have. My career still feels like I haven’t been out that long, which is crazy.”
Born Ernest Clayton Walker, Jr., in Beaumont, Texas and raised mostly in Vidor, music became Walker’s focus early on. His grandfather was a guitarist and singer who played in the late Tex Ritter’s band. Walker’s father was also “a great singer” who gave his son his first guitar when he was nine and taught him to play. “I grew up poor,” he explains, “so you really respected an instrument. You took great care of it. You knew it was special. The young Walker was also privy to family jam sessions while he was growing up, which further stoked his interest in making music himself.
“It was the ability to change the mood of everything that really attracted me to it,” Walker says. “When my dad or his siblings would break out a guitar, it just completely changed everything. You forgot about the struggles you were going through — unless you were singing about them, of course. It was just everything I needed at that young age.”
The teenage Walker entered talent competitions and began playing around town; a local radio DJ even played one of his self-recorded songs on the air. He hit the road when he was 19, after graduating from high school and working at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant. “I just started working on trying to get in front of more people and play in bigger places,” Walker recalls. “Finally my name got out there in the local area I’m from and people started coming to see me perform, and then it kinda spread and Nashville came calling.”
In 1992, record producer James Stroud discovered Walker and signed him to Giant Records, leading to “What’s It to You” and the singer’s self-titled debut, which hit No. 8 on the country charts and went platinum. Since then Walker has notched another eight Top 10 albums and 16 Top 10 singles. He was nominated for an American Music Award for Favorite Country New Artist in 1994, and in 2015 he was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Making all this more remarkable is that Walker, who has seven children from two marriages, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996, which led him to start the Band Against MS non-profit seven years later.
“I struggle with the MS, and I continually look for anything and everything to make it better,” he notes. “some things work, some things don’t. I’m unabashedly a believer in God; I believe prayers actually work, and if you have that perspective you get a chance.”
Walker has seen country music change considerably during that time. And while he’s not often mentioned alongside the likes of current hitmakers such as Morgan Wallen, ??, he’s not bothered by that in the least.
“I think change is good, and it’s inevitable,” Walker says. “I remember when the 90s country blew up; I don’t think Merle Haggard or George Jones liked what country music was becoming then, but they didn’t conform to it. And they certainly accepted all of us, the new artists and treated us great.
“So now it’s my turn to do the same thing. I don’t lament that we’ve changed or moved forward. I don’t understand some of the sounds that I hear that are more digital or processed than organic musicianship, but it really is something that you either accept and embrace, or it just runs right over top of you. It’s here, and it’s not going away — and it’s huge.”
Walker does enjoy some of the younger artists — he singles out Ella Langley and Riley Green in particular as “great artists that still embrace a lot of traditional sounds and write songs in that way.” In the meantime he’s still able to play headline shows for the audience he built with his success, and he’s about six songs into what he plans to be his first new album since 2021’s “Texas to Tennessee, working with award-winning producer and songwriter Keith Stegall, whose credits include Alan Jackson, the Zac Brown Band and George Jones as well as previous projects for Walker.
“Our properties are directly across the street from each other, so that makes it easy,” Walker notes with a laugh. “It’s really a great thing to work with a producer who not only knows a great song and how to right a great song but also cares about the vocal more than anything else on a record. He wants to make sure it’s your best performance and that you are actually telling the story.
“And as long as I’ve been doing this — and I feel like I’m a pro at it — he challenged me in the studio. He said to me, ‘Everyone knows you sing great; would you stop singing and start telling the story?’ And he was 100 percent right. So I know when we’re finished with this, it’s going to be something special.”
Clay Walker and Confederate Railroad perform at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 27 at Soaring Eagles Casino & Resort, 6800 Soaring Eagle Blvd., Mount Pleasant. 888-732-4537 or soaringeaglecasino.com.
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