in which he sang of a week spent working on an oil pipeline for “80 hours, making time and a half,” before driving home in the heat and spending his earnings “all on pot.”
Singer-songwriter Kevin Fowler, a fellow Texan, said that Mr. Robison “paved the road” for two generations of Texas country musicians, including contemporaries such as Pat Green, Jack Ingram and Cory Morrow and younger artists like Parker McCollum, Cody Johnson and Cody Jinks.“His voice was so unique. It was something refreshing,” Fowler said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t what was going on at the time — all the slick Nashville stuff. Here’s a guy with raw, rough edges.
He added that Mr. Robison could be charmingly ornery onstage, dropping f bombs while refusing to project a more sophisticated image in the mold of stars like Garth Brooks. “That’s really what helped fuel this scene, was the authenticity of it,” Fowler said. “It wasn’t about going out and kissing radio [butts] and trying to get air play, it was about the live show and connecting to fans. I think we just took what Willie [Nelson] was doing and took it to the next level.
Mr. Robison began to attract a wider audience with the release of his album “Life of the Party” , produced by Lloyd Maines, and “Step Right Up” , his major-label debut for Columbia. And while he continued to disparage the Nashville music establishment as insular and controlling , he served as a judge on the first season of “Nashville Star,” a USA Network singing competition.
By then he had married singer and banjo player Emily Erwin of the Chicks, then known as the Dixie Chicks. Their relationship inspired the lyrics to one of the Chicks’ biggest songs,
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