Dale Watson at The Bugle Boy

Although born in Alabama, Dale Watson is as Texas as the Panhandle or a smokey plate of BBQ. Seriously, how many people can say that Willie Nelson is their biggest fan? He came to country music early and naturally. His truck-driving father moonlighted as a country singer, and his older brothers had bands as well. Dale remembers receiving his first guitar at age 7 and starting to write songs shortly after — “the same stuff I’m writing about now,” he says with a laugh. A man with more than one life’s experience under his belt, he has entertained crowds all over the world, including appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and PBS’s long-running Austin City Limits. Dale has been inducted in the Austin Music Hall of Fame and even founded his own genre of music — “Ameripolitan,” complete with its own annual awards show. But just so long as it’s understood that we’re talking about the real-deal stuff, the 100-proof kind of hardcore honky-tonk that can fill a dancehall floor with two-steppers and a 12-pack of longnecks with salty tears, go ahead and call Dale Watson’s music what it was from the first time he set boot on stage, what it still is today, and what it will alwaysbe, long after we’re all gone but there’s still at least one working jukebox playing the good stuff: COUNTRY.