Jason Boland & the Stragglers

red dirt · texas country

Jason Boland and the Stragglers are a red dirt and Texas country band formed in 1998 in Stillwater, Oklahoma, by singer, guitarist and songwriter Jason Boland, a native of Harrah, Oklahoma. Boland met founding guitarist Brad Rice at Oklahoma State University, and the band took shape in a Stillwater scene that also produced Cross Canadian Ragweed's Cody Canada and Stoney LaRue; the rented house near campus that several of them shared is remembered in red dirt lore as the Yellow House. The current lineup pairs Boland with Grant Tracy on bass, Nick Gedra on fiddle and mandolin, Chris Compton on drums and Nicklaus Hamburg on steel and electric guitar. The debut album, Pearl Snaps, appeared in 1999 and remains a touchstone of the scene. Later studio records include Truckstop Diaries (2001), Somewhere in the Middle (2004), The Bourbon Legend (2006), produced by Pete Anderson, Comal County Blue (2008), Rancho Alto (2011), Dark and Dirty Mile (2013), Squelch (2015), Hard Times Are Relative (2018), The Light Saw Me (2021) and The Last Kings of Babylon (2025). Several were issued through Thirty Tigers, and Squelch reached number eleven on Billboard's country albums chart. Shooter Jennings produced both Dark and Dirty Mile and The Light Saw Me, the latter a concept album built on an alien-abduction narrative that moves between the 1890s and the 1990s. Boland recovered from a ruptured vocal cord and surgery in 2008. The band has documented its live show repeatedly, on Live and Lit at Billy Bob's Texas (2002), High in the Rockies (2010) and Live from Cain's Ballroom (2024), and it was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in April 2025 alongside Stoney LaRue, The Great Divide and Cross Canadian Ragweed. It plays dance halls, saloons and outdoor stages across Oklahoma, Texas and the southern Plains.

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