Jason Eady just released a record full of original music, but it’s not a record full of traditional Jason Eady country.
The singer-songwriter, born in Mississippi but based in Texas for most of his career, is highly-regarded for his old-school country sound, mixing honky-tonk beats and acoustic ballads with aim-for-the-heart lyrics. When Eady recorded Tulsa Turnaround, however, he threw all that out the window. The 11-track album is Eady’s tribute to the Tulsa Sound — a scene that mixes folk, blues, and rock that sprang up in the Oklahoma city in the 1960s and Eric Clapton embraced and popularized a decade later.
“I’m not trying to say too much, or get too much meaning into these songs,” Eady says of Tulsa Turnaround. “I just want to let them live and let them feel good and let the music carry it. It’s as much about the music as anything on this one, which is a shift for me. Normally I am a lyrics-first kind of guy.”
Eady wrote 10 of the songs on Tulsa Turnaround and enlisted Oklahoma native John Fullbright — who is currently touring with the Turnpike Troubadours playing keys — to produce the project.
On the title track, Eady name-drops Tulsa icons and venues like J.J. Cale, Leon Russell, the Gap Band, and Cain’s Ballroom over a blues riff with choir-like backing vocals. It all leads to a chorus of, “I’m doin’ that Tulsa Turnaround/Lord have mercy, what a sound.” Written with Ray Wylie Hubbard, it became the first song that Eady recorded for the album.
But fans who may assume the album also must include a cover of the old Kenny Rogers and the First Edition tune “Tulsa Turnaround” will be mistaken. For one, as Eady points out, that “Tulsa Turnaround” is really about an Omaha sheriff, while his puts Oklahoma’s second-largest city front and center.
“We tried to throw in as many different Tulsa references as we could,” Eady says. “There’s Saturday night at Cain’s, there’s Sunday morning at the Church Studio, and there’s Mercury Lounge, and all the local players. When people think about the Tulsa Sound, they always forget that the Gap Band was from Tulsa, too. We threw that reference in along with Charlie Wilson, the singer for that band.”
Eady, who turned 50 last year, has been releasing music since 2005, and caught on in country music with 2012’s AM Country Heaven and 2014’s Daylight/Dark — both of which cracked the Top 50 of the Billboard country albums chart. His twangy vocals earned him a following among traditional country fans. But Eady grew up with a soft spot for the Tulsa Sound ever since he heard Clapton’s 1982 compilation LP, Timepieces. In particular, he was struck by Clapton’s covers of J.J. Cale, who pioneered the Tulsa Sound.
“That kind of got me hooked on it,” Eady says. “And it made me dig into it deeper. Then, I just started discovering it and realized that it wasn’t just one guy. It was a whole sound coming out of Tulsa.”
To record Tulsa Turnaround, he and Fullbright chose Farmhouse Studios at the home of the late Steve Ripley — himself a former owner of the Church Studio which Russell had opened and made the centerpiece of the Tulsa Sound. It was the culmination of a two-year effort for both Eady and Fullbright.
While touring behind his 2023 album Mississippi, he played a show in Tulsa. Fullbright had recently moved to the city from Bearden, a tiny town 40 miles to the south. Fullbright is well-versed in Oklahoma music history and that signature sound. He frequently plays around Tulsa, sometimes headlining and other times sitting in with artists.
After Eady’s Tulsa show, Fullbright invited him to tag along to a jam session in the basement of a bar nearby.
“It was about 11 o’clock at night,” Eady recalls, “and we went down there, and I mean it sounded like you walked into 1972. In every song, there was still that sound, you know? It’s alive and well, and it’s still happening. Right then, I went, ‘I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to be a part of this.’”
Eady began immersing himself in the Tulsa Sound and frequently bounced ideas off Fullbright. He had questions about what to tell his producer when he went to record the album. Over time, it dawned on Eady that he could just ask Fullbright to do it himself.
“I’m really excited to see how people react to this,” Eady says. “The album cover is me and John and the band, and that was very intentional. I think of this as much of a John Fullbright record as me. It’s the band’s record as much as it is me. It’s not ‘Everybody look at me,’ it’s more ‘Look at this cool thing that we got to do.’ That’s a pretty great feeling.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
