The boys from Oklahoma are back.
Cross Canadian Ragweed, longtime torchbearers for Red Dirt and Texas music and a major influence on the current generation of rising stars from both scenes, are reuniting after nearly 15 years for a comeback show in the town that launched their career. On April 12, Ragweed will cap off a daylong concert at Boone Pickens Stadium on the campus of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
“I can’t wait to do this,” frontman and lead guitarist Cody Canada says. “I want to make people happy, and I want people to walk away feeling like it was 15 years ago.”
The Turnpike Troubadours will co-headline the show with Ragweed, who confirmed the reunion to Rolling Stone. Ragweed and Turnpike will share ticket details this morning on their band websites and social media channels, with a pre-sale set for Oct. 7. The public on-sale gets underway Oct. 11.
The bill will also include the Great Divide, Stoney LaRue, and Jason Boland and the Stragglers. Each band either directly inspired Ragweed or was heavily influenced by them during the late 1990s and early 2000s when Red Dirt went from a regional music scene based in Stillwater to a nationally-recognized genre characterized by unrefined vocals and Oklahoma-inspired lyrics.
“Stillwater represents a beginning — for me, personally, and for the band,” says Ragweed co-founder and drummer Randy Ragsdale. “It’s like that for most people that go there. That’s where they start their life. It’s one of the first places we got going, and I think it’s also bigger than just our band. The whole damn movement got going there. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but it’s kind of like the motherland. I cannot think of a better place to get it going again, to bury the hatchet, to try to do this the right way, and just start over.”
Ragweed broke up in October 2010 after a final concert at Joe’s on Weed Street in Chicago. The split was not amicable, and hard feelings lingered. Almost immediately, Canada and bassist Jeremy Plato formed Cody Canada and the Departed and have recorded and toured under the name since. Seven months ago, Canada told me Ragweed would never reunite. When that conversation became a Rolling Stone story, Canada regretted it almost immediately. He’d harbored bitterness in the 15 years since Ragweed fractured. Some of it was on display in that interview, and Canada decided he was ready to work on a change of heart.
In mid-September, shortly before Ragweed caused a stir with cryptic updates to the band’s website and social media channels, Canada once again sat across from me, this time on his tour bus, to reflect on the last decade and a half. We were on the outskirts of New Braunfels, Texas, where he has lived for more than 20 years.
“I should not have said I’d never do it. When I told you that, I thought, ‘What if we do [reunite]? I’ll have to eat my words,’” he says. “Now, I’m sitting right here with a mouthful of my words. You really never know, and you should never say never.”
Cross Canadian Ragweed are Canada, Ragsdale, Plato, and rhythm guitarist Grady Cross. All four members discussed the reunion this month (and those interviews will be shared, in full, in the book Red Dirt Unplugged, set for release on Dec. 13). Founded in 1994 in Yukon, Oklahoma, the band gained a foothold playing the college bars in Stillwater. They honed a rock-edged live show and a coolest-guys-in-the-room stage presence that spread like a prairie fire, particularly across Texas, where they won over fans and joined Lone Star heroes Pat Green and Charlie Robison as the state’s biggest draws outside of mainstream country.
“Man, I think about how happy we were making music,” Cross says of Ragweed’s heyday. “And I think about how loyal our crowds were. I think about how big those crowds were, and I think about how some of them would drive across the country, or fly across the country, and I think about them singing our songs back to us.”
They landed a deal with Universal South in 2002 and released most of their music on the label. Their 2004 album Soul Gravy hit Number Five on the Billboard country charts and Number 51 on the Billboard 200. Their single “Fightin’ For,” off 2005’s Garage, became the band’s only Top 40 hit, peaking at Number 39 on the country charts.
Canada co-wrote “Fightin’ For” with Great Divide frontman and co-founder Mike McClure, who was also Ragweed’s primary producer throughout their career. Ragweed began as regular opener for the Divide, whose contentious breakup in 2003 was also reconciled with a reunion concert in Stillwater, at the Tumbleweed Dance Hall in 2011. The band capped its comeback in 2022 with a full-length record, Providence, which would go on to be named Album of the Year by the Texas Country Music Association. McClure believes a similar triumph awaits Ragweed.
“I’ve seen firsthand what forgiveness and personal growth can do,” McClure says. “The work now becomes growing up and out of the things that once held us down — be it alcohol, communication, or just ego. On the other side of all that anger and animosity awaits joy. Cross Canadian Ragweed coming back in 2025 is going to bring so much joy to so many people. It will be healing across the board.”
Ragweed’s reputation was built around a high-energy live show. The band leaned into that, releasing three live albums and including “Live and Loud” in the title of each. Two songs in particular — “Carney Man” (an ode to the circus) and “Boys from Oklahoma” (an ode to marijuana) — became signatures. Constant fan requests for both tunes frustrated Canada even before Ragweed broke up. Canada says he’s also had a change of heart about that. He knows the loudest cheers of the reunion show will be for “Carney Man,” and he is quick to point out that he and Great Divide frontman Mike McClure co-wrote the song in Stillwater, two blocks from where the reunion concert will take place.
“It’s gonna be a rush,” Canada says. “I can’t wait to play it.”
He’s not the only one.
“It’s been really fun going back through all those songs, making sure I can still nail it,” Plato says. “I know I can, but I think that a good two, three, four days of really hammering at some rehearsals, and we’ll all be sharp as a tack.”
If Ragweed won over fans with party anthems, they won the respect of fellow artists in Texas and Nashville with a welcoming approach to their peers and a relentless refusal to bend to the whims of mainstream country.
A then-unknown Dierks Bentley approached the band as a fan at a Nashville show in 2003 and Ragweed brought him on the road as an opener. When Bentley blew up mid-tour and became the showpiece, he famously insisted that Ragweed remain headliners when they’d play shows in Texas. Bentley namedropped Ragweed in “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)” and took them on a series of nationwide tours, each dubbed “High Times and Hangovers.” Canada and his wife, Shannon, were moved enough to name their oldest son Dierks. (Both of Canada’s sons, Dierks and Willy, currently play in the metal-core band Waves in April and occasionally open Departed shows.)
After Waylon Jennings died from complications of diabetes in 2002, Ragweed organized a tribute concert featuring dozens of largely independent artists, as well as Shooter Jennings and Jessi Colter, and released it as a live album called The Red River Tribute, with the proceeds benefiting diabetes research. At the peak of her career, Lee Ann Womack sang on a Ragweed ballad called “Sick and Tired.” During Ragweed’s farewell show in 2010, Canada told the crowd that Womack “helped a bunch of tattooed hippies from Oklahoma look classy in the eyes of country music.”
When Ragweed established themselves as the biggest act in Texas music in the mid-2000s, they routinely took Wade Bowen and Randy Rogers on the road as opening acts. Ragweed’s management would manage the Randy Rogers Band when it released Rollercoaster in 2004. Later, Rogers became an early manager of both Parker McCollum and William Beckmann, meaning Ragweed’s influence has carried all the way through to present-day country music.
One of Koe Wetzel’s concert staples is the 2019 song “Ragweed.” When Brent Cobb reflected on the people who revived country music in his 2023 song “When Country Came Back to Town,” Canada was one of those name-dropped. Both Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit were once openers for Ragweed. Stephen King, an unabashed Ragweed fan, used the lyrics to “Suicide Blues” as the setup to his 2016 novel End of Watch.
This all came flooding back to Canada as he reflected on his comments about a reunion never happening. He realized it was not just fans or fellow artists Ragweed had made happy over the years.
“First of all, nobody’s sick, and there’s no ‘We need to do this for some reason,’” Canada says. “I just felt like it was time. And, honestly, I got tired of harboring hard feelings. I had a lot of those back in the day, and I don’t want to have them anymore.
“Once my agent, Jon Folk, came to me with this offer for about the 40th time, I said, ‘Man. Let’s see what we can do.’ And we got everybody on the phone. We talked it through, and everything was cool. So, we’re gonna give it a go.”
Folk also books Turnpike and coordinated the band’s 2022 comeback from an extended hiatus. It was his choice to stage Ragweed’s reunion in Stillwater, and at a stadium show on a much greater scale than nearly every other Ragweed show — although the band was a one-time holder of the attendance record at the racetrack Lone Star Park in suburban Dallas.
But ultimately, it was a wiseass superhero that sealed the reunion deal for Canada. A major fan of Deadpool, he says his first thought upon getting the latest Ragweed offer was how excited he was when he saw the first trailer for Deadpool 3.
“I had been watching the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine and thinking, ‘Look at them out there making everybody happy.’ Why don’t we do that?” Canada says. “Let’s make everybody happy. Let’s make our parents happy. Let’s make our kids happy. And let’s be happy. And let’s do it in Stillwater, because I’ve said it a hundred times, if it wasn’t for Stillwater, I wouldn’t have anything.”
Canada emphasizes that the Departed is still his day job; he’s never shied away from playing Ragweed songs in Departed sets and re-recorded Soul Gravy in its entirety in 2022 as a Departed album. “I’m very, very happy with the Departed,” Canada says. “We’re still making music. We don’t have to answer to anybody but ourselves.”
For fans, that means a full-scale return of Ragweed is unlikely. Currently, the Stillwater show is the only concert the band has booked. For a group that spent most of its 16 years in theaters and dance halls, coming back in a stadium a decade-and-a-half later requires a degree of caution and assessing demand.
Canada, though, says if there’s enough interest to support additional Ragweed shows — or even a limited tour — in 2025, he and the band are willing to listen.
“Right now, this is the only one we’ve got,” he says. “But if it goes well, I’m open to that discussion, because I think it’s going to be a really, really badass time.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
