3 Songs You Didn’t Know Ray Wylie Hubbard Wrote For Other Artists

Rough-and-tumble country troubadour Ray Wylie Hubbard makes music that is gritty and rough around the edges, but honest and real. His songs are anthems tinged with twisted humor and a kiss-off attitude. It is a style that has infiltrated his songwriting through and through. Even the tunes he’s penned for others are just as unapologetic.

Here are 3 songs you didn’t know Ray Wylie Hubbard wrote for other artists.

[RELATED: Ray Wylie Hubbard Recounts Details of His Famous Career on ‘Songcraft’]

1. “Drunken Poet’s Dream” – Hayes Carll

Written by Ray Wylie Hubbard and Hayes Carll

Wine bottles scattered like last night’s clothes / Cigarettes, papers, and dominoes / Well, she laughs for a minute ’bout the shape I’m in / Says, “You be the sinner, honey, I’ll be the sin,” plays the dirty prose of “Drunken Poet’s Dream.”

Written by Hubbard alongside fellow singer-songwriter Hayes Carll, the latter recorded the song for his 2008 album, Trouble in Mind.

“We had the melody and [Carll] kind of changed it up a little bit too,” says Hubbard. The pair used the software tool Masterwriter and worked on the revisions over e-mail, which Hubbard jokes he preferred to “being in the same room with Hayes.”

2. “Hold On” – McKendree Spring

Written by Ray Wylie Hubbard and Bob Livingston

With Bob Livingston of The Lost Gonzo Band, Hubbard penned the song “Hold On.” It was first released by the progressive folk-rock band McKendree Spring in 1975. The band gives the song an avant-garde spin, dominated by a funk-fueled bass line and dramatically trilling keys.

3. “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” – Jerry Jeff Walker

Written by Ray Wylie Hubbard

And it’s up against the wall, Redneck Mother / Mother, who has raised her son so well / He’s thirty-four and drinking in a honky tonk / Just kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell, plays the classic country tune, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.”

First recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1973, the Hubbard-penned song was born from a true event that took place while on a beer run. A story from Texas Monthly explains, where Hubbard was staying in Red River, New Mexico had very few places to buy beer —one was a “hippie bar,” the other “a redneck bar.”

Hubbard chose the latter, a joint called the D-Bar-D, apparently because it was closer. “I walked in and there were thirty or forty people drinking, including one old woman,” the songwriter said. “The jukebox stopped and they all turned and looked at me.”

He asked the bartender for a case of beer, and while he waited for his order, a woman and her son took a disliking to him. “How can you call yourself an American with hair like that?” the woman asked him, her son adding, “You want me to beat him up?” He quickly left with his beer in arm and a song in mind.

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