Cross Canadian Ragweed didn’t just send their fans into a frenzy when they announced their 2025 reunion concerts in Stillwater, Oklahoma, last week. Fellow artists also got fired up: During his headlining concert in Nashville on Sunday, Koe Wetzel told the crowd, “God bless, Cross Canadian Ragweed” and performed his tribute to the band, the eponymously titled “Ragweed.” The track is just one of a few that celebrate the Oklahoma group by name.
When Dierks Bentley stumbled into a Ragweed concert at Nashville’s Exit/In in the early 2000s, he was just another fan. He struck up a conversation with the headliners, who suggested Bentley join them on tour as an opener. On their first run, Bentley told Canada, “Thanks for making us look cool.” The tour barely got off the ground when Bentley’s debut single “What Was I Thinkin’” reached Number One, launching his career into orbit and reversing the order of the tour.
For the next half-decade, Bentley brought Ragweed out to open multiple “High Times and Hangovers” tours far from Red Dirt country, helping create a truly national fanbase for Ragweed in the process. Bentley paid tribute to those tours in his 2006 hit “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)”: “Ragweed’s rockin’ on my radio/Free and easy, down the road I go.” The song became his fifth chart-topper and added further mystique to the Red Dirt torchbearers.
If Bentley was subtle in his tribute, Wetzel was anything but when he released his own ode to the band in 2019. From the opening line, “She misses Ragweed like I do,” Wetzel endeared Ragweed to his audience — and a generation of Texas music fans who may have been too young to catch Ragweed’s heyday. One of the many social media gimmicks during Ragweed’s long build-up to their comeback announcement in recent weeks was a static image of a gift-wrapped logo with “To: Koe. From: Ragweed” written on it.
And most recently, Brent Cobb shouted out Ragweed when he turned his own artist journey into the ballad “When Country Came Back to Town.” In a little under five minutes, Cobb charted the two-decade resurgence of stripped-down, lyrics-first music that bro country had pushed to the far edges of the genre since the early 2000s. While recounting his life circa 2006 — in the prime of Ragweed — Cobb sang, “I moved to Nashville, and most of the Broadway stars wanted to be Cody Canada, Ryan Bingham or Hayes Carll.”
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Later he recounted on Instagram how Canada and Ragweed effused coolness at a time when country’s mainstream appeared too cautious to embrace the vibe.
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“I honestly didn’t believe it,” Canada recalls now about hearing Cobb’s song for the first time. Cobb also name-checked the Turnpike Troubadours — Ragweed’s co-headliners at two of their comeback concerts in April.
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged — which includes a 2024 full-band interview with Cross Canadian Ragweed — is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
