Ryan Bingham Rode the ‘Yellowstone’ Bump All the Way to His Own Festival

Wearing a feathered cowboy hat and a brand-new black jacket with “Great Western” printed across the back and “Hassie” stitched on the front — for his wife, fellow Yellowstone star Hassie Harrison — Ryan Bingham stood and watched the house lights fall over the Texas Gentlemen.

Just a few moments earlier, the Lone Star State outfit that doubles as Bingham’s backing band kicked off “Nothing Holds Me Down” and now Bingham was ready to take stage of the Dickie’s Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, to headline an arena for the first time in his career.

He had already had a full day. The inaugural Great Western Festival is Bingham’s to both curate and host, and the evening concert was the capper on a program of music, Western culture, rodeo, and bullfighting. Bingham, with Harrison alongside, congratulated rodeo winners, applauded rope tricks and native dances, and posed for photos.

“If I want to do something on a big level like this, let’s incorporate all kinds of stuff that was really informative to me,” Bingham tells Rolling Stone about the festival. “Rodeo is a big part of my life. I rode bulls before I started playing music and made some of the best friends I’ve ever made through that.”

When he caught his breath, he both promoted and partook in the festival’s featured liquor: Bingham’s Bourbon, a Texas-distilled bourbon that is the brainchild of the 43-year-old songwriter, actor, Oscar winner, and one-time performer in a Wild West-themed show at Disneyland Paris.

The fest is part of a whirlwind fall for Bingham, who will see his Yellowstone character, Walker, reprised in November when part two of the ranching drama’s fifth season returns to CBS. He will also spend the fall on the Last Waltz Tour, which kicked off Thursday in L.A. This year’s theme is “Life Is a Carnival: A Musical Celebration of Robbie Robertson,” and features Bingham, Jamey Johnson, Lukas Nelson, and a pair of original Heartbreakers in Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench.

But even with all he has going right now, Bingham is likely best-known for Yellowstone — and he’s far from alone. The show boosted the careers of Americana and folk musicians whose music it featured, exposing them to a worldwide audience.

In Bingham’s mind, however, that recognition was far from a foregone conclusion.

“Man, I had no idea,” he says. “At the time, you know, it could have gone either way. It could have been really cool for this music, or it could have been really bad for it. You really didn’t know what people would think. If the show would have went downhill, you could have went downhill with it.”

The biggest beneficiaries of such a Yellowstone bump are likely Whiskey Myers and Shane Smith and the Saints. Both bands moved from dance halls to arenas and amphitheaters following featured placement on the series, with Smith serving as Bingham’s direct support at the Great Western fest. But an entire generation of independent country artists have seen their profiles raised from the show.

“When those first couple of seasons came out, I started noticing it,” Bingham recalls. “Because I’d be in, like, New York City or Los Angeles, sitting at a bar with a bunch of stockbrokers in suits, and they’re all going, ‘Fucking Yellowstone! We love that show!’

“Then, I went on tour in Europe, and people were going crazy for it over there. You’re in Dublin, Ireland, seeing people wearing cowboy hats and stuff and you’re just going, ‘Wow, what a turn of events, and on a global level.’ It wasn’t cool to be country or wear a cowboy hat, and then all of a sudden it was.”

When the Yellowstone bump happened, and bands such as Smith’s could make a leap from the 90-capacity Mercury Lounge in New York to the 1,500-capacity Webster Hall in a span of 18 months, Bingham found himself at the forefront. Even if he was already an established headliner, the series elevated him to a household name among viewers not familiar with his music and his relationship with Harrison began receiving the sort of treatment often associated with Hollywood A-listers. An extensive profile of their October 2023 Dallas wedding in Vogue revealed a theme of Texas heritage and termed the style “cowboy black-tie.”

When it came time to shoot the upcoming season of Yellowstone in Texas, Bingham — born in Hobbs, New Mexico, and currently residing in California — was thrilled. He considers himself an adopted Texan.

“The big difference this year is that we went to Texas,” Bingham says. “We were in the Four Sixes Ranch [in Guthrie, Texas], and that’s where a lot of my family is from. My grandmother’s side of the family has like four or five generations coming from there, ranching. It almost felt like that would have been my destiny if I hadn’t moved around and found a guitar. I’d probably be living in West Texas and working on a ranch. I don’t know if ‘nostalgic’ is the word, but I felt really at home there.”

When Bingham was asked to join this year’s Last Waltz tour, however, “nostalgic” was in fact the correct term. The invitation took his mind straight back to Stephenville, Texas, where he had been on the rodeo team at Tarleton State University in his younger days and cut his teeth as a musician years later.

“I got invited to be a part of it and asked what it was all about,” Bingham says. “And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s gonna be you and Jamey and the Heartbreakers as the Band,’ and I’m thinking, are you kidding me?’ I’m a huge fan of the Band, and they had some of the first songs I ever learned. The first time I ever played ‘The Weight’ was with Cody Canada and Jason Boland and Stoney LaRue in Stephenville at the old City Limits bar there.”

Bingham has hosted a festival once before this year’s Great Western. In 2019, he and his manager, Kyle Wilensky, put on Ryan Bingham’s Western Festival in Luckenbach, but the pandemic canceled a planned 2020 edition. Five years later, Bingham dreamed bigger, plotting a multi-day event for the Dickie’s Arena and the bars in the Fort Worth Stockyards. On this Saturday in mid-October, Smith delivered a scorching set ahead of Bingham on a bill that also included Tanya Tucker, Louie TheSinger, Vincent Neil Emerson, and Angel White.

“Texas is such a melting pot, musically,” Bingham says. “I wanted to have some kind of a representation, where you can feature all these different things that make Texas what it is. You have the North Texas swing music, cowboy music, and folk. You’ve got zydeco and blues and hip-hop from Houston and the Louisiana border. You have all the Mariachi and Tejano and Cajun stuff. Then, I got to Stephenville, and Cross Canadian Ragweed and Jason Boland and Robert Earl Keen and Pat Green — all these bands — were playing there at City Limits. It was fucking cool.

“I’ve been thinking about this for years,” he continues, “trying to create something that would reflect all that.”

After a short stint in Paris at that Disneyland show in the mid-2000s, Bingham returned to Texas to give music a shot, eventually landing in New Braunfels and living at the River Road Ice House, a music venue and campground. There, he honed his songwriting skills alongside artists like Boland in the years before “The Weary Kind,” written for Jeff Bridges’ Crazy Heart, won Bingham the 2010 Academy Award for Best Original Song and established him as the most successful singing cowboy in a generation.

Later that night, at a Great Western afterparty that could have passed for a Hollywood gala were it not taking place in Fort Worth’s Stockyards, Harrison asserts that her husband’s steady, two-decade rise has positioned him to deftly balance the demands of fame and business. Bingham had just spent the day as Cowtown’s biggest party host, headliner, and brand ambassador, making it difficult to argue with her conclusion.

Bingham recognizes this, too, and says that any fame or fortune is a happy accident for a singing cowboy whose music just happened to catch on. He’s interested not in growing his celebrity, but rather on building long-term security out of what he already has — through businesses like Bingham’s Bourbon.

“I feel very grateful for the opportunity of playing music and being able to tour, but I’ve also got three little kids now, and I am remarried,” he says (he and Harrison tied the knot in May). “If I could sling some booze and make a little side hustle money on that, and then be able to stay home and write songs and be with my family, that would give me something to balance out all the life stuff.”

To that end, Bingham says he’s been writing and has music in the works for both his own catalog and for Yellowstone. There’s also a live album from a show at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre set for a Nov. 8 release, and he’s undertaking a mammoth project to re-record his entire catalog acoustically. He envisions it as a box set.

Onstage at the Dickie’s Arena with the Texas Gentlemen, Bingham covered a broad swath of his career over 15 songs, including two covers — one a version of the Band’s “The Weight” with the day’s artists all joining in, and the other a song that no one saw coming.

After he finished “Got Damn Blues” from 2019’s American Love Song, Bingham told the crowd about the time he lived in Houston, and a friend telling him he needed to learn about that city’s music if he wanted to be taken seriously. He was particularly drawn to the hip-hop duo UGK and their Ridin’ Dirty album, he said, and proceeded to invite Bun B — one half of UGK — onstage to the loudest cheers of the night.

The two delivered a nearly eight-minute rendition of UGK’s “One Day,” taking turns singing the chorus of “One day you’re here/and then you’re gone,” with Bun B asking the crowd to hold up one finger for someone they wished was alongside them on this night. When it was all over, the two shared a quick embrace before Bun B ceded the stage back to Bingham — who waited until the rapper was out of sight to pose a question to the crowd.

“How ’bout that shit, Fort Worth?”

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.