Reckless Kelly

Reckless Kelly videos

Once upon a time in the outback of Australia, a wily outlaw named Ned Kelly instigated a shootout with the frontier police in the backwoods prospecting town of Glenrowan. Though shot countless times, he survived - Kelly was wearing a 97-pound suit of custom forged metal armor that rifle rounds bounced right off of. Though he was eventually hung for his cattle-rustlin’, bank-robbin’, ranger-shootin’ ways, the larger-than-life tale of Ned Kelly went on to become an important part of Australian folklore.

The boys of Austin, Texas country outfit Reckless Kelly may invoke outlaw image of Ned Kelly with their band’s name, but the similarities end there; they’ve exchanged the armor and six-shooters for microphones and six-strings. Originally formed in 1997 by brothers Cody and Willy Braun in Bend, Oregon, Reckless Kelly soon packed their bags and moved to Austin to try and make a name for themselves in the Texas alternative country scene - a trail blazed not so long ago by genre greats Hank Williams Jr. and Willie Nelson.

Reckless Kelly released a handful of independent records before signing to the regionally influential label Sugar Hill Records (Terry Allen, Townes Van Zandt) in 2003, just in time for their breakout release Under the Table and Above the Sun. Reckless Kelly would go on to release four more records on the label over the next five years, seeing their biggest success of the era on their last Sugar Hill release Reckless Kelly Was Here (2006), which peaked at #56 on the Billboard Top Country Albums index. By this time the band’s melodic yet hard-hittin’ honky-tonk rock sound was beginning to find itself an audience of ever-increasing size in the Texas country scene, prompting the band to switch to a more mainstream label; Sugar Hill‘s focus was largely on folk and bluegrass groups.

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