Bingham had to clear life’s hurdles

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music writer
• Published: Oct 23, 2009

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As much as a traveling musician can, Ryan Bingham, a 28-year-old new addition to the Texas singer-songwriter tradition, has a home. His permanent address in Topanga Canyon, Calif., is the first place he’s settled since his mid-teens.

“I’ve got my own post office address with my name on it,” he said last week from Annapolis, Md., where he’d performed the night before. “We’d been wandering around, kind of homelessly, for years before that. So it’s nice to have a place to go when I do get a few days off. It’s kind of good for the soul.”

Following a chaotic childhood in Texas and New Mexico with roaming, dysfunctional parents, Bingham took off on his own at 16.

“My parents, they just kind of lost it,” he said. “And I was kind of lost. I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing or where I was going. But I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. One day it happened and there I was. I was like, ‘If I wanna survive in this game, I better get with it.’ ”

Bingham’s income came from whatever jobs he could find and his occasional rodeo-riding prizes.

“I was more of a weekend rodeo warrior,” he said. “I had to have a job during the week. Welding, framing houses, picking up rocks, anything.”

In his spare time, Bingham practiced a guitar piece he’d learned from a Mexican neighbor in Laredo, “Malagueña,” playing the instrument his mom gave him on his 16th birthday. 

“That was the only song I knew,” Bingham said. “When I finally got tired of playing that, I learned a few other chords and started making stuff up. I mainly just played for myself. But when I really got into it, it was like therapy for me. It was a way for me to get a lot of stuff off my chest. That was how I got into writing songs.”

One night Bingham’s friends encouraged him to perform informally at The Waterhole, a little bar in the small Texas cowboy town of Stephenville. The performance earned an invitation from the bar’s owner to play a return engagement. A local radio deejay also invited Bingham to perform at the station.   

“It just all went from there,” he said.

Bingham got more encouragement from an uncle, a fan of such Texas singer-songwriters as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Joe Ely.

“My uncle was like, ‘Man, you gotta record those songs! That way I can listen to ’em when you’re not around.’ So they talked me into going into this garage studio.”

Friends copied Bingham’s CDs on their computers and sold or gave them away at bars and rodeos. Pretty soon Bingham realized he could make enough money to get by performing from town to town.