Robert Earl Keen does his year-end DFW swing

For more than a decade now, Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen has made his last stop of the year Fort Worth’s Bass Hall, where he does an annual holiday show. He has called the Fort Worth concert his favorite show all year.

“The venue is incredible,” Keen says during a phone interview. “There’s just no finer venue as far as getting up onstage and being heard and everybody having a good seat. And even though it has somewhat of a high-brow sort of feel, there’s a real comfortableness to it. It’s not intimidating.”

But then Keen — who is playing Sunday night at Bass Hall — says he loves Fort Worth. Not just loves; he thinks it’s the best city in Texas.

“The fans in Fort Worth have been super-great to me,” says Keen, who performed his first Fort Worth shows 30 years ago at the now long-gone The HOP on Berry Street. “That doesn’t matter if I was playing the HOP, or I was playing Billy Bob’s or I was playing Bass Hall. Always great audiences, and I think that reflects on the town.”

Let’s go back to that “highbrow” thing about Bass Hall, though. Yes, it hosts the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Texas Ballet Theater, Fort Worth Opera and other fine-arts groups. If you’ve ever been to any of those events, though, you know that audiences will cheer and whoop enthusiastically when they see something that thrills them.

It’s just that Keen is the kind of guy who can get the audiences to sound like they’re doing that in a roadhouse.

“We are known for fun,” Keen says with a chuckle. “That’s part of it. One of the most common comments that we get is, ‘You guys look like you’re having a lot of fun.’ There’s no doubt. I spend many, many days, and many, many hours on the road, and stepping onstage and making it all happen — it’s magic. It makes me feel good, it makes the crowd feel good, and it just feeds on itself.”

Keen says he doesn’t get that reaction everywhere — he and his band always seem to struggle in the Midwest, where the audiences he’s encountered seem inclined to just stay in their seats, although he gets good reactions on either coast. But Fort Worth, he says, is a place where things work every time.

“There are good spots on the Earth,” Keen says. “There are places that just stay feeling good, and there are places that are the other way.”

The singer is also playing a holiday show Saturday night at House of Blues Dallas; he says that when he plays the two cities back to back, he often encounters fans who went to both shows. Even though the shows are after Christmas, he calls them “welcome to the holidays” shows.

Blast to the past

But don’t expect just any Hallmark card. This is the guy, after all, whose Merry Christmas From the Family references drunken parents, bean dip and Marlboro Lights. And he comes up with something new for the holiday show every year.

“This year’s theme is ‘The ’70s,’ so we took some of the set pieces from last year, and then we added a bunch of stuff,” Keen says. “We came up with the ’70s because I would say, by and large, particularly Merry Christmas From the Family comes from my experiences — the ‘coming of age’ sort of thing.

“So we’ve sparked it up with some really, really gross shag carpeting and some big giant television sets. It’s a fun set with some foil trees and things like that.”

The holiday shows have evolved: A pioneer on the modern Texas singer-songwriter scene, Keen is still on the alt side of country, and earlier audiences were less familiar with him than they were with his Christmas song.

“They just sat there and stared until I played the song,” says Keen, whose best-known songs include The Road Goes on Forever and Corpus Christi Bay. “I realized what it’s like for a person to have a hit, because I don’t really have what people would call ‘hits.’

“I don’t sit around and wait for somebody to play the hit; I always think of my songs as my songs. But I never did have that feeling of somebody just wanting you to play the one song that they want to hear.”

But word of mouth helped: Fans who loved Merry Christmas From the Family would talk friends and family into going to the shows, where they found that Keen went beyond that song and they became fans themselves.

Eventually, it became more of a party: “It was like, ‘I’m coming home from college, and Robert Earl Keen’s playing Saturday, do you want to go?’” Keen says. “That kind of deal. So it became kind of a family affair.”

The grass is bluer

He and his band evolved in turn. Keen says that for years, they’d do straight shows where they would notice that the audience was waiting to hear Merry Christmas From the Family, so they decided to add the more fun elements. That was partly, Keen says wryly, at the band’s request.

“When we first started, they kind of dressed up in classic theater black, and they’d play Greensleeves and English madrigals [to start the show], and it was somewhat of a snore,” Keen says. “They came to me and said, ‘C’mon, man! Can’t we play something more fun?’ So then they dressed up in these hillbilly outfits and started playing upbeat hillbilly-swing versions of Winter Wonderland and Sleigh Ride and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.”

That turned into a CD, The Xmas Men’s Santa Is Real, an instrumental album that Keen says he didn’t have anything to do with but adds, “It’s really good.”

Some of of the Xmas Men songs will be in this weekend’s shows. What won’t be in them, Keen says, is the bluegrass you can hear on his next album, Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions, due for release in early 2015.

Despite a lifelong love of bluegrass, this is Keen’s first bluegrass CD.

“I started playing guitar behind fiddle-contest guys, just banging out these little chords,” he says. “I think a first cousin to fiddle music is bluegrass music, and I became a fan of that and played it and sang it, and had a bluegrass band and then another bluegrass band.

“I finally listened to myself on tape and realized I didn’t sound like any of the people I admired. So I continued to love it and play it, and never really brought it into my own life.”

Keen says he realized last year that if he didn’t do a bluegrass album now, he might never do one, so he decided to forge ahead. He was a little tentative at first, but he dove in, with a record that spans 100 years of bluegrass and, unusually for Keen, is all cover material.

And it didn’t all start as bluegrass; one of the songs is Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, which Del McCoury eventually turned into a bluegrass hit.

Keen has been branching out: His REK Yardbird Bloody Mary Mix (inspired by a line in Merry Christmas From the Family) is now on shelves in H-E-B stores; and Fredericksburg-based Pedernales Brewing Co. released a Robert Earl Keen Honey Pils beer this year.

“For me, this has been the year of ‘yes,’” Keen says with a laugh. “People go, ‘You wanna do a beer?’ ‘Yeah, sure!’ ‘You wanna sell a bloody mary mix?’ ‘Yeah!’”

This story was originally published December 24, 2014 at 1:26 PM with the headline "Robert Earl Keen does his year-end DFW swing."