For Mescalito, his major-label debut, 25-year-old Ryan Bingham has the right folks in his corner: Sometime Lost Highway labelmate Joe Ely provides the CD equivalent of a jacket blurb, and Terry Allen (like Ely, a Lubbock legend) sits in on guitar and even trades vocals with Bingham on the rollicking shit-kicker “Ghost of Travelin’ Jones.” But neither Ely nor Allen was present while Bingham was being shuffled from town to town along the Rio Grande as a kid, nor later while he eked out a living on the lower rungs of the rodeo circuit. And it’s the gleanings from all that hard traveling that form the guts of Mescalito, which provides more than enough proof that Ryan Bingham is the genuine article—and that the Texas territory he stakes out is, more than anything, his own. With the Ryan Montbleau Band and Marcus Eaton.

Listen to The Ryan Montbleau Band’s “Maybe Today.”

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Sat., Nov. 17, 9 p.m., 2007