Country rap pioneer Cowboy Troy rides into town Saturday

Cowboy Troy

Just after Christmas, Troy Coleman enjoyed hanging around his Nashville-area home watching his 2-year-old triplets play with their holiday booty.

“They’re just making a mess in the playroom,” he says. “They got all kinds of toy musical instruments. They got a baby drum set. There’s a lot of noise.”

Cowboy Troy

Now, with the dawn of the new year, Coleman, better known to music fans as the country rap pioneer Cowboy Troy, is making his own noise with a show at Newby’s Saturday night.

It was just five years ago that Coleman burst on the music scene as the lone African-American member of the MuzikMafia, a loose, eclectic Nashville collective of artists that also includes James Otto, Gretchen Wilson, and Big & Rich, on whose 2005 album he made his recording debut. At the time, country and hip hop, while not exactly strangers (see Toby Keith’s “I Wanna Talk About Me” or Tim McGraw’s collaboration with Nelly, “Over and Over” from earlier in the decade), kept a respectable distance from each other.

But with the arrival of Coleman in 2005, both on the Big & Rich single “Rollin (The Ballad of Big & Rich) and on his own debut disc of that year, Loco Motive, which featured the hit “I Play Chicken with the Train,” the two genres were slammed together like the unlikely partners in a buddies cop flick. Kanye West/Taylor Swift feud aside, Coleman’s success nudged the door open a little further for songs like Trace Adkins’s “Honky Tank Badonkadonk” and Big & Rich’s teaming with Wyclef Jean and Lil John on their 2007 LP Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace, helping ensure through crossover the continued success of the decade’s most dominant genres.

In retrospect, the merging of country and rap seems like a no-brainer, but when he first started mashing the two together in a style he’s dubbed “hick-hop” more than 15 years ago Coleman says converts were hard to come by.

“Not everybody was as forward thinking,” he says. “A lot of people looked at me like I was an idiot. Some people thought I was crazy but I kept with it because it made perfect sense to me, and it seemed to be a natural fit.”

It seemed self-evident to Coleman because he grew up in both worlds. A native of Dallas, Texas, he grew up with a musical father who received his Bachelor’s degree in music and played in the college marching band.

“There was always music in the house,” Coleman says. “When I was a kid I spent a lot of time listening to ZZ Top and Van Halen and Def Leppard and the Doobie Brothers and all that. But I was also listening to Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J and Charlie Daniels and Jerry Reed and Roger Miller. Basically whatever was on the radio.”

Coleman didn’t start performing himself until he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. (A loyal UT fan, Coleman recorded the song “Hook ’Em Horns” when the Longhorns won the national championship in 2006; he likewise recently contributed a song to the Dallas Cowboys EP Get Rowdy.) At first Coleman would just jump up to rap at parties, but then he met a kindred spirit, musician John Rich, who was equally disdainful of genre barriers and encouraged the rapper to follow his vision. Soon, Coleman was taking time off from his job managing a Dallas-area Foot Locker store to visit Rich in Nashville, where he had gone on to success in the band Lonestar and then as a duo with William “Big Kenny” Alphin. When Big & Rich hit it big in 2005, they brought their MuzikMafia pals, including Coleman, along with them.

In September, Coleman released his third CD, Demolition Mission: Studio Blue Sessions. The disc is a break from his past work on a couple of fronts. It is his first effort since breaking with Warner Brothers Records following 2007’s Black In the Saddle. It also represents Coleman’s effort to expand and mature his sound.

“I had some fans asking, Do you sing at all?” says Coleman, who spent a year-and-a-half preparing the new material that makes up about half of the new album. “We would try it out in front of live audiences. We would slow the show down and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to try some new material. Let us know what you think. Do you like it? Do you hate it?’ And to my surprise the feedback was really positive.”

The new crooning Cowboy Troy just adds a new dimension to what Coleman sees as the inevitable integration of all pop music.

“Music fans like all kinds of music, as long as its good,” he says. “I think the more we can have — I guess the kids call ’em mash ups — if you start doing mash ups where you have a rapper with a pop singer or a rapper with a country artist or a metal artist with a country artist, whatever, people will start to look at it and go, That’s Cool. I never would have thought of that before.’ … If you have that cross-pollination it not only makes better music but it makes all of us better. “

Cowboy Troy & Nash Villain with the Dirt Brothers

Saturday at Newby’s, 539 S. Highland. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $10, available at the door and online at newbysmemphis.com. For more information, call 452-8408.

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