It’s a fall Friday night in Fayetteville, AR, and the giant Razorback flanker who’s been tearing through the defensive line all game is barreling toward your channel. You’re a freshman with a football background, and it’s only your third rugby match ever, but no one else looks like they’re going to tackle this guy.
You throw all of yourself into the challenge, head included, and end up in the hospital concussed with a dislocated shoulder. First rugby injuries, ever. On the rural ride home back to Stillwater, OK, other than a little worry about playing the big gig tomorrow night after the football game (so you know downtown is going to be buzzing) with a bruised brain, it’s all smiles.
The doctor says in no uncertain terms you should spend the next week in a dark room, and explicitly advises against standing on a stage in front of blinding lights while blasting loud music to hundreds of rowdy bargoers. But playing Oklahoma Red Dirt country music, in Stillwater – the birthplace and mecca of the rebellious, rootsy subgenre – is the precise reason you enrolled in college in the first place.
So you play your show the next night, and spend the following 24 hours in a dark room, asleep. Following the doctor’s orders, if only a bit late. Sounds like the opening of a Luke Combs or Kris Kristofferson biopic, as both played rugby in college before going on to bonafide country music superstardom.
As an English major at Pomona College (and left end on the football team, sports editor of the school paper and lauded amateur boxer), Kristofferson, a three-time Grammy winner, began writing songs and playing flyhalf, doing the latter well enough to be featured in full kit in Sports Illustrated in 1958. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he kept playing rugby and writing songs. And boxing.
Eight-time Grammy-nominated Luke Combs played prop at Appalachian State for three years before dropping out to pursue music full time. “Nothing about me wanted to go to math or science, you know what I mean?” Combs told iHeartRadio. “I was just more concerned with drinking and playing rugby and singing.”
Oklahoma State freshman Jack Dunker, the subject of this story’s real-life opening anecdote, falls somewhere between Kristofferson and Combs on the academic spectrum. On one hand, like Combs, he probably wouldn’t be going to college if it weren’t to appease his mom, and he daydreams of music getting existentially in the way of his studies, sooner than later.
On the other hand, like Kristofferson, he’s a high academic achiever with a wide array of interests. In high school, he played varsity football, wrestled and swam, was the treasurer of the Pep Club and sat on Student Council. All while studying at the Kansas City Jazz Academy, playing viola in the school orchestra and starting a Red Dirt band, Jack Dunker and the Ellman Bros.
Dunker grew up around music, his dad a radio disc jockey and promoter for Kansas City’s 101 The Fox. He started playing guitar in the second grade, picked up the viola in fourth grade, and earned a symphony orchestra scholarship to OSU, where he’s majoring in music industry.
“My mom, being the awesome lady that she is, made it to where I got pretty good pretty quickly,” said Dunker. “In general, she’s the one pushing me to do a lot of stuff, like going to college and all that business.”
Dunker’s dad is to blame for his obsession with Red Dirt music, introducing him to the genre via the Turnpike Troubadours from Tallequah, Oklahoma.
“Eventually, I get really influenced by the Turnpike Troubadours, 49 Winchester, Cross Canadian Ragweed and a lot of red dirt music, and I started writing, myself. I’ve got all these songs and I wanted to play them live, and the best two musicians I knew were Devin and Ben, who I met playing jazz,” said Dunker.
For two years, he’d been playing guitar in the Jazz Academy alongside the Ellman brothers, fellow high school musical savants, in Kansas City’s famed 18th & Vine District, one of the birthplaces of modern jazz and the playground of icon Charlie “Bird” Parker during the 1930s Swing Era.
“I just took them from playing their difficult, long, hard, crazy jazz songs to maybe my less-difficult red dirt country songs,” said Dunker of his bandmates.
“By the end of my senior year it was to the point where we had two gigs a weekend, and I was bringing in enough to where I could have gotten an apartment and just played around Kansas City and made enough to support myself. My mom was like, I think you can do more for yourself.
“I was like, if I’m going to college, the one place I wanna go to is the place where I can make connections and get to know people in the Red Dirt scene.”
In 1979, a pair of OSU students famously rented a farmhouse on a 149-acre plot that would, over decades, become the site of countless legendary parties, jam sessions and concerts that fostered a unique blend of country, bluegrass, blues, rock and honky tonk known as “Red Dirt”, named after Oklahoma’s crimson, clay soil.
With frequent visits from the likes of Bob Childers, nicknamed the “father of Red Dirt”, a young Garth Brooks, and Cross Canadian Ragweed, “The Farm” birthed a new genre of country music.
Nearly a half century later, the allure of Oklahoma’s red dirt was too strong for one Kansas City kid, steeped in its tradition from a state away, to ignore. There, as a lonely freshman walking through the campus club fair looking for something else to be a part of, Dunker found rugby.
“They started talking to me about it, and it sounded like a whole lot of fun. I showed up to my first practice, and I got passed the ball. Being a football lineman and a fullback for so long, I loved that I got to run with the ball.”
Written by Pat Clifton