Bringing country back

In a country music landscape littered with frat-boy party anthems and glittery pop princesses, Jacob Tovar mines the tradition of the genre’s Honky-tonk roots.

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Jacob Tovar looks like he rolled off an assembly line at the Country Music Star Manufacturing Plant™. Tall and slender, his frame appears custom-built for a pearl-snap Western shirt and snug-fitting Wranglers. A devil-may-care grin peeks out from beneath a ten-gallon hat with just the right bend in the brim. 

Video: "Tips and Beer" by Jacob Tovar

If Tovar—a relative newcomer to the Tulsa scene who has already established himself among the most sough-after acts in town—were interested in regurgitating the sort of slickly-produced, dance-pop ditties that currently pass as “country” music, he’d likely have Nashville record executives tripping over themselves to offer him fame and fortune.

But he’s not interested in that sort of music. Not in the slightest.

“What I’m doing isn’t even country music anymore,” he said. “I mean, it is, of course. It’s the original country music, the kind I’ve loved all my life. But it’s not the kind of country music that sells. Nowadays it’s all about these game shows, or how young you are, or how you look. It’s just pop music. 

“There’s no story to it anymore. I’m interested in the stories. I want to play real country music.”

Tovar hails from Perry, Oklahoma, the son of hardworking parents who encouraged him to get to work as soon as he was able. Home-schooled from an early age, he spent his formative years as an apprentice to his father, an electrician.

“The education I got working with my father, I wouldn’t trade that for anything,” he said. “Meeting and interacting with the kinds of people I did, at that young age, in that environment, you figure out a lot of things about the world real quick.”

When the time came that many of his peers were headed off to college, Tovar was already a skilled electrician, and didn’t see much point in breaking the bank to learn some other trade. He just kept on working, and it was about this time that he started teaching himself the guitar.

“My older brother is a great guitar player who lives in Nashville. My uncle is a great guitar player. But I never started playing until I was about 19 or 20. I was always just a bedside picker. I played because I liked playing.”

Also around this time, on a job in Stillwater, Tovar met Jamie, who became his first girlfriend, and eventually his wife. (The pair have since added three new Tovars to the brood— sons Waylon and Coltrane, and daughter Sylvia). Eventually, when Jamie got a job offer in Tulsa, he was more than happy to relocate.

“Even though I still didn’t have the nerve to get out and play in front of people, Tulsa is where I wanted to be,” he said. “I knew the music scene here was amazing, and I wanted to be here and be around it, because I’m just obsessed with music. At that time, there wasn’t a thought in my mind that I’d be able to make money at it.”

For years, he showed up as an eager fan at the collaborative live music showcases that laid the foundation for Tulsa’s current scene—particularly Tom Skinner’s “Science Project” at The Colony, and “Higher Education” at McNellie’s, led by Dustin Pittsley and Jesse Aycock.

He’d been coming out to shows so often that he made casual acquaintance with many of the musicians, and one Halloween night found himself at a late-night party at Pittsley’s house.

“Everyone was playing and singing, just having a good time,” Tovar said. “At one point, I grabbed a guitar and played a little tune, and they all seemed to like it.”

By all accounts from the musicians in attendance that evening, the claim that people “seemed to like it” is a massive understatement. Pittsley called it revelatory. Tulsa singer-songwriter Wink Burcham said the room fell silent, every mouth agape, every eye fixed on this unknown talent who’d been hiding in plain sight. “Who is this guy?” Burcham recalled thinking. “How is there a voice like this in Tulsa that none of us have ever heard?”