On a cool, crisp February morning, Ray Wylie Hubbard is putting a Sharpie to T-shirts and CD jackets as he sits in the break room at Amplifier, the East Austin company that receives and ships merchandise orders placed from his web site, www.raywylie.com. Dressed in black with salt-and-pepper beard, wire-rim glasses and his wild, graying mane sticking out from beneath a stocking cap, Hubbard looks like a holdover from the Woodstock Nation as he converts mundane Internet transactions into small gestures of goodwill, artist to fan.

With grace, humility and a wry sense of humor cocked and ready, he also fields questions about his life and times as Texas troubadour, hard-partying road warrior, and venerable songwriting icon. As he signs, he talks comfortably without hint of regret about the highs and lows of a three-decade career that is now soaring to new heights. A sense of gratitude seems to permeate every word. As he recalls the years and the events that have shaped his life, and considers where he's at in the present, the implication is that from this point on, it's nothing but gravy.

Ray Wylie Hubbard was born in 1946 in Oklahoma where he spent his first eight years with his father, a high school English teacher, and his housewife mother. It was there, in the pews of the local church, that a love of music took root. "When I was up there in Oklahoma," he says, "it was church music, you know, gospel, that's pretty much all it was up there. I don't really remember even that much country. There was the singing, halleluiah and that stuff. There wasn't a lot of singing in the house, though."

The family migrated south across the state line after his dad accepted a job as a high school principal in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff-a hotbed for blues, country, R&B, and folk, and where a couple future legends were already incubating. In Big D, Hubbard got his first real taste of the rich, stylistic variety of Texas roots music. He also began chewing on the idea of pursuing music as a livelihood, and found kindred spirits in a cadre of gifted kids who shared his aspirations and motivated him to chase his dreams.

"When I was a junior in high school," he says, "Michael Murphy, who is now Michael Martin Murphey, was a senior and B.W. Stevenson was a sophomore, and a guy named Larry Groce, who hosts (the NPR program) Mountain Stage, was a freshman. So we all kind of got into music together; we weren't in a band together but we knew each other. And, of course, the Vaughan brothers (Jimmie and Stevie Ray) were at Kimball (High School) and John Vandiver was at Sunset (High), so it was a very musical era.

"I actually started with a little folk group in high school, Three Faces West. It was right out of high school and we went to New Mexico and started playing a coffeehouse circuit that included Red River, New Mexico, and included Sand Mountain down in Houston, and there was the old Checkered Flag here in Austin, and there was a club called the Rubiat there in Dallas. So it was a little folk circuit."

Playing that circuit, Hubbard befriended other talented performers who would further influence his music and help shape his career. Nobody had a bigger impact early on than Jerry Jeff Walker. Walker, yet to make Austin his adopted home, was still a work in progress himself, traveling the circuit as a Dylan-inspired folkie playing cover tunes. "The first time I met Jerry Jeff he was playing at a Dallas folk club called the Rubiat in the late sixties. I was still in high school and he was just traveling through at the time. And I remember the first time I saw him, he was pretty much doing Dylan covers."

Hubbard appreciated the New York natives' style and musical sensibility. But it was something that happened the second time he encountered the future outlaw-country legend that had the biggest impact. "When he came back through the second time," Hubbard recalls, "he had written…I think Jerry had written "Driftin' Way of Life," "Ramblin' Scramblin'," "Little Bird" and something else. So there were four songs he had written-it wasn't "Bojangles" (Walker's later hit tune)-but it was just really cool seeing him come out and do the original stuff."

Until that time, Hubbard wasn't writing a lot of his own material, and he hadn't really given it much thought. The idea of actually taking the stage and baring his soul in front of a room full of strangers was daunting. By his own admission, he simply did not yet have the confidence. Seeing Walker staking out a musical identity performing his own songs left a lasting impression. It was obvious that if was going to get anywhere in the business, it would not be by putting his stylistic stamp on "Blowin' in the Wind." He realized eventually he would have to write his own material, and he committed himself to learning the craft.

And while he fully understood becoming a master songwriter did not happen overnight-that, in fact, it took years or even a lifetime-Hubbard demonstrated flashes of brilliance almost immediately, especially with his penchant for biting humor and tongue-in-cheek social commentary. A serendipitous encounter with a bar full of drunken rednecks gave him an unintended chance to establish himself as a young songwriter to watch. What he did with that chance encounter also changed his existence forever.

As the story goes, Hubbard wandered into a nondescript looking establishment to buy a beer one evening while working a summer residency at a folk club in Red River, New Mexico. Apparently Hubbard's decidedly un-country and western, nonconformist, hippie fashion sense irked some of the patrons, who proceeded to inform him, in so many words, that sticking around could be hazardous to his health.

Escaping bodily harm, he wasted little time dashing off a musical version of the story that became a comical little throwaway he called "(Up Against The Wall) Redneck Mother." At the time he thought little of it. But eventually the tune made it's way back to Texas, where his pal Jerry Jeff had set up shop to start a new country movement. Walker put a rowdy, live version of the tune on Viva Terlingua, the album that would eventually become his signature recording-and the rest, as it goes, is history. The little ditty has evolved into one of the great anthems in the annals of Texas country music. For authentic Cosmic Cowboys, it's practically the national anthem. It is one of those rare tunes most artists go a lifetime without writing: a song that stirs passion, a song tied to an identity, a song that people want to sing-and want you to sing-whether you are in the vegetable aisle at the HEB, dining at Spagos with gossip columnist Liz Smith, or at the urinal to the left. For Hubbard, "Redneck Mother" is at once the gift that keeps on giving and an albatross tied tightly around his neck. He's spent a good chunk of his life coming to terms with it.

"I'm just really glad it wasn't "Feelings," he says. "I would have made more money if I'd written "Feelings" but I couldn't sing "Feelings" every night. "Redneck Mother" I can sing every night. I mean I just keep making it up, just kinda having fun with it. And the audience? I figure they want to hear it, and like I say, I have fun with it, and I do it different every night. It's not set in stone.

"So the thing is I've made peace with it because I've got other songs now. I don't feel like I'm known just for that anymore. For a period of time, just being known for "Redneck Mother" was just kind of a rough deal because I had these other songs and people just wanted to hear "Redneck Mother." I still don't understand why it happened. You know, like I said, I've made peace with it."

Fortunately, Hubbard's given birth in recent years to a song or two that elicit a similar raw, gut-level response from the faithful. "Screw You, We're From Texas," a wicked little ditty designed to stir passion in those who take big pride in their affiliation with the Lone Star State, is the odds-on favorite to be the "Redneck Mother" of the twenty-first century.

As gypsy songman Walker's star continued to rise with the help of Hubbard's raucous anthem, he was in the process of fomenting a country music revolution back in Austin with the aid and comfort of a few other rogues and malcontents who had neither the patience nor the manners for the Nashville establishment. With Walker and old Dallas buddies Michael Murphy and B.W. Stevenson all there making waves, and native son Willie Nelson back home for good, Hubbard had no intention of missing out.

As Hubbard recalls, it was a time when barriers were broken and the rules of the game were being rewritten every day: "The music was really progressive. Willie Nelson came from Nashville and then got Mickey Raphael, a blues harmonica player, to play with him. Michael Murphy, who had been a folksinger, came here and got Herb Steiner playing pedal steel. And Jerry Jeff, who'd been a folksinger, came here and got John Inman, who'd been a rock 'n' roll guitar player. And B.W. Stevenson had that voice. So the music really was progressive for the time. It was folk, country, rock-it had this attitude, this Austin attitude. And the audience became as important as the band-they became like another member of the band. It was such a scene. And there was a lot of warmth."

The success of "Redneck Mother" got Hubbard the attention he needed to land his first record deal. But the momentum did not carry over. The first record was so disappointing, he literally cried when he heard the finished product for the first time. In response, he tossed in the towel on his dreams of becoming a big-time recording artist, at least for the time, packed his bags, and hit the road full throttle. By this time, Hubbard already had a first-rate live act. His hell-raisin', honky-tonkin,' leap before you look, country-rock road show was a popular act on the Texas club and festival circuit. His enthusiastic and loyal fan base was growing. And so was his appetite for wretched excess.

Hubbard began living out the stage persona he'd created as a hard-partying, heavy-drinking, substance-abusing Texas bad boy. He wasn't just throwing caution to the wind, he was tossing it into the air and whacking it with a Louisville Slugger. Hubbard continued on this breakneck course for years. "There was a downhill slope I was on," he recalls, "and it was getting to the point that I was digging myself a hole and couldn't quit digging. Throughout my whole twenties and thirties, I would pretty much just drink and plot."

It got to the point that just keeping it together was a day-to-day crapshoot. Whether or not he realized it himself at the time, much less accepted the fact, Hubbard's whole life, already teetering on the brink, could have toppled over in the direction of self-destruction. Then a funny thing happened on the road to oblivion: Hubbard had a chance encounter with someone who'd been barreling down that road himself, but had miraculously bailed out before shooting the falls.

Hubbard ran into the Texas blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan shortly before his tragic death. Although not close friends, the Dallas Oak Cliff boys had crossed paths a few times, had even partied together. There was an undeniable kinship. "Stevie was the first guy I knew who had gotten sober," Hubbard says, "he had about fourteen months at the time. And he had gotten clean and sober and he didn't turn into, you know, a square. He still had his edge-he was still doing it. I'd seen some other people, you know, and I had this fear that if I quit doing this I'd turn into this doofus, square, unhip, I don't know what.

"But he took the time to sit down and talk to me. He shared his experiences and just told me what it had been like, what had happened, and what it was like for him now. He just said that once he got sober, it was like he took off the boxing gloves and he could play. He said once he did that he could really play, he could hear, he took the cotton out of his ears. So that just gave me hope that not only could I quit living like I was living, but there was a chance to be even more creative. And so that was very important to me that he took the time to talk to me."

After taking his last drink in 1987 on his forty-first birthday, Hubbard rededicated himself to his career and the art of songwriting. His first record clean and sober was the appropriately titled Lost Train of Thought. Reviews were solid. The Associated Press wrote that it signaled Hubbard was poised to claim his place as "one of the leading lights among Texas singer-songwriters." With the much-needed boost in confidence, Hubbard worked vigorously to make up for the time lost.

Three records put out between 1995 and 1999 were all well received by critics and the public. The quality of his work on each album-musically and lyrically-displayed real artistic growth. Hubbard was clearly hitting his stride and developing into one of Texas music's most articulate voices.

The year 2001 was a watershed for Hubbard professionally. After almost a decade kicking about the idea of working together, he finally went into the studio with brilliant producer and guitarist Gurf Morlix, in recent years the go-to guy in the studio for the likes of Lucinda Williams and Robert Earl Keen.

"I'd met Ray eight or ten years earlier through a mutual friend," Morlix says. "I'd seen him play a bunch as far back as 1975 and always liked what he did, but I hadn't kept up with what he'd been doing. This was around the time of his coming out as a songwriter, you know, and I was just blown away by the songs he was writing. I remembered him and thought he was a cool guy and funny and everything, and he was writing these amazing songs so I wanted to work with him. We talked about it a little then, but it didn't happen for a number of years after that. I wanted to work with him from the time I heard those great songs."

The product of their first collaboration, Eternal and Lowdown, is a dark and brooding collection about the search for inner-peace in the face of a world fraught with evil. A stellar effort, the record proved to be another step forward in Hubbard's continuing evolution. Once again critics raved. No Depression magazine called the record Hubbard's "most musically satisfying recording." With the addition of Morlix' production skills and guitar prowess, Hubbard effectively raised the creative bar another notch-and then cleared it with room to spare. As for Morlix, he found himself even further blown away by Hubbard's creative output: "He's deep down in those Delta blues, and has those great spiritual lyrics. I think maybe Bob Dylan is the only person I can think of who is on a similar track. There's a bunch of great songwriters in Texas: a lot of them are rootsy, and a lot of them are poetic, but Ray, he's kind of walking a line that nobody else really is. And I love it."

Last year, the duo paired-up again on Hubbard's most recent record titled Growl. Like Lowdown, the album is dark and ominous, full of spiritual dissonance and moral dilemmas. It's bluesy, too, with a more than subtle bow to a few of Hubbard's all time biggest influences: Mance Lipscomb, Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, and Freddy King, each of whom he had the chance to see perform in Dallas back in the day. The Dallas Morning News calls the record "intoxicating." Guitar Player magazine has high praise for the recordings' "exquisite vignettes of life's darker side."

The record further solidified Hubbard's reputation as one of the preeminent tunesmiths in the state of Texas. If he had any lingering doubts at all about truly mastering his craft, he could now put them to rest. "I'm grateful that I've learned that songwriting is a mysterious process," he says, "but it's also…it's like songwriting is inspiration plus craft. Inspiration, like you get what they call the great ah-ha. Ah-ha! That's a great idea for a song. You take that inspiration and you apply it to the craft. That means that you can make that idea fit the laws of music. You have to have enough knowledge of guitar, piano, or whatever to know the form of the song and to take that idea to the type of song you want it to be.

"Then the other thing is I've learned that the craft can trigger the inspiration. I'll give you an example from the album I did, Crusades of the Restless Knights. The way I even got that is I had the record deal with Rounder in November, and I called up Lloyd Maines and the musicians and booked the studio time for middle of January. I had the record deal, the producer, the musicians, and the studio so I guess I better write some songs. So each night after Judy (wife) and Lucas (son) would go to bed, I'd go up into this little loft and write. I wrote the whole album except for one, I think I had one of the songs already written, but I know I wrote nine or ten of the songs in that two-month period.

"And that's where I got the bad pun of the title because each night I'd go on this crusade up these stairs on restless nights to find these songs. I knew they were there, and that I wasn't going to have to fear writer's block or anything like that. A lot of times I think that's just laziness. I'd have two or three songs working at a time, working each night from eleven to about three. And, oh, about sometime after Christmas I had 'em done and I just had to go back and tweak 'em just a little bit. So it's really a comfortable feeling to know that inspiration and craft can work together."

Immensely grateful for the uninterrupted roll he has been on for more than a decade now, Hubbard has developed a strong desire to reach out to the next generation of talented Texas songwriters. Notable young stars Pat Green, Cory Morrow, and Slaid Cleaves can already call him a mentor. There are many others who'd relish the chance to learn from the master. One admirer is popular Austin roots artist Patricia Vonne, a riveting performer who pens songs in both English and Spanish. "'Three Days Straight' is one of the best songs I have ever heard," Vonne says. "I admire his talent for writing, especially in a stream of consciousness. I'd love to work with him one day."

So would a lot of people. Not just because he's such a gifted singer-songwriter, but simply because he's such a decent, warm, and engaging fellow. Morlix makes no bones about it: "He's one of my all-time favorite human beings. He's just the greatest guy. Ray makes it all better."

Another member of the RWH admiration society is Austin musician Will Taylor, the man behind the innovative Strings Attached concert series. "It was a true honor to work with Ray," Taylor says of Hubbard, who was one of the first artists he worked with in the series, which is now well into its third year. "Out of all the artists we've worked with, Ray's vibe gave us the most room to do our own thing."

Austin's famous blues patron Clifford Antone, who recognizes talent when he sees it regardless of the genre, has known Hubbard for years. "Ray Wylie Hubbard is not just one of the treasures of Texas music," Antone says. "He's a guy you never get tired of seeing."

Clearly, everybody loves Ray. So, what does the future hold for a man who is so admired and respected and who is absolutely at the top of his game? Well, if life is about the journey, there's little doubt Ray Wylie Hubbard will continue moving forward, seeking out the truth, being thankful for luck, listening to the birds sing, and doing his best to keep on living a fruitful life.

"The thing about right now," he says, "I'm an older guy, but I'm not a nostalgia act. I'll still do '"Redneck Mother" but I'm still-hopefully-making records and writing songs that are valid, and I'm still moving up. Which is a good place for me to be. I'm very comfortable right now with where I am. I'm not wealthy, but I am prosperous, as I'm a prosperous songwriter. It doesn't mean I have a red Jaguar, I still have my funky, old van, but I can write songs and, you know, pay the bills-most months. I'm very happy right now."

Patrick Cosgrove is an Austin freelancer who plans to take a stab at songwriting once he masters the three most important chords for schmaltzy, tears-in-your-beer country tunes. When that time comes, he also hopes to write with Hubbard. You may e-mail Patrick at pcosgrove@goodlifemag.com.