From playing music on a tailgate, to practicing in a garage, to setting up this current band, Cody Johnson is as close to an overnight success as one can get in this business. Especially considering he’s still a young man who is taking Texas like a tornado, except that, unlike a tornado, he’s leaving only good times in his wake.

Cody recently released “Cowboy Like Me,” a CD with 13-track project filled with real country songs. It had to be that way, because Cody himself is a real, working cowboy, and it’s the only life he has known. In fact, he said, the title song was written toward the end of the project, and had to be a song to epitomize his life. He and co-writer David Lee sat down to write, he said, when he told David “I want the album to be about me, my life, who I am.” “And who would that be?” David asked him. “You know, a cowboy like me. And the song is so personal and descriptive, it is who I am.”

Yet, it isn’t the first release off the CD. “Dance Her Home,” is currently high on the Texas music charts.

It ain’t Cody’s first rodeo, though. His “Pray For Rain” hit the Texas charts, and there were several others after that, including an usual recording — unusual in that it was a song he didn’t write himself, but covered a Zane Williams’ song, “Ride With Me.”

Johnson cut his musical roots on true country, listening to Gene Watson, Farron Young, Alan Jackson, and others of the ilk. Now, he believes his music is somewhere around that of George Strait and Garth Brooks. A highlight of this career, he said, was when Moe Bandy “actually walked up to me in Vegas and said, ‘Thank you for playing real country music.’”

“It’s nice not singing about trucks and tailgates and cut-off T-shirts. It’s in the real emotions that country brings out,” Cody said. “When George (Jones) sang ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today,’ you believe it.”

He was rocking along, the band playing all over Texas, when Nashville’s Tim DuBois approached him about a publishing deal, Johnson related. He was, by then, already working with Howie Edelman, and when the deal was done, they also had Trent Willmon at the gate to produce this new project.

Talking with Cody make one realize that there’s no overblown ego going on inside that spirit of his, and when asked how he maintained his down-to-earth personality, he simply replied, “There’s a fine line between confidence and cockiness.” He learned that, originally, he said in the rodeo arena. “Rodeo instilled something in me. You check your ego every day and, when you do, you’ll be OK downin the arena. I use that same mentality toward my shows.”

This thunder bolt wore a performer’s jacket he had just earned at the Colorado hugh Music Fest, having Music fest. He’s on the line-ups at Larry Joe Taylor Fest in April, and Texas Thunder in May. He’s got a return gig at Billy Bob’s Texas, still the largest dance hall in Texas, and playing Gruene Hall and one of the oldest dance hall in the Lone Start State, the Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos, which was Tuesday night home to George Strait for two years in Strait’s earliest years. Cody Johnson is being featured on the syndicated music series “Troubadour TX.”

Until the past few years, Cody said he worked for six years with the Texas Department of Corrections, all while rodeoing and playing music. “I spent a little time riding horses while working those guys (inmate) in the field. Then, I met Brandi, who was to become my wife, and Howie, who gave me the avenue into full-time music.  “He opened the doors and leveled with me on what he expected out of me, and we shook hands and been thick as thieves ever since.” After Cody and Brandi married, “she quit school and took two jobs, and I kept pouring money into the business, and she stuck with me in spite of all the time apart. I told her Christmas 2012, ‘Quit your job.’ She did, and she is completing her schooling online. I got my friend back. Then  last year, I bought her a truck.”

All this growth and changes has, in Cody’s words, “been surreal. It’s not the fame, not the ego, it’s because I didn’t expect it. In the last six months, the gravity of it hit me. We (the band and Brandi) were working so hard we couldn’t see it coming. We were too close to the scene sometimes. That’s how it can be, and then you pull your head up and see that’s it’s working. And knowing I have a wife who loves me, whether I succeed or not, and a manager who believes in me, well, it couldn’t get any better.”

For more pix, click here: