There are songs that slip through the cracks—songs that never climb to the top of the charts, never get the radio play they deserve, but somehow end up engraving themselves on the souls of a select few. When I look back at the patchwork of my own life, with its fields of memory stretched wide under the Dutch sky, there’s one in particular that keeps coming back to me: Willis Alan Ramsey’s 1972 gem “Northeast Texas Women.”
I still remember the first time I heard it. It must have been 1978, at a disused American army barracks just outside Helmond, of all places—a far cry from the piney woods of Texas that Ramsey wrote about. A friend of mine, Peter Vervoort, had come back from a six-month adventure in Oklahoma, his suitcase stuffed not with souvenirs but with rare American LPs. We’d built ourselves a makeshift fire out back, listening to the crackle of wood on a cool Dutch evening, when he dropped a weathered vinyl onto my father’s old gramophone.
The album cover was a curious thing—Willis Alan Ramsey holding his guitar, looking almost bashful. I didn’t know what to expect. The needle dropped, and out came this loping, gentle groove, fingerpicked and meandering. And then Ramsey started to sing, and everything changed:
“I got a woman, she’s better than most
She don’t make me feel like a wanted ghost
I’m crazy ‘bout a Northeast Texas woman”
The words drifted out over the smoke and sodden grass, and I felt something I can only describe as homesickness for a place I’d never seen. It was a Tuesday night in Brabant, half a world away from cow towns and oil rigs, but suddenly I was there, riding dusty roads with a sweetheart beside me, the light slanting golden over cotton fields.
What makes “Northeast Texas Women” such a magical song—such a rare, secret passage for those who find it—is its plainspoken honesty. Ramsey wasn’t a Nashville hitmaker. He was a poet of the back roads, a kid with a knack for rolling ordinary life into something both nostalgic and immediate. In the way he sings—soft, slightly frayed, almost like he’s sharing a joke with only you—there’s a sense of gratitude springing up through hardship, love surviving the daily grind. It’s that gentle wit:
“I got a good woman, she don’t talk back
She does what I ask, and that’s a fact
I’m crazy ‘bout a Northeast Texas woman”
You hear lines like that and expect bravado, but instead Ramsey’s voice lifts, self-effacing, almost tender. There’s no swagger here—just the grateful amazement of a man who knows he’s lucked out in love.
Over the years, the song became a talisman for me. I wasn’t a Texas man. I was a Dutch country singer struggling to find my own voice in a place where country music still felt like an exotic language, a hidden tongue spoken after midnight on scratchy LPs. But “Northeast Texas Women” became something I could share. When my first daughter was born, when my father died, when the quiet stretched long between performances, I’d put it on. The song was never quite about Texas anymore—it was about the universal hush of gratitude, the thrill of finding warmth where you didn’t expect it.
Let me tell you: you don’t need to know Texas pine from Brabant beech to understand that feeling. We all carry inside us the hope of finding someone who sees straight through our tough hides to the tender heart beneath; someone who brings coffee in the morning, who waits up when we’re late, who smiles when we shuffle through the door smelling of smoke and rain.
What I love most about Ramsey’s song is the way it refuses the grand gesture. The woman he’s praising isn’t a Hollywood beauty queen, not some idealized dream girl—she’s real, maybe even “mean as she can be,” but loyal, present, irreplaceable. That’s a truth as old as country music itself, and as poignant in Helmond as in Henderson County.
“I’m crazy ‘bout a Northeast Texas woman
I’m crazy ‘bout a Northeast Texas gal
She’s long and tall, she’s mean as she can be”
As the years went on, “Northeast Texas Women” stayed with me. Sometimes, I’d play it at the close of a small show in Eindhoven, letting its gentle roll wash over the crowd. Occasionally, someone in the audience would recognize the tune, their eyes lighting up—a secret handshake among wanderers and dreamers. More often, they’d just lean in, caught by the intimacy, the rare gift of music to make strangers feel like a family for three sweet minutes.
Back in 2019, I tracked down a mint copy of Ramsey’s record at a vinyl fair near Utrecht. The seller, an old Londoner with a cowboy hat askew, grinned as he handed it over. “Not many know that one,” he said, “but the ones who do—it never leaves them.” I nodded, thinking of firesides, daughter’s hands, and long walks through Dutch fog.
And maybe that’s the strange alchemy of Ramsey’s masterpiece—it’s for the people who look for wonder in the quiet places. It’s a song that didn’t conquer the world the way it should have, but found its way home to those who needed it most. Even now, so many years after its release, it reminds me that no matter how far a man might wander from where he started, love—plain and unassuming as a fencepost in a misty field—will always call him home.
I owe a debt to Willis Alan Ramsey, and to that smoky night so long ago, when the music of Northeast Texas and the dreams of a Dutch country boy met and became one thing. Put “Northeast Texas Women” on, listen close, and I guarantee you’ll find something you didn’t know you’d lost.
With love and gratitude,
Kroes den Bock