It was a cold, windy Tuesday when Jesse Cornett came to play in Sapulpa, but looking at him, you’d never know it.
The 2008 Sapulpa graduate sat in a green chair sporting a mullet, jean jacket, and cowboy hat. And sunglasses. At 9:00 pm. Indoors.
He’s completely comfortable, despite the frigid temperatures outside the office. But then, Cornett is used to the cold weather. Currently living in Colorado, he came to Sapulpa when he was a teenager from one of the few states more associated with the wild west than ours: Wyoming.
“From the time I was three years old, I wanted to be a cowboy,” he said. “My great-grandfather was a cowboy, and he was a world-ranked hunter.”
Cornett’s great-grandfather—whom he never named—used to own a famous hotel in Cody, Wyoming called The Irma. And on the walls in his hotel were mounts of Big Horn sheep from “every corner of the globe,” he said. It was with his great-grandfather that he first got a taste of what life was like as a cowboy, and he fell in love with it.
Unsurprisingly, Cornett was also drawn to some of the biggest names in country music at the time, especially an up-and-coming world sensation named Garth Brooks.
“He was just kind of coming up,” he said. “He had ‘Thunder Rolls,’ and ‘Rodeo,’ but one of my favorite songs of all time was, ‘Against the Grain.’ I was just captivated by it, and by the time I was 5 or 6, I knew I wanted to play the guitar and I knew I wanted to play music.”
Music had a steady relationship with the Cornett family. Wyoming, like Oklahoma, has a lot of distance between some of its towns. On these regular road trips, it wasn’t uncommon for the family listen to music. “We listened to everything from Billy Squier to Stevie Ray Vaughan to ZZ Top,” he said. “My mom had this big, double-wide suitcase that was just full of these awesome cassette tapes. We would just pop them in, one after another, and rewind them with a pencil.”
It was on those road trips that Cornett learned to love music deeply. “We traveled quite a bit as a kid and in that traveling and just found a love for the radio and love for the music and just how you can kind of create your own thing.”
For his 10th birthday, his grandmother bought him his first guitar. “I was just kind of banging on it, I didn’t know what I was doing. Then a couple people showed me some chords, and I’d read a couple books, and I was trying to figure out how to make it sound good. And then I got a couple of years of guitar lessons and then I think I played my first professional show at the age of 14.”
That “professional show” was actually a family reunion at the Silver Dollar Bar in Cody, Wyoming, but it’s where he got his first taste of the traveling music persona.
“We had a couple of musicians in the family already that were hard rock musicians and they were hardly ever around,” he said. “I just remember them always being on the road or on tour.”
Jesse Cornett decided that somehow, he’d make a life out of doing the things he loved, but it wouldn’t keep him in Sapulpa. “Right after I graduated, I moved up to Cody Wyoming and started chasing, you know, like being a cowboy.”
He said it was a good life, but not an easy way to make a living. “Making your living with a horse between your legs, riding and fixing fence, doctorin’ cattle, whatever needed to be done.”
“It taught me a lot about the type of person I wanted to be. It’s a lot like being a father: you gotta show up every day, those animals depend on you. And those employers depend on you, because it’s a tight-knit group, you know.”
As if you couldn’t get any more into the cowboy life just bustin’ broncs at a ranch, Jesse Cornett decided to take it up a notch: he joined the rodeo circuit.
“I was a professional bull rider from about 2009 to 2014 or 2015. I loved it. The sport teaches you grit.”
He compared being a bull rider to the life he now lives as a traveling musician. “The road is just as hard. You find yourself alone a lot. But, you can get stacked up in the dirt pretty hard and wonder if you have the guts to keep going. It taught me to toughen up a bit more. Tomorrow’s a new day. I’ll get him the next time.”
Bull-riding is a young man’s game, but Cornett also says that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it, “as soon as you can understand it and do it good, something clicks in your mind, and it’s cool and it’s fun.”
Cornett recalled with that switch flipped for him: “You’re the kind of guy that you show up and people are like, ‘I shouldn’t even enter it, because he’s gonna come win it.'” But he warned that a hot streak can be over just as quickly: “Just as fast as that can happen. That light switch will turn off.”
The light didn’t just switch off for Cornett—the bulb shattered to pieces.
“I got a bull called ‘Walk in the Park,'” he said. “I was feeling pretty good about it, but when he jumped out there he turned back and jerked me down, and I broke the left side of my face. My face is all swollen shut.”
Funnily enough, his streak would come to a real end just a day or so later, in Woodward Oklahoma. “I got on this bull called ‘Unleashed,’ he took me down and broke my arm.”
That was the last time he rode a bull for awhile, but a silver lining appeared, and he began to have more success as a musician.. “I was just playing acoustically at these little bars here and there—any place that helped me and I’d charge just a couple hundred bucks and free drinks, you know. And that’s kind of how I started going back and forth and then I was like well, that’s pretty easy and I liked doing that.”
Slowly, he began to put together a band, but none of them seemed to stick around very long. Finally, a friend told him, “You should call yourselves Jesse Cornett and the Revolvers, because it’s just a revolving door.”
The name stuck.
Fast forward to 2022 and Jesse Cornett is on his way to Florida to play his winter shows in warmer weather. Through a series of circumstances, he ends up playing at the Route 66 Christmas Chute in a windy 40-degree night. He says he never meant to be gone as long as he was. “Super, super happy to be back. It’s a beautiful town.”
His music is a nice mix of Red Dirt Country and some piece of 90s Twang Country that’s hard to miss. He calls himself a storyteller. “It just lights a fire under me a little bit more, writing a storyteller song that actually happened.”
He says that kind of music is what makes music an intentional, interactive experience.
“The whole world—the way people listen to music has completely changed,” he said. “It’s such a passive thing. You listen to music on your way to work and while you’re at work, but you don’t really listen to it.
“That’s something that Whiskey Myers and Cody Johnson and a few other artists have really capitalized on—having a really good product, and really good lyrics to go with that, and getting people to listen.”
He says it’s that desire to make music that people want to listen to that keeps him going.
“If I didn’t play music, I would lose my mind. If I just gave it up, I’d be haunted for the rest of my life. Like, what if my next song that I put out, what if it pops? The game has totally changed. I like to play live shows and get as many live shows as I can, but I see where I can blow up on TikTok with the right following. I can’t quite figure it out.”
When he’s not holding a guitar, you can find Jesse with a rod and reel in his hand. “That’s kind of what took me down to Florida,” he said. “I want to go catch big fish. I’ve been doing some of it. Nothing gargantuan.”
But, if Cornett has taught us anything, it’s that in life, in music, or in fishing the advice is the same. “Just don’t give up.”
You can find out more about Jesse Cornett and the Revolvers or hear their music at jessecornett.com
