All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture)

All Over the Map

Michael Corcoran

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Number Seventeen Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2005

Corcoran, Michael Joseph, 1955– All over the map : true heroes of Texas music / Michael Corcoran.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 0-292-70955-2 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-292-70976-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Musicians—Texas—Biography. 2. Music—Texas—History and criticism. I. Title. ml394.c66 2005 781.64'092'2764—dc22 2005007625

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/ bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ix East Texas/Houston

SOUL STIRRERS In Search of Rebert Harris

trinity

2

port arthur

6

freestone county

10

orange

17

THE GETO BOYS AND DJ SCREW Where the Dirty South Began

houston

23

ARCHIE BELL AND THE DRELLS ‘‘Hey, everybody! That’s me’’

houston

27

FLOYD TILLMAN Honky-tonk Triple Threat

houston

30

oak cliff

34

mansfield

39

HARRY CHOATES Death in a Jail Cell WASHINGTON PHILLIPS Lift Him Up, That’s All CLARENCE ‘‘GATEMOUTH’’ BROWN At the Crossroads

Dallas Area T-BONE WALKER Architect of Electric Blues ELLA MAE MORSE ‘‘You sing like a black girl’’

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SLY STONE The Funk Grows in Texas ERNEST TUBB The Original E.T. ARIZONA DRANES The Gospel Beat FREDDIE KING The Stinging Leads Heard ’cross the Atlantic RONNIE DAWSON The Blond Bomber Waco Area BILLY JOE SHAVER ‘‘The second time I done it on my own’’ BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON The Soul of a Man CINDY WALKER The First Lady of Texas Song WILLIE NELSON The Red-Headed Stranger at 70

denton

42

crisp

45

greenville

48

gilmer

51

waxahachie

55

waco

60

marlin

67

mexia

74

abbott

79

Austin STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN Straight from the Heart

86

BLAZE FOLEY Death of a Songwriter

91

BUTTHOLE SURFERS Showing Worm Movies

98

RAY WYLIE HUBBARD From Rednecks to Rilke

103

TOWNES VAN ZANDT Death on New Year’s Day

107

DON WALSER Last of the Singing Cowboys

110

Contents

vii

ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO Hands of the Son

113

San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley STEVE JORDAN The Invisible Genius san antonio

120

DOUG SAHM The Genre Conqueror

san antonio

127

SELENA AND LYDIA MENDOZA The First and Last Queens of Tejano corpus christi, san antonio

131

West Texas WAYLON JENNINGS An Outlaw at Rest THE CHUCK WAGON GANG Higher Power through Harmony BOBBY FULLER Rock ’n’ Roll Mystery

littlefield

138

lubbock

142

el paso

145

Bonus Tracks THE NEW SINCERITY Austin in the Eighties

150

THE TEXAS TOP 40 Michael Corcoran’s List of the Best Texas Recordings Ever

157

THE DEAD CLUBS OF THE LIVE MUSIC CAPITAL

161

TWENTY-FIVE ESSENTIAL TEXAS MUSIC CDS

164

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

169

INDEX OF NAMES

171

Photo section follows page 16

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ix

PREFACE

o state is more musical than Texas, whose very geography seems to hum. Almost every city reminds you of a song, and so it’s easy to break into a medley of ‘‘San Antonio Rose,’’ ‘‘El Paso,’’ ‘‘Streets of Laredo,’’ ‘‘Amarillo by Morning,’’ ‘‘Galveston,’’ and ‘‘La Grange’’ while checking out the ol’ Rand McNally. Some towns, meanwhile, remind you of the great musicians who couldn’t wait to get out. Port Arthur conjures visions of Janis Joplin freaking out the rednecks, and it’s impossible to see Wink on a map without imagining Roy Orbison slipping on his first pair of shades or Corsicana without hearing Lefty Frizzell’s pure honky-tonk tenor cutting through the air of a rowdy roadhouse. Centerville? That’s where the great gritty blues giant Sam ‘‘Lightnin’’’ Hopkins is from. Tiny Winnie, meanwhile, is where a barber turned producer named Huey P. Meaux auditioned Beaumont’s great Barbara Lynn between haircuts. The wide-open spaces of rural Texas are reminiscent of what the best Lone Star songwriters, from Cindy Walker to Steve Earle to Jack Rhodes to Leon Payne to T-Bone Burnett, have chosen to leave out of their songs. A myth born of John Wayne movies and stoked by big hair, big cars, and loud proclamations has been made real by musical pioneers. Indeed, Texas is the biggest and the boldest when it comes to its songs and sounds. Texans were the first to record a country tune (Amarillo’s Eck Robertson in 1922), the first to play electric guitar on a jazz record (Eddie Durham of San Marcos) and in a country band (Bob Dunn of Fort Worth’s Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies), the first to explore ‘‘free jazz,’’ as Fort Worth alto sax player Ornette Coleman’s idiosyncratic experimentations were dubbed in the late fifties.

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All Over the Map

The first national recording stars of blues and country were Texans. Before he froze to death on a Chicago street in 1929, Wortham’s Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded nearly one hundred country blues tunes for Paramount Records. Vernon Dalhart, who took his name from two Texas towns he visited in his youth, was the first country singer to sell a million records, with ‘‘The Prisoner’s Song’’ b/w ‘‘The Wreck of the Old ’97’’ in 1925. Lubbock’s Buddy Holly and the Crickets were the first self-contained rock combo, writing, producing, and playing on their albums and inspiring a British Invasion a few years later. (The Beatles’ name was in homage to the Crickets). Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours plugged in and took the honky-tonk sound nationwide with ‘‘Walkin’ the Floor over You’’ in 1941. The country’s first blues guitar hero was T-Bone Walker of Oak Cliff; its first great electric jazz guitarist was Dallas native Charlie Christian. In the gospel field, a trinity of Texans—Blind Willie Johnson, Washington Phillips, and Arizona Dranes—were putting religious lyrics to blues progressions years before ‘‘the Father of Gospel,’’ Thomas A. Dorsey, first mixed spiritual lyrics with a sinful rhythm on 1928’s ‘‘If You See My Savior.’’ Both boogie-woogie piano, originally known as the ‘‘fast Texas’’ style, and psychedelic rock had roots in the Lone Star State. George W. and Hersal Thomas, the brothers of blues great Sippie Wallace, laid the blueprint for boogie-woogie, while Austin’s 13th Floor Elevators were making acid rock back when lsd was still legal. Would bebop have happened when it did if sax player Henry ‘‘Buster’’ Smith hadn’t been lured from Dallas to Kansas City in 1925 to join the Blue Devils? You may have heard of Smith’s protégé: a kid named Charlie Parker. And while New Orleans piano player Jelly Roll Morton is credited as being the father of jazz, there’s no denying that Scott Joplin of Texarkana provided the template with his syncopated ragtime compositions in the late nineteenth century. Texas is where music is made for dancing, where the exuberant crowds have coaxed musicians to play louder, first out of necessity and later because the added power expanded the boundaries. Money, independence, big noise, and dust—that’s Texas, a land of opportunity within the land of opportunity. It’s where the South ends and the West begins, and yet Texas remains independent of those regions. Texas is a state of immigrants, with the melting pot stirred to the sounds of Cajun waltzes, polkas, honky-tonk, conjunto, funk, and jazz. The Hybrid State, Texas is where new variations were created when Hispanics played German music, blacks played country, farm boys played big-band jazz, and everyone played the blues.

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Of course, Texas is not the only state that can boast incredible musical heroes. Mississippi had the Delta blues and Elvis Presley. Louisiana’s incredible musical heritage includes everyone from Louis Armstrong to Jerry Lee Lewis to Leadbelly (who, it should be noted, moved to Texas as a young man). Even Minnesota could warrant its own book of true heroes, with chapters on such divergent talents as Bob Dylan, Prince, and the Replacements. But Texas stands out for its sheer number of musical pioneers, spanning several genres. The range is spectacular, and it seems that for every superstar like Ray Charles there’s a Texan like Charles Brown of Bay City, who showed him the way. How can a book chronicling ‘‘True Heroes of Texas Music’’ not include chapters on Buddy Holly, Bob Wills, Roky Erickson, and Lefty Frizzell? Where’s Henry ‘‘Ragtime Texas’’ Thomas, the songster whose ‘‘Bulldoze Blues’’ was the basis for Canned Heat’s smash ‘‘Goin’ Up the Country’’? Where’s nascent blues diva Victoria Spivey or sensational country swing band Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies? And where are the jazz artists—Jack Teagarden of Vernon, Dallas’s David ‘‘Fathead’’ Newman, or Arnett Cobb and Eddie ‘‘Cleanhead’’ Vinson of Houston? There’s no way this book can be complete and still be portable. The general focus here is on underappreciated artists, pioneers who haven’t fully received their due. No one can put Holly or Wills in that group. But sometimes even big names are underrated, which is why you’ll find chapters on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Selena, two artists whose talents transcend nostalgic sugarcoating. Where dying young is a proven career booster, it also ends the creative process when there’s so much more to come. In the cases of Vaughan and Selena, their deaths were especially tragic because their greatest gift was what they could do on a stage. You can listen to the records, but it’s not the same. The chapters on SRV and the Butthole Surfers, both originally published in the Austin Chronicle in 1986, were the start of this book, although I didn’t know it at the time. When I first moved to Austin, from Honolulu, I had never even heard of Ella Mae Morse or Blind Willie Johnson or Billy Joe Shaver. I pronounced Roky Erickson’s first name with a long ‘‘o’’ and didn’t know that Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas of ‘‘She’s about a Mover’’ were one and the same. But I fell in love with Austin’s music scene the first night in town. It was

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April 1, 1984, and I went out for a walk, to check out my new South Austin neighborhood. I happened upon the Continental Club, where a handwritten sign said the Butthole Surfers were playing. Cover was three dollars. I wasn’t prepared for the psychedelic juggernaut of a Butthole Surfers set. With twin drummers pounding out primitive jungle beats, while singer Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Leary, the Jagger/Richards of musical debauchery, raged menacingly all over the stage, the music pinned me to the wall for over an hour. My first week in Austin, I saw the great blues belter Lou Ann Barton, Tejano dance band Little Joe y Johnny y La Familia, hardcore punk band the Offenders, and the ‘‘King of White Trash,’’ Dino Lee. I met people like Keith Ferguson, the former Fabulous T-Bird bassist who filed his albums under three categories: Mexican, Negro, and Other. I ran into kids like Charlie and Will Sexton, who had been practically raised in live music venues. Since I grew up on military bases and then spent my young adulthood in the cover band wasteland of Oahu, I had never lived in a place where music figured so heavily in the quality of life equation. I had found true paradise. I started covering music for the Austin Chronicle and wrote a gossip column called ‘‘Don’t You Start Me Talking,’’ which gleefully butchered local music sacred cows. One diatribe disguised as a column announced ‘‘Austin Music Sucks,’’ a reaction to the local chauvinism and its attendant selfimportance. In 1985, after my first year in town, readers of the Chronicle voted me ‘‘The Worst Thing to Happen to Austin Music.’’ That’s cool. I dish. I take. After four years in ‘‘the velvet rut,’’ I took off for San Francisco, the home of many a bored ex-Austinite, then settled in Chicago, where love took me, and the char dogs from the Wiener Circle kept me, for just over three years. But I kept coming back to Texas, not missing a single South by Southwest music festival. I took any writing assignment that would take me to Texas, even a Spin cover story on Bon Jovi. I moved back for good in 1992, taking a job as country music critic at the Dallas Morning News. Oh, how the mainstream country music fans hated me (and how the morning call-in shows loved that). I dismissed Brooks and Dunn as ‘‘Loggins and Oates,’’ wrote that Billy Ray Cyrus looked like Mel Gibson with a ferret crawling up the back of his neck, referred to Mary Chapin Carpenter as ‘‘Mary Blatant Carpetbagger.’’ Country radio hosts called me ‘‘Michael Cockroach.’’ And then it got nasty. Given the state of mainstream country music at the time, I jumped at the

Preface

xiii

chance to turn historian, writing about Lefty Frizzell and Willie Nelson and Ray Price. I mean, who would you rather research: Diamond Rio or Ernest Tubb? There was a collective exhale from the kicker crowd when I moved into the pop music critic chair. With a broader range of styles to cover, my ears started endorsing the theory that Texas music just hits harder and resonates deeper than the sounds from elsewhere. On my watch, the Geto Boys were the ultimate gangsta rappers and Stevie Ray Vaughan the best blues guitarist ever. Ronnie Dawson blew all the other vintage rockers away, and Junior Brown made pretenders out of all the other honky-tonk throwbacks. In 1995 I returned to where my affinity for Texas music began, taking a job as music critic for the Austin American-Statesman. The bulk of this book comes from pieces that ran in the Statesman. Some took several weeks to research and write. (And rewrite.) Others, such as the obits on Floyd Tillman and Townes Van Zandt, were done on deadline in an afternoon and later polished. Some of these chapters were based on interviews with dozens of sources. Others came solely from personal experience or were meditations on a beloved subject. In revisiting these newspaper articles and finessing them into bookworthy form, I started thinking about just how much my interests have shifted since my days as a caustic gossip columnist for an alternative weekly. Back then a big day was getting off a zinger, like comparing the lyrics ‘‘I wanna go home with the armadillo’’ with a certain famous singer’s dating habits. Nowadays, my favorite part of the job is driving to small Texas towns and knocking on doors in old neighborhoods looking for people who knew this long-gone blind gospel singer or that old street-corner songster. You just get bit by the bug, is how it happens. For me, the obsessed rock ’n’ roll detective side started, in earnest, while researching a story on Rebert Harris, the original lead singer for the Soul Stirrers. It was 2000, and I was amazed to discover, while reading liner notes on a new gospel compilation, that the man who practically invented the gospel quartet style (and therefore its offsprings, soul music and doo-wop) was still alive, living in Chicago. I had been almost sure he was dead. I flew into action. I just had to track down Sam Cooke’s mentor. But two hours of phone calls, to anyone resembling a gospel music authority, did not yield a contact to Mr. Harris, who was eighty-three at the time. I gave 4-1-1 a shot and was stunned when the operator read back a phone number for a Rebert Harris of Chicago. ‘‘Is this the home of Rebert Harris?’’ I asked anxiously when a woman picked up the phone. ‘‘Rebert Harris of the Soul Stirrers?’’ Yes, she said

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All Over the Map

again. I told her I was writing a story about the legendary gospel quartet and I wondered if I could speak to Mr. Harris. ‘‘Re-bert!’’ she yelled as my temples pulsed. ‘‘You can only talk to him for a minute,’’ she told me. ‘‘He’s been sick.’’ I talked to the legend briefly that afternoon, then called some of my friends. ‘‘I’m going up to Chicago to interview Rebert Harris!’’ I told them, unable to contain myself. ‘‘Who?’’ they all asked. ‘‘Who?’’ The word that launched this book. Come along as we drive from East Texas to Houston and on up i-45 to Dallas, then down i-35 to the Waco area, then Austin, then San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, before ending our journey in West Texas. Rather than divide these profiles according to musical styles or arrange them in chronological order, it made more sense to create a musical road trip, a waltz across Texas.

All Over the Map

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East Texas/Houston

2

SOUL STIRRERS In Search of Rebert Harris

here are certain voices you can’t forget hearing for the first time: Aretha Franklin, George Jones, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra. In my case add Rebert H. Harris. Before I heard R. H. Harris for the first time on Rhino’s Jubilation! compilation about ten years ago, the only thing I knew about the Soul Stirrers was that they were the group Sam Cooke sang in before he went on to become an r&b superstar. But Harris’s elastic vocals and instinctive phrasing planted the seeds. Cooke’s been called ‘‘the man who invented soul,’’ but if he were still alive he’d have to acknowledge the influence of ol’ ‘‘Pop’’ Harris. That his New York Times obituary ran September 9, 2000, six days after he passed away at age eighty-four, attests to the obscurity that shaded Harris’s existence. That two of the Stirrers’ names were misspelled and Harris was described as a ‘‘soul singer’’ in the Times headline (a designation that could’ve killed the gospel purist if his heart hadn’t already given out) proves that this musical pioneer has never gotten the glory he deserved. In the thirties, the Soul Stirrers provided the blueprint for doo-wop, as well as such Motown groups as the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Four Tops. The Stirrers revolutionized gospel when they added a second lead singer, a fifth member of the quartet, so the four-part harmony wouldn’t be disturbed as the two leads took turns wailing. ‘‘Most everybody out there singing has got a bit of me snuck up in them,’’ Harris told Anthony Heilbut, who wrote the essential reference book The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. Harris also liked to remark that most of the people imitating him didn’t even know his name. This lack of recognition bothered Harris to the point that he would often overcompensate by making outlandish claims. In a 1987 interview with the

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Soul Stirrers

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Texas Music Museum, Harris took credit for inventing the falsetto and later teaching the style to Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, writing the first true gospel song (at age seven), inspiring vocal arrangements by Duke Ellington, and inadvertently teaching Tex Ritter how to yodel. There could’ve been truthful nuggets in all that, but Harris’s boasts stretched thin over the course of the hour-long interview. There’s really no graceful way to make up for fifty years of being overlooked. Although he claims that his later groups—the Christland Singers, the Gospel Paraders, and the Masonic Quintet—‘‘ascended the heights of popularity,’’ Harris could never match the fervor he created with the Stirrers. After leaving the group in 1950, he focused on his role as president of the National Quartet Association and worked for a florist to help support his first wife, ex–Golden Harps singer Jeanette Harris, and their four children. Gospel scholars, meanwhile, continued to hoist R. H. Harris as a true innovator. ‘‘His was a vocal sound never before heard in gospel—nor has it been heard since,’’ wrote Horace Clarence Boyer in How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel. Boyer, a singer himself, suggests that Harris’s unique style comes from a choice ‘‘to place his voice between the head and the chest, so he could call on the power of his lower voice, as well as the falsetto, in which he could essay his high range, but without the opera singer sound.’’ Harris claimed to have no musical influences besides that which he found in the trees and fields of his family’s farm outside Trinity, eighty miles northeast of Houston. ‘‘The falsetto sound that traveled from gospel to soul to the Beatles began as a Texas birdsong mimicked by a latter-day Mozart,’’ wrote Heilbut, who also produced a Harris tribute program in Chicago in 1990 called ‘‘The Father of Them All.’’ Despite his miss with the masses, gospelheads know all about the prematurely bald dynamo who quit the Soul Stirrers too soon because he tired of a life on the road overrun with swindlers and jezebels. A sign proclaiming Trinity, population 2,997, as ‘‘a city of prayer’’ welcomes visitors to this spot where the Trinity River feeds into Lake Livingston. But it’s also a prison town, located just fifteen miles from the Huntsville state correctional facilities, the area’s biggest employer. Harris grew up on a farm thirteen miles outside Trinity, in the former Blackland settlement (named after the darkness of its soil, though also fitting the racial makeup of its residents). James and Katie Harris and their nine children (Rebert was number six) lived about three hundred yards from the barbed-wire fence of the Eastham Prison Camp, where convicts would toil in the fields and sing themselves back home with a mixture of spirituals and blues.

4

East Texas/Houston

Rebert said he started arranging his first gospel quartet, with his brother Almo and two cousins, before he even knew what the quartet style was. ‘‘I was seven years old and the closest boy in age was six years older,’’ he said in that 1987 interview. ‘‘I heard the sound of each part in my head and I’d tell each person how to sing it.’’ The group was called the Friendly Four and then the Friendly Gospel Singers when Harris moved to town to start seventh grade at the Trinity Colored High School. After tenth grade, which is as far as the school went, fifteen-year-old Harris attended Mary Allen College in nearby Crockett and weighed a tempting offer to join Silas Roy Crain’s group the Soul Stirrers, who had moved to Houston. At the time the Stirrers were a jubilee group, singing peppy, up-tempo numbers like ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ and ‘‘That Old Time Religion.’’ But as soon as Harris finally committed (Rebert says the year was 1931; gospel historians usually put the year at 1935 or 1936), he helped change the group’s sound to a slower, deeper, more passionate hard gospel style. The group’s influence quickly outgrew the Houston gospel scene, where their acolytes included a couple of farm boy cousins from Cleveland, Texas, named Kylo Turner and Keith Barber, who would go on to create musical magic of their own in the Pilgrim Travelers. Chicago beckoned, but the Soul Stirrers never forgot their Texas roots, and whenever they needed to recruit new singers, they usually found them, including Austin’s James Medlock and Houston’s Paul Foster, in their home state. Harris’s parents were devout churchgoers and choir singers who, in 1911, helped build a church that bears their name (Harris Chapel c.m.e.) on the main road leading into town. It’s still active, one of twenty-three places of worship in Trinity, which is one of those seemingly joyless hamlets where porches are piled like thrift stores and folks sell barbecue and trinkets out of their homes. But on Sunday, the burdens dissipate in feverish church singing. On a recent visit to Trinity, I tracked down several former classmates of Harris, including eighty-four-year-old Hill Perkins, who was a member of Harris’s Friendly Gospel Singers seventy years earlier. Perkins recalls that Harris was always singing, even on the field during football games. ‘‘You could always tell Rebert by the way he walked, kinda slow and smooth,’’ recalled seventy-two-year-old Lois Saldana, who got to know the gospel legend during his yearly visits from Chicago to Trinity. The last time Harris came to Trinity was 1996 to attend the funeral of S. R. Crain, whom everyone in Trinity calls ‘‘Simp’’ for a reason no one can recall. On the way out of town, I visited the Harris Chapel one more time. I sat in my car outside the simple, white, boxlike building and listened to Rebert Harris sing on my cd player. God, what a marvelous voice, so pure and clean

Soul Stirrers

5

and filled with passion. In my mind, the chapel doors outside my window opened to reveal a little boy standing on a chair so he could be as tall as his fellow singers. His voice, like those of the mockingbirds, was effortless in its leap from the soul. Two months earlier, I sat in a rental car, listening to a different version of Rebert Harris’s voice on my cell phone. I had flown up from Austin to interview Harris and was a block away from his home on the West Side of Chicago, when I called to let him know I’d be at his front door within minutes. But Rebert said that on the advice of his lawyer he had changed his mind about doing the interview. ‘‘People are making all this money offa me and I don’t see a cent,’’ he said. ‘‘You could turn around and write a book and I wouldn’t get nothin’.’’ He tried to shake me down for money, saying the Chicago Tribune paid him a little something for an interview (untrue). When it became apparent that he wouldn’t budge, I told him that since I was in the neighborhood, I just wanted to shake his hand and thank him in person for all the great music, then I’d be on my way. ‘‘Well, all right then, I’ll see ya for a minute,’’ he said. His wife, Mary, met me at the door and led me inside a dark, ornately decorated house. A plastic trail on the carpet guided us to a back room, where Harris rose from a chair with much effort and the aid of a walker to shake my hand. He sat back down and gestured for me to sit. A little shell-shocked from our earlier phone conversation, I left my tape recorder in the car, but it didn’t matter. When I asked him how much he taught Cooke, he refuted decades of liner notes and gospel anthologies by saying Cooke already had his own style before joining the Soul Stirrers. Instead of giving useful quotes, Harris showed me fan mail from as far away as Japan and described pictures on his wall. ‘‘Who’s that?’’ I asked, pointing to a velvet painting of a bald man with thick-rimmed glasses. ‘‘That’s Rebert,’’ Mary said. ‘‘It doesn’t look like him, but one of our dear friends from our church [New Faith Baptist] made it for us so it’s special that way.’’ One wall was dominated by family photos. Facing it was a wall containing Soul Stirrers memorabilia, including a newspaper article announcing the group’s 1989 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When I asked him whom I should talk to in Trinity about the Soul Stirrers, Harris said, ‘‘I’m the only one who knows the real story.’’ Maybe all the loose ends of life come together in the sweet by-and-by, as Harris sang in that song that moved me toward fanaticism ten years ago. The truth, whatever it is in this tale of fuzzy memories and furry pride, was buried with Rebert H. Harris the month after I met him. What’s left are his recordings—sweet, powerful music that connects in a deeper way than stories to be told.

6

HARRY CHOATES Death in a Jail Cell

hey remember it like it was yesterday. ‘‘He was shaking uncontrollably, stumbling around his jail cell in a stupor, with a big cut on his forehead,’’ seventy-two-year-old Jimmy Grabowske says as the fiftieth anniversary of his former bandleader’s death approaches. ‘‘He didn’t know us. He didn’t know anything,’’ says Junior Burrow, 76. ‘‘I’d never seen anything like it.’’ Harry Choates (pronounced ‘‘Shotes’’), the music pioneer who updated and popularized the Cajun standard ‘‘Jole Blon,’’ was in bad shape in the Travis County Jail that afternoon of July 17, 1951. Steel guitarist Grabowske and fiddler Burrow, plus drummer Eddie May, went looking for assistance, but only found shrugs. ‘‘We went to one of the guards and told him that Choates needed a doctor, badly, but he said there was nothing he could do about it,’’ Burrow says. The three musicians headed back to the Brown Building, where they performed at 1 p.m. every day on Lady Bird Johnson’s ktbc radio station, looking for anyone who might help. Then they heard the ambulance’s siren, an ominous shriek that signaled the flaming out of another troubled musical genius. Twenty-eight-year-old Choates was declared dead in his cell at 2:45 p.m., soon after his bandmates in Jesse James and His Boys came by with cigarettes and magazines. He had been in jail three days for failure to pay child support. Grabowske dismisses the half-century-old myth that Choates was beaten to death by Austin police, believing the injuries to be self-inflicted in a crazed state. But he wonders if the musician could’ve been saved by proper attention. ‘‘He was an absolute alcoholic suffering from DTs [delirium tre-

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mens]. Why was he left alone in a cell, staggering around and hitting his head on everything?’’ The autopsy by Dr. Harold M. Williams ruled the cause of death as ‘‘fatty metamorphosis of the liver.’’ Chronic interstitial nephritis (kidney deterioration) was listed as a contributing factor. The cut on the forehead was measured at 2.5 centimeters (about an inch), plus Williams noted large irregular contusions over the left hip and upper thigh and several reddish spots on the body. Although Choates was born in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana (on December 26, 1922) and was often billed as being from Lake Charles, he moved with his parents, Clarence and Edolia, to Port Arthur in 1929 and remained primarily a Texan the rest of his life. ‘‘He was a maze of contradictions,’’ says Houston researcher Andrew Brown, who wrote the liner notes for a comprehensive Choates collection for the Bear Family label. Choates was a Cajun who gained fame singing in a language (French) he wasn’t fluent in and rarely used in conversation. ‘‘He was an exceptional jazz guitarist and multi-instrumentalist whose bestknown records portray only a simple folk fiddler,’’ says Brown. ‘‘He was a wild, disreputable character who sang mournful lyrics set off against traditional Cajun melodies.’’ According to Kevin Coffey’s liner notes to the Five Time Loser: 1940– 1951 reissue, Choates’s drinking was already out of control when he was a young man. By the time he was twelve, whiskey was a steady part of his diet. ‘‘I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic because there was never any change in his behavior,’’ says Burrow. ‘‘I guess it’s because he was always drinking.’’ Grabowske agrees. ‘‘He wasn’t obnoxious like some drunks. He just seemed to always be in a good mood.’’ He played with his eyes on fire, often jumping on tables and unleashing his trademark ‘‘Ah-Yeeeeeee!’’ and ‘‘Eh-HA-Ha!’’ yelps. Years after his death, Choates’s exuberant outbursts would give Doug Kershaw an act. Choates became a regional favorite in late 1946, when Houston’s Gold Star label released ‘‘Jole Blon,’’ which had been recorded with a much more subdued arrangement in 1935 by Choates’s fiddle mentor, Leo Soileau. A few months later, the stirred-up Cajun waltz landed at Number 4 on the Billboard country charts. It was the first time many listeners had ever heard Cajun music. Other notable Choates tracks during this period include the fiddle-driven ‘‘Rubber Dolly,’’ ‘‘Poor Hobo,’’ and the classic ‘‘Devil in the Bayou.’’ His band not only played Cajun styles but Western swing and even

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pop standards such as ‘‘All of Me,’’ which Choates would pick on an electric guitar. ‘‘Choates was to Cajun music what Bob Wills was to Western swing,’’ says Grabowske, who’s lived in Austin since he replaced Lefty Nason in the popular Jesse James and His Boys in 1948. ‘‘[Choates] was a master showman. Audiences loved him. He was a featured guest with us, and whenever he’d come on, the energy level would shoot through the roof.’’ One of the last records he cut, at a session in San Antonio six weeks before his death, was ‘‘Austin Special,’’ an ode to his stomping grounds during the final year of his life. The extroverted Choates left his first wife to marry a shy Gulf Coast gal named Helen Daenen in 1945. ‘‘I couldn’t figure that one out,’’ says Grabowske. ‘‘I don’t know anything about their personal life, except that they had a little girl and a little boy. But they seemed such an unlikely pair—this very proper, very reserved, attractive woman and this completely outgoing guy.’’ Indeed, the couple had their differences, separating and reconciling with regularity. Helen first filed for divorce in 1948, but withdrew the suit. In 1950 she joined Harry in Austin, and they had an apartment off North Lamar near Threadgill’s. But she filed for divorce on February 21, 1951, and left her husband for good that time. Choates often slept in the back of Dessau Hall after his wife left. During a career that started in 1947, when he was Charlie Walker’s steel guitarist on kwbu in Corpus Christi, Grabowske has seen his share of tragedies. He was on the bandstand for Johnny Horton’s final show at the Skyline on North Lamar. The ‘‘Honky-tonk Man’’ died the next day, November 5, 1960, in a car accident near Milano. Grabowske also backed a deteriorating Hank Williams at the Skyline, just two weeks before his heart broke for the last time on January 1, 1953. But he’s particularly haunted by Choates’s death. The stumbling and incoherent mess he saw in the jail cell was not the fun-loving Choates he knew. But too often it’s the Choates he remembers. ‘‘I was just twenty-two years old, so you can imagine how hard the whole thing hit me,’’ he says, sitting at his kitchen table in the Allandale neighborhood, thumbing through old pictures of musicians in cowboy hats and hand-painted ties. ‘‘He was something,’’ he says when he comes across a picture of Choates in Bandera, smiling broadly under a white cowboy hat. Choates died penniless and underappreciated, like so many who trade their gift for the daily suicide that booze brings. Beaumont dj Gordon Baxter had to organize a benefit dance to pay for Choates’s burial in Port Arthur’s Calvary Catholic Cemetery. In recent years, however, with Choates’s

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legacy finally acknowledged by more than a handful of researchers, collectors, and musicians, there is a monument next to the grave of a man who didn’t even rate a doctor in July 1951. ‘‘The Godfather of Cajun Music,’’ the marker reads. But an even greater testament to Choates’s influence continues on bandstands. Whenever a Cajun fiddler cocks his head back and lets out an exuberant ‘‘Eh-HA-Ha!’’ he’s communicating with the ghost of Harry Choates.

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WASHINGTON PHILLIPS Lift Him Up, That’s All

he mystery begins the first time you hear the flowing gospel of Washington Phillips, whose entire recorded output consists of eighteen tracks recorded from 1927 to 1929. His sacred porch songs, bathed in a celestial haze of notes from a strange instrument identified as a dolceola, sing out the existence of a higher power, for how could man alone create music for the angels? After just five sessions in a Dallas studio, where he’d been summoned by Columbia Records field recorder Frank Walker, Phillips faded back into obscurity. Ry Cooder led a slight revival in 1971, when he covered Phillips’s ‘‘Denomination Blues,’’ and newer bands, such as Austin’s Knife in the Water, have interpreted moralistic lullabies like ‘‘A Mother’s Last Words to Her Daughter’’ for the art rock crowd. For the most part, however, Phillips is virtually unknown except to a cult of rabid musicologists who revel in the mystique of the man who emerged out of nowhere as a fully formed artist— and just as quickly disappeared. The liner notes to Phillips’s only American cd, I Am Born to Preach the Gospel, on the Yazoo label, provided a biographical explanation in 1991, reporting that the singer was committed to the state mental institution in Austin in 1930 and died there of tuberculosis eight years later. The All-Music Guide, a favorite Internet reference source for critics and fans, repeats the information, taken from the death certificate of a Washington Phillips of Freestone County. The truth, however, is that another man of the same name, from the same place, is the one who made that mesmerizing music. The ‘‘real’’ Washington Phillips returned to the farming life in the black settlement of Simsboro, sixty miles east of Waco, content to play for neighbors and churchgoers until

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1954, when, at age seventy-four, he died of head injuries suffered from a fall down the stairs at the welfare office in nearby Teague. I didn’t know about this case of mistaken identity in November 2002, when I stood over a grave on the old ‘‘colored’’ side of the Austin State Cemetery, thinking that I’d found the final resting place of the man who helped create modern gospel by putting religious lyrics to twelve-bar blues. ‘‘It’s gotta be this one,’’ said Dave Roup, the hospital’s director of maintenance, who led me out to the site where only numbers mark many of the graves. ‘‘We know that Number 1692 died in early December ’38 and Number 1694 died in April ’39.’’ The information on the death certificate, which said a Washington Phillips had been buried at the state cemetery January 2, 1939, placed him in grave Number 1693. Later that day, Roup called with some interesting news. It turned out that the body had been exhumed the day after it was buried and taken back to Teague, near Simsboro, by brother Sim Phillips. A few days later, I was making the same trek. According to the Yazoo liner notes, the parents’ names were Houston Phillips and Emma Titus Phillips, which gave me a place to start. Before I left, I sent a few e-mails to historians of Freestone County (also the home of 1920s blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson) and soon received a phone call from Wilbur Titus of Fairfield, whose grandfather was Emma Titus’s brother. Wilbur had traced the Titus roots from the slave depots of the Caribbean to South Carolina, then to Arkansas and finally to Fairfield, Texas, in 1852. What’s more, three of Sim Phillips’s children were still alive. A volunteer with the Freestone County Genealogical Society, meanwhile, e-mailed me to say she’d found that a Washington Phillips was buried in the Cotton Gin Cemetery near Teague. This search was going too easily, I thought. The main challenge would be to find out how an uneducated black man from rural East Texas managed to get his hands on a dolceola, a strange keyboard instrument produced in Toledo, Ohio, from 1903 to 1908 and sold almost exclusively in the Northern states as a ‘‘miniature grande piano.’’ Phillips’s accompaniment was identified as a dolceola in the sixties by noted British music historian and author Paul Oliver, who said he got the information from a Columbia executive. Through the years, the dolceola (fewer than fifty are known to exist today) has been such a part of Phillips lore that modern Memphis dolceolist Andy Cohen told me, ‘‘Without Phillips, the instrument would be completely forgotten today.’’ Until Cooder tinkered with a dolceola, Phillips was believed to be the only artist to ever record with the instrument, which measures 16 inches wide and 22 inches long and weighs about 15 pounds.

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Still on the trail of the wrong Washington Phillips, the one who died at the state hospital, I found his nephew Cleo Phillips in Oklahoma through directory assistance. Born in 1940, he never knew his uncle, but he said he did have a cousin named Wash who used to preach and sing a bit. ‘‘He had this trick,’’ Cleo said, ‘‘where he’d eat a fish like a sandwich and spit the bones out the side of his mouth.’’ Cleo gave me the number of his sister Annie Mae Flewellen, who lives in California. When I asked her if she remembered anything about her uncle, the gospel singer, she corrected me. ‘‘You mean my cousin Wash. He’s the one who sang.’’ Flewellen said she remembered her father going to Austin to bring back the body of his brother when she was a young girl. ‘‘I never knew him. They said he drowned in a water tank.’’ But she had lots of memories of Cousin Wash. ‘‘He used to dip snuff, right, and when I was small I’d always ask him if I could have some,’’ she recalled. ‘‘So one time he finally gave me a little pinch and showed me how to spit it out, but I just went to the floor. Passed out cold.’’ Giving snuff to a child? That didn’t sound like the Bible-thumper who preached good parenthood in ‘‘Train Your Child.’’ But then a lot of things didn’t make sense in the Washington Phillips story I was pursuing. For instance, how could someone’s mental faculties deteriorate so quickly, so noticeably, in 1929 Texas that he could record eight masterfully played and sung tracks in a single day and then be sent to an asylum eight months later? I returned from my first visit to Freestone County without finding a single person who knew Wash Phillips, the son of Houston and Emma, as the singer who recorded a few 78 rpm records. Three days later I would find what I hadn’t been looking for: eyewitness evidence that Washington Phillips, the gospel pioneer, was not the one who died in Austin on the last day of 1938. While looking over my notes one Monday night, I saw that I hadn’t yet talked to Wilbur Titus’s cousin Virgil Keeton, who used to sing in a gospel quartet. Since he’s also related on the Phillips side, he could be a good source. I called at nine p.m., borderline for calling a stranger. ‘‘I think he’s sleeping,’’ said the voice on the other end of the phone. ‘‘Wait, I hear him stirring. Virgil! Come get the phone.’’ After a couple of minutes came a tired hello. ‘‘Oh, yeah, I knew Wash Phillips, the gospel singer,’’ he said when I told him what I was calling about. ‘‘He used to live in Simsboro with his mother, my Aunt Nancy. He used to play this harplike instrument that he made himself. Sang like a bird, man.’’ Born in 1920, Keeton said he first saw Phillips perform in the mid-thirties (‘‘I was a teenager’’) and visited him and his

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mother in Simsboro regularly. ‘‘He gave one of his 78s to the Titus family and it eventually passed on to us,’’ Keeton said, starting the chorus of ‘‘Lift Him Up, That’s All.’’ Virgil and his wife, Jewell, said they last remember seeing Phillips a couple of years after they married in 1946. At the Freestone County Clerk’s office the next day, I searched death records from the late forties until I came to the date September 20, 1954, and saw the name George Washington Phillips. According to the death certificate, he was born on January 11, 1880, which means he was forty-seven, not thirty-six, as previously believed, when he made his first recordings. Just as Virgil had said, Phillips’s mother’s name was Nancy (Cooper). His father was Tim Phillips. Next stop was the Keetons’ house, where Virgil had just returned from his weekly cancer treatment in Temple. He demonstrated, with a thumbplucking motion, how Phillips played the strings on his instrument. Showed a picture of a dolceola, Keeton said, ‘‘No, that’s not it.’’ Even with this new eyewitness account, some Phillips fans maintain that only a dolceola could make the heavenly accompaniment found on Phillips’s recordings. ‘‘I’m 100 percent sure it’s a dolceola,’’ said Memphis producer Jim Dickinson, who played the ‘‘completely illogical instrument’’ on Ry Cooder’s Crossroads soundtrack. ‘‘The way it sounds like part of it is going backwards, that’s a dolceola,’’ he said. The debate has even carried over to academia. At the 1991 International Conference of African American Music and Literature in Belgium, Dutch musicologist Guido van Rijn ended a lecture on Phillips with an argument for the dolceola theory. Is it possible that Phillips played a dolceola in the twenties, but then lost it or broke it and switched to a ‘‘harplike’’ instrument in the thirties? But what about the 1927 photo of Phillips, discovered in 1983? It shows him in the recording studio holding two zithers, which look like autoharps and are played in a manner consistent with Keeton’s recollection. Ex-Simsboro resident Doris Foreman Nealy finds it curious and somewhat amusing that music historians would be giving lectures or arguing over details about her neighbor Wash almost fifty years after his death. ‘‘He was what they called a ‘jack-leg preacher,’ ’’ she said. ‘‘He didn’t have a church, so he’d kinda roam the town looking for someplace to preach. In Simsboro, we had a big picnic every June 19, and Mr. Wash would always start it off with a song. But none of us kids knew he ever made any records.’’ He belonged to the Pleasant Hill Trinity Baptist Church in Simsboro, but May Nella Palmore, 82, of Teague recalled Phillips also preached and performed at the ‘‘sanctified’’ St. Paul Church of God in Christ. ‘‘His sing-

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ing really fit in with that crowd,’’ she said. ‘‘He had such a strong, powerful voice.’’ The Keetons said they last saw him doing the devotion at St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Teague. ‘‘I am born to preach the Gospel,’’ Phillips used to say, ‘‘and I sure do love my job.’’ That he was well versed in the varying beliefs and customs of different churches is evident in ‘‘Denomination Blues,’’ his most famous song via covers by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (who renamed it ‘‘That’s All’’) and Cooder. Coyly denouncing hypocrisy in organized religion, Phillips mocks six different black denominations before launching into the verse: ‘‘You can go to college, you can go to school / But if you ain’t got Jesus, you a educated fool.’’ The lyrical bitterness, perhaps born from too many Sundays waiting to be called while less pious men hogged the pulpit, didn’t seem to apply to a musical career that never took off. ‘‘He knew he had talent,’’ Keeton said. ‘‘But he was just ol’ Wash Phillips, you know? Don’t nobody get famous from Teague.’’ He was known more for his mule cart, from which he sold homemade ribbon cane syrup, than for a handful of records that gave him a blip of recognition many decades ago. But where the memories of the man fade, the musician’s work is stuck in time, vibrant and eternal. ‘‘Without knowing much about him, I feel that his recordings tell his story,’’ said Knife in the Water guitarist Aaron Blount, who became acquainted with the songs six years ago when the grieving father of a friend gave him a Phillips tape and asked if he knew anyone who could play that kind of music at the funeral. ‘‘His music is so simple, yet highly developed to the point that it’s almost psychedelic,’’ Blount said. ‘‘You can hear the essence of a true artist, creating against all odds.’’ Phillips had some success with his first 78 record, which had the updated church song ‘‘Take Your Burden to the Lord’’ backed with ‘‘Lift Him Up, That’s All.’’ Then came the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The scouts and field recorders stopped coming from New York in search of raw talent, and the labels instead focused on making more refined records that would comply with the escapism sought by a dour populace. In the 1920s, Texans such as blind Pentecostal pianist Arizona Juanita Dranes of Dallas and Marlin’s Blind Willie Johnson, whose classic compositions have been covered by Led Zeppelin (‘‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine’’) and Eric Clapton (‘‘Motherless Children’’), were spicing ‘‘Negro spirituals’’ and songs of praise with barrelhouse piano and slide guitar before anyone else. But the innovative recordings from Texas suddenly stopped. Like Phillips, Dranes made her last recordings in 1929, and Johnson never stepped inside a studio again after April 1930.

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How Phillips spent the first forty-seven years of his life remains a mystery. He was a brilliant instrumentalist, but did he receive formal training or was he self-taught? And what was his relation to the Wash Phillips who was eleven years younger and died sixteen years sooner? The two men named Washington Phillips are buried in the Cotton Gin Cemetery in the countryside six miles west of Teague. But an hour-long search could locate only the tombstone of the Phillips who died in the Austin State Hospital. That the Washington Phillips who was gospel’s great disappearing act would take his eternal nap in an unmarked grave seems about par for this course in music history. Sixty-two-year-old Durden Dixon is one of the few black people still living in Simsboro. ‘‘They knocked down all the houses and put together these big ranches,’’ he said, waving his arm across the horizon. From 1944 to 1954, a young Dixon lived down the road from the man he described as ‘‘kind of a hermit.’’ Sometimes the old man would bellow neighborhood boys away from his dewberry bushes. Other times he’d invite them up to his porch, where he’d sing and strum a boxlike instrument Dixon said Wash ‘‘made from the insides of a piano.’’ Dixon didn’t know Phillips made records, so as he rode shotgun to show me where Phillips used to live, I played him ‘‘A Mother’s Last Words to Her Daughter,’’ a song about shirking temptations to become a child of God. Dixon’s face lit up. ‘‘That’s Mr. Wash, all right,’’ he said, in full-beam delight. ‘‘I remember he used to sing us that one.’’ The shack is gone, but Dixon showed me where it used to sit, about twenty yards in from the road. The land seemed untouched, aside from a few Coors Light bottles discarded under a tree, in the forty-eight years since Phillips was called home. There were old pieces of tin and some rusted buckets. There was also a little brown bottle, half buried where the porch used to be. When I picked it up and showed Dixon, he laughed. ‘‘That’s his snuff bottle, man.’’ The next day an appraiser at Rue’s Antiques in Austin confirmed that the bottle once held Garrett’s snuff circa the early fifties. What do you know? Annie Mae Flewellen’s seventy-four-year-old memory was on the mark. If there’s anything the story of Washington Phillips has told me, it’s that sometimes what’s true and what’s false comes from where you least expect it. The great musician Wash Phillips didn’t die in the insane asylum. And his instrument almost certainly was not a dolceola. The legend lessens with the mundane facts. It’s comforting to know, however, that the singer who has affected so few people so profoundly didn’t live out his last few years in

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mental torment, but surrounded by the people who respected him for who he was. ‘‘Leave it there, oh leave it there,’’ he used to sing in his sweet tenor of the truth. ‘‘Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.’’ Sometimes it can be as simple as that, knowing when and where to let go. Sometimes eighteen tracks is the whole shot and you accept that and just go on living the life you sing about.

Beaumont’s Barbara Lynn wedded blues and pop with ‘‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’’ in 1962. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

Giants of country music Willie Nelson and George Jones. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum. Lightnin’ Hopkins plays Austin’s Vulcan Gas Company in 1970. Burton Wilson photo.

Guitarist Johnny Winter of Beaumont in 1968. Burton Wilson photo.

Producer Huey Meaux in the middle of two of his discoveries, Freddy Fender, left, and Doug Sahm, right, circa 1974. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

The Soul Stirrers, from Trinity, moved to Chicago in the late ’30s. Leader Rebert Harris, far right, left the group in 1950 and was replaced by Sam Cooke. Courtesy Fantasy/Specialty Records.

Fiddler Harry Choates and His Jole Blon Boys in Bandera, circa 1950. Left to right: Unknown, Phil Marx, Choates, Louis Oltreman, Ivy Gaspard, Junior Keelan. Photo courtesy Jim Grabowske.

Choates’s death certificate.

Washington Phillips was believed to have died in 1938. This photo of the gospel great was taken circa 1952. Courtesy Doris Foreman Neely. Houston’s Archie Bell and the Drells had a #1 smash with ‘‘Tighten Up’’ in 1968. Pictured on the front of a promotional booklet are (left to right) Bell, James Wise, Mark Putney, and Billy Butler. Courtesy Texas Music Museum.

Clarence ‘‘Gatemouth’’ Brown, shown here in 1947, became a star at the Bronze Peacock in Houston. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

Electronics buff Floyd Tillman, shown in his home studio on the cover of a 1950 Billboard magazine. Courtesy Tracy Pitcox Collection.

The man with the electric smile, Floyd Tillman. Courtesy Tracy Pitcox Collection.

T-Bone Walker was the consummate performer. Courtesy Michael Ochs Archives.

Ella Mae Morse of Mansfield had the first #1 record for Capitol Records. Courtesy Jurgen Koop.

Sly Stone was born in Dallas. Courtesy Epic Records.

Texas Troubadours (left to right) Butterball Paige, Jack Drake, Ernest Tubb, unknown, Bill Drake. Photo by Walden S. Fabry. Courtesy Tracy Pitcox Collection.

Backstage at the Armadillo, ‘‘The House That Freddie Built,’’ on October 3, 1970. Burton Wilson photo.

Ronnie Dawson began his career as Ronnie Dee. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

The only known photograph of Arizona Dranes, seated at the piano.

Willie Nelson performs at the Backyard in Austin in March 2003, a month before turning seventy. Photo by Larry Kolvoord, Austin American-Statesman.

Willie in November 1972, soon after moving back to Texas. Burton Wilson photo.

The first Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic was held at Dripping Springs in 1973. Burton Wilson photo.

Blind Willie Johnson’s death certificate doesn’t fill in all the blanks.

The cover of a 1989 retrospective. Courtesy Yazoo Records.

Cindy Walker wrote her first hit for Bing Crosby, but was better known as Bob Wills’s go-to songwriter. Courtesy of Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.

Texas music’s poet laureate. Todd V. Wolfson photo.

Shaver films his Freedom’s Child video with friend and fan Robert Duvall in 2003. Photo by Michael Corcoran.

Stevie Vaughan in 1977, before the hat, before the ‘‘Ray.’’ Photo by Ken Hoge.

Blaze Foley, middle, at Spellman’s. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Mandy Mercier.

Ray Wylie Hubbard lived off ‘‘Redneck Mother’’ before learning to really play the guitar. Photo by Jennifer Jaqua, courtesy Judy Hubbard.

Butthole Surfers revel in bluebonnet season 1994. Left to right: King Coffey, Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary. Photo by Will Van Overbeek.

TVZ 1977. Photo by Ken Hoge. Townes Van Zandt as a federale for the video of the Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard duet on ‘‘Pancho and Lefty.’’ Photo by Jeanene Van Zandt. Courtesy Texas Music Museum.

Don Walser: Andy Devine meets Tex Ritter. Todd V. Wolfson photo.

Alejandro Escovedo. Todd V. Wolfson photo.

True Believers, circa 1986. Left to right: Denny DiGorio, Jon Dee Graham, Kevin Foley, Alejandro Escovedo, Javier Escovedo. Photo by Pat Blashill.

Esteban Jordan. Photo courtesy Arnaldo Ramirez Collection/Texas Music Museum.

Jordan and band in 1986. Photo Clay Shorkey/Texas Music Museum.

Do these guys look British? Sir Douglas Quintet in 1965. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

A rare live photo of Sahm sans shades at Austin’s Hole in the Wall, 1988. Photo by Casey Monahan.

A portrait of innocence and beauty. Selena the year before she died. Photo by Sung Park, Austin American-Statesman.

Lydia Mendoza plays Austin’s Las Manitas in the late ’80s. Photo by Clay Shorkey/Texas Music Museum. Waylon Jennings backstage at the Armadillo, 1974. Burton Wilson photo.

Waylon Jennings: The only daddy that’ll walk the line. Photo by Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

Lubbock had its own musical Carter family. Sponsored by Bewley Flour, David ‘‘Dad’’ Carter and his harmonizing offspring became the Chuck Wagon Gang when they sang on Fort Worth’s 50,000-watt WBAP. Courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

Daniel Johnston traded his McDonald’s uniform for the life of a songwriter. Photo by Pat Blashill.

The Reivers, before they had to change their name from Zeitgeist. Photo by Casey Monahan.

Javier Escovedo of the True Believers during the 1985 shoot of MTV’s The Cutting Edge program. Photo by Pat Blashill.

Doctors’ Mob: (Left to right) Don Lamb, Glenn Benavides, Steve Collier, Tim Swingle. Photo by Pat Blashill.

Roky Erickson wrote ‘‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’’ while a member of the Spades. Photo courtesy Doug Hanners/Texas Music Museum.

Freda (Marcia Ball) and the Firedogs at the Split Rail, subsequently the site of a Wendy’s. Burton Wilson photo.

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CLARENCE ‘‘GATEMOUTH’’ BROWN At the Crossroads

lay the blues!’’ Usually those are words of encouragement, an accent on a hot solo in a smoky club. But one night in 1975 at Antone’s original Sixth Street location, that exhortation sounded a bit too much like a command to the headliner, a black man with piercing eyes who wore a Stetson hat, a pearl-buttoned rodeo shirt, and cowboy boots. After opening with a fast blues instrumental, Clarence ‘‘Gatemouth’’ Brown put down his Gibson Firebird guitar, picked up a fiddle, and played a country number, complete with weeping steel guitar. After another shout for more blues, less country, Brown played a Cajun waltz. Nobody tells Gatemouth Brown what to play. Nobody. Many in the crowd—who knew Brown only through the juke-jumpin’ and lowdown r&b sides he cut in the forties and fifties—were thrown by the curves, but none more than young club owner Clifford Antone, who had opened his joint just a few months earlier so he could hear all the living legends of the blues. Anticipation was high for the return of Gatemouth Brown, a key figure in Texas blues history, who had scarcely performed in his home state since the early sixties. It was Gatemouth’s swaggering, swinging guitar style and gritty vocals that inspired Houston businessman Don Robey to form Peacock Records, the first successful r&b label owned and operated by an African American. A reprise of Brown’s classic fifties work was what the crowd wanted to hear, and they yelled for ‘‘Dirty Work at the Crossroads’’ and ‘‘Okie Dokie Stomp.’’ Instead they got Bob Wills covers and fiddle hoedowns. Sensing a mutiny, Antone shouted, ‘‘This is a blues club!’’ from the wings. ‘‘I told him to get the fuck off my bandstand,’’ Brown recalled with a laugh

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from his home in Slidell, Louisiana. ‘‘It may have been his club, but when I’m up there, it’s my bandstand.’’ Nearly three decades later, on October 30, 2004, Antone was onstage at a blues festival in Beaumont, introducing ‘‘the man considered the Count Basie of the blues.’’ He said of Gatemouth, with whom he made up long ago, ‘‘Here’s the man who influenced Guitar Slim, who influenced Buddy Guy, who influenced Jimi Hendrix, who influenced Stevie Vaughan.’’ Through the years, blues purists have come to accept the ornery but affable man that associates call ‘‘Gate’’ as an artist of his own stubborn creation, not the T-Bone Walker rival he began his career as. An instinctive musician who can play any instrument he gets his hands on, from guitar and fiddle to drums, piano, harmonica, mandolin, and bass, Gatemouth packaged his diverse repertoire as American Music, Texas Style in a 1999 album. ‘‘Because I’m a black man who plays the electric guitar, people are always trying to wall me in as a blues musician,’’ Brown said the day after the fest appearance, as he sipped his morning coffee from an enormous mug emblazoned with the words ‘‘You asked for just half a cup.’’ When he recently came to Austin to record a track for an upcoming Los Super Seven lp, the studio musicians were warned about asking the eighty-year-old Brown about such former contemporaries as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters. ‘‘Those guys played blues,’’ said Gate, with a dismissive snort. ‘‘I play everything.’’ And he continued to play it all even after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in July 2004. Brown rummaged through his mixed musical bag in the scorching heat of the Willie Nelson Picnic on July 4 in Fort Worth and at September’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, where he breathed into an inhaler between solos. A conversation with Brown is almost always conducted through a cherryflavored haze. Asked if his doctor lets him smoke his pipe, Gatemouth jumped on the query. ‘‘Lets me? Ain’t no doctor have to let me do nuthin’.’’ After doctors at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston determined that Brown’s cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and probably beyond, they had even more bad news. Because his emphysema has weakened his lungs and the arteries to his heart were significantly clogged, he was unlikely to survive surgery. Chemotherapy was the only option, but after doctors put the survival rate at only 15 percent after seven weeks of treatment, Gate decided against it. The morning after the Beaumont gig, Gatemouth stopped in his old hometown of Orange, touted as ‘‘the Last Taste of Texas,’’ to see his youngest and only surviving brother, Bobby, and other relatives. Orange is where

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Gatemouth first started playing country music as a boy, emulating the Gulf Coast folk music his father, ‘‘Fiddlin’ Tom,’’ played in a variety of string bands. Orange is also where Gate learned to play the blues. Sixty-nine-year-old Bobby Brown takes a visitor on a tour of Second Avenue, where juke joints with names like the Manhattan Club, the Drag Club, and Charlie’s Place used to be, though they’re all torn down now. ‘‘The Deuce was hoppin’,’’ says Bobby, who used to play drums in a band with his three brothers, Gatemouth (so nicknamed because of his large, slightly gapped front teeth), James (nicknamed Widemouth) on guitar, and Wilson on bass. Sitting on folding chairs outside Bobby’s paint-peeling house, the brothers reminisced, joined by Bobby’s daughter Brenda, her three children, and two grandkids. ‘‘One thing anyone who knows him will tell you is that you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth,’’ said Brenda, 42. ‘‘Uncle Clarence will say anything to anybody.’’ Just ask David Letterman. When Gatemouth met the late-night icon before a taping in the eighties, the first thing he said to him was ‘‘Paul Shaffer sucks.’’ At breakfast recently at an ihop in Beaumont, Gatemouth engaged the somewhat befuddled but ultimately amused waitress in his crazy talk. Claiming to be homeless, he asked her for twenty dollars. When he ordered, he did so with a musical cadence: ‘‘One egg, one pancake, one patty.’’ Asked how he wanted his egg, Gate said, ‘‘Just cook it, baby,’’ the song apparently still playing in his head. When the waitress turned to leave, Brown added, ‘‘Just scramble it a bit.’’ Gatemouth left Orange for the first time as a teenager playing guitar behind the Brown-Skinned Models. He left town for good in 1945 when he was drafted into the army. It was obvious to everyone involved that the service, with its rigid discipline, was not for the free-spirited musician, so he was let out of the army with a general discharge. He settled in San Antonio, and there he met his first wife, Geraldine, and, in 1947, the man who would change his life forever. When Don Deadric Robey opened the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club on Erastus Street in Houston’s Fifth Ward in 1945, his goal, quickly realized, was to run the finest black nightclub in the South. He hired chefs, not cooks, for the kitchen and booked the ‘‘uptown’’ acts who’d outgrown the Chitlin Circuit—Cab Calloway, Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan. He was also always on the lookout for up-and-coming talent, which brought him to Don Albert’s Keyhole Club in San Antonio in 1947. In the band was a gregarious singing drummer they called Gatemouth. Word had it he could also play guitar like nobody’s business.

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‘‘Robey gave me his card and said that if I ever made it to Houston, I should pop on by the Peacock,’’ Gate said. The next day off he hitchhiked to the Fifth Ward hot spot, where, legend has it, he commandeered the stage when headliner T-Bone Walker took ill and, with T-Bone’s Gibson L-5, started playing a boogie and singing words he made up on the spot. The audience was so impressed with this brash upstart that it showered the stage with about six hundred dollars in tips. Hearing the uproar from his dressing room, Walker suddenly felt better, grabbed his guitar back, and resumed his set. It’s a good story, but probably more myth than truth. In the book Down in Houston by Roger Wood (University of Texas Press, 2003), Robey’s business manager, Evelyn Johnson, said her boss had actually sent for Gatemouth, at T-Bone’s recommendation, when the headliner was advised by doctors to take a few days off. She even recounts Brown’s auditioning for Robey; from her office she thought she was hearing T-Bone. At any rate, Brown’s initial performance at the Bronze Peacock inspired Robey to go into artist management and start the Buffalo Booking Agency. He formed Peacock Records in 1949, then in 1952 acquired Memphis label Duke, with its roster of Johnny Ace, Bobby ‘‘Blue’’ Bland, Junior Parker, and others. Then the music business became much more profitable than the club, especially when Big Mama Thornton had an r&b smash with the original version of ‘‘Hound Dog,’’ and in 1953 Robey closed the Bronze Peacock and converted the building into a recording studio and offices. Although Robey, a notorious gambler with reputed mob ties, was famous for strong-arming artists out of royalties, his first client, Brown, says he harbors no resentment against the nonmusician who had more than a thousand songwriting credits by the time he sold his Duke-Peacock empire to abcDunhill in 1973. ‘‘I didn’t know about the business,’’ Brown says. ‘‘Maybe he ripped me off, but if it wasn’t for Robey no one would’ve found out about me.’’ The two parted company in 1960; at Gate’s final session for Peacock, Robey finally let him play blues fiddle. Gatemouth started dressing strictly in Western wear in the sixties, an aimless time in his career when he bounced between Nashville club work and a stint as a deputy sheriff in rural New Mexico. ‘‘I was seeing some guys spend an hour or two getting ready to go out,’’ Brown says of his sartorial choice. ‘‘I just throw on a cowboy hat, snap the buttons on my shirt and put on my boots, and, boom, I’m dressed up.’’ The outfit has helped Brown joke his way out of potentially hairy situations, like the time he took manager Jim Bateman and a songwriting col-

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laborator, both white, to eat at an all-night diner in a black neighborhood of New Orleans. ‘‘It was like a classic movie scene,’’ Bateman recalls. ‘‘We walked in and jaws dropped. The place went quiet, and I got a real bad feeling. So Gate, who’s all decked out like John Wayne, says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t you never seen a cowboy before?’ He put it on him and everybody eased up. Gate can size up a situation and respond to it faster and better than anyone I’ve ever seen.’’ But the country wardrobe and repertoire, not to mention several appearances on Hee Haw with his 1979 lp collaborator, Roy Clark, have led to lingering criticism from members of the black community. ‘‘They say I’m selling out to the white man, but does that mean I was selling out when I was six years old and playing country music?’’ says Gate, who admits that almost all his friends, associates, and band members are white. ‘‘It’s funny,’’ he says. ‘‘When I was coming up, it was all black people: where I lived, where I played, who I had to deal with, and now it’s all white people. And that’s my choice.’’ Although, at eighty pounds, he weighs his age, Gatemouth Brown was not wasting away in late 2004, not by a long shot. He has a new album, Timeless, to promote, and on his days off back home in Slidell, where he moved in 1983, there are always people dropping in, always new projects going on. Captaining a cell phone with a couple hundred phone numbers memorized, Gate’s constantly in touch with his wide inner circle. ‘‘Listen, Robert,’’ he barked into command central one Monday morning, ‘‘I need you to bring me a hot battery right away. No, can’t wait half an hour. Tow truck’s here now.’’ Picture this: Gatemouth Brown, sitting on the hood of his black 1976 Cadillac, dangling feet holstered in fluffy yellow SpongeBob SquarePants slippers, ordering the wrecker operator around and smiling when Robert showed up a few minutes after the call with a new battery to help start his other car, a 1967 Lincoln Continental. ‘‘See, this is why I live here,’’ he said, ducking under the billowing pipe smoke. ‘‘I own this town.’’ He lives by himself in a small, two-bedroom house of lacquered wooden walls on the northern banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The interior design is dominated by two things—the models of ancient sailing ships he collects and Gatemouth Brown memorabilia. The back of the piano is decked with awards you’ve never heard of, but Gatemouth keeps his two biggest trophies —the Grammy he won for 1982’s Alright Again and his 1983 W. C. Handy Award as entertainer of the year—in a safe-deposit box. He loves to watch cartoons and listen to his old records and becomes animated when a favorite solo comes out of the speakers. He slaps the table hard when he hears himself making his guitar say ‘‘woman’’ and then, rifling

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through a pile of cds, says, ‘‘Check this out.’’ He plays a version of ‘‘Blues Power’’ that has him and Eric Clapton trading solos and verses. ‘‘When the record [Clapton’s 1970 solo debut] came out, the producer had cut all my parts out,’’ Brown says. ‘‘They didn’t even bother rerecording it.’’ Brown doesn’t bother hiding his bitterness about not being as rich and famous as inferior musicians, or even great ones he influenced. His mailbox says ‘‘the Man,’’ his car window says ‘‘the Man’’—it’s stenciled everywhere. Gatemouth Brown is the Man, even though a top seller in Brown’s catalog might move a paltry hundred thousand copies stateside and just as many in Europe and Japan. But as he faces his mortality, Brown struggles with the question of how he’d like to be remembered. He gazes into space for a long time and then offers, ‘‘Just remember that ol’ Gate brought a smile to people’s faces.’’ He thinks about the question some more, then says, ‘‘A lot of people play music for the wrong reasons. I never played to get women, though I had my share. I didn’t do it for the money, though it pays the bills. I realized early on that I could create something beautiful that would build love within the people who came out to hear it. Music is the best medicine in the world, man.’’

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THE GETO BOYS AND DJ SCREW Where the Dirty South Began

he slow and furious promenade rolls almost nonstop in East Austin. When an suv, spewing trunk-rattling bass, sidles up to the corner of East Twelfth and Chicon, the intersection sounds like Vietnam, 1968. You’ve heard the stuff—that rap music with the nuclear bass that flattens out and sustains like a heavy appliance on the fritz. You’ve heard it whether you wanted to or not. Houston-based hip-hop, slowed and manipulated to sound like a hallucinogenic flashback, is the new punk rock. Three years after his November 16, 2000, death, DJ Screw still rules the streets, wreaking havoc with his psychotic-sounding remixes. Forget the trippy delicates like PM Dawn and De La Soul; DJ Screw made rap music psychedelic. But the attendant lifestyle he advocated, which included ‘‘sippin’ lean,’’ drinking codeine cough syrup, to get the full, sluggishly hallucinogenic effect of the music, ended up killing him at age twenty-nine. Screw protégé Big Moe dubbed Houston ‘‘The City of Syrup’’ with his 2000 album, but by the end of the year, the mayor of the screwheads was gone. The autopsy reported the cause of Screw’s death as an overdose of codeine, with traces of Valium and pcp also in the bloodstream. Not since the death of Selena have so many Texas music fans grieved as when Screw died, quite simply, from trying to get too slow. Other Houston producers, most notably Michael ‘‘5000’’ Watts of Swisha House, keep pumping out the slowed-down jams. But even Watts has to admit that he’s just following his former rival’s blueprint. ‘‘Screw started the revolution,’’ Watts says. ‘‘He slowed it down and chilled it out when all the other cats were trying to go faster, harder.’’ The ‘‘Dirty South’’ sound (originally called ‘‘Down South’’) was pioneered by the Geto Boys in the late eighties and taken to the bank by Master P in the late nineties. Where Miami was known for its heavy bass sound and

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l.a. was the home of ‘‘gangsta’’ rap, Dirty South mixed those elements and slowed ’em down with a beat equally influenced by sixties Memphis soul and New Orleans funk. But then Screw came along and built on the bottom to change everything. One can debate which was the first rap record, who invented house music, or whether punk rock started with the Stooges or the Ramones, but there’s no denying that Smithville native Robert Earl ‘‘DJ Screw’’ Davis originated the bass-heavy remix sensation that still reverberates today. It doesn’t matter who’s at the mixing board, the slowed-down stuff is still called ‘‘screw,’’ in deference to the originator. Working as a Houston dj in the late eighties, Davis accidentally hit the pitch button while a rap record was playing, slowing everything down and accenting the bass. There’s your big bang. Named after his penchant for damaging records he deemed ‘‘whack’’ by scratching them with a screw, Davis became DJ Screw, and the subgenre he invented was called ‘‘screwed and chopped.’’ Chopped refers to the old-school technique of repeating and rearranging lines. When you get hooked on screw, you can’t listen to the radio anymore. Nelly sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks. A customer at Non-Stop Music in Austin asks to sample the new Lil-O cd, but rather than play a bit on the store sound system, store owner Anthony LaPicca hands it to the guy, who takes it out to his car. It’s a new twist on listening stations. ‘‘This is ridin’ music, man,’’ LaPicca says. After a few minutes listening to the cd in his car, the customer says he’ll take it. He drives around the parking lot, swerving to the beat (‘‘swangin’’’) and cutting the wheel sharply (‘‘bangin’’’). LaPicca calls his place a ‘‘screw shop,’’ not a record store, and estimates that 90 percent of his sales are screwed and chopped cds from Houston. The big sellers here are decelerated remixes of albums by such Houston heavies as Z-Ro, Slim Thug, Lil’ Flip, and the Boss Hog Outlawz. LaPicca estimates that there are about four or five ‘‘screw shops’’ in Austin, but there are also several fly-by-night entrepreneurs who sell bootlegged DJ Screw cds out of their houses, at flea markets, and from the trunks of their cars. ‘‘It’s really hard to get the legit stuff,’’ says LaPicca, who’s been out of Screw stock for two weeks. In the beginning, you had to buy DJ Screw’s music like you were buying drugs. After he came upon his accidental innovation of slowing down hip-hop, Screw started making tapes, remixes of national acts like N.W.A. and Above the Law, and selling them for ten dollars each at his house in the South Park section of Houston. Sometimes working around the clock for three days straight, with a crew of up to fifteen rappers, Screw produced

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hundreds of albums, which he chose to sell on tapes he bought in bulk from Sam’s Club rather than on cds. Such was the demand in the mid-nineties that Screw had to install a security gate that stayed closed until eight p.m. every night. When it swung open, there were usually about a dozen fans, many who drove in from Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis, and even Atlanta, ready with their crisp twenties and fifties. Eventually, the producer opened Screwed Down Records and Tapes on Cullen Boulevard in South Houston, where you shoved your money in a sliding tray to a clerk behind a Plexiglas window. When his music first became widely available on cd in 1998, Screw caused such a single-minded sensation that thieves who broke into Austin’s hip-hop mecca Musicmania stole only DJ Screw cds and didn’t touch anything else in the store. The early rumor was that the selective heist was in retaliation for the DJ’s appropriation of other rappers’ work without compensation. (In Screw’s world a royalty statement is something the Queen might say.) But the culprits were never caught. As Houston rap became a national sensation, spinning off into the ‘‘crunk’’ scene, it was hard to believe that just ten years earlier, the only Texas rap acts of any note were Donald ‘‘The D.O.C.’’ Curry, the Dallasite who hooked up with Dr. Dre and the N.W.A. crew, and the Geto Boys, who set out to make West Coast gangstas come off like Young MC. With the 1989 release of the Geto Boys’ Grip It! On That Other Level, it became apparent that the other level was to rhyme more explicitly, more violently than anybody else. Just as the Sex Pistols hijacked standard rock riffs and forced them into their rebellion, the Geto Boys pinned traditional rap formats to the wall by the sheer intensity of their anger and confusion. The group’s motto— ‘‘We’d rather be hated for what we are than loved for what we’re not’’—was not an empty pose. Featuring a dwarf with a slasher fixation named Bushwick Bill, a suicidal poet in Scarface, and the original playa Willie D, fresh from a stint in prison for robbing a Texaco station, the G.B.s pushed the envelope of bad taste so far it required extra postage. Rapping about urban paranoia over an Isaac Hayes sample, the Boys had a huge hit with ‘‘Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me,’’ from the 1991 album We Can’t Be Stopped (whose cover showed Bushwick in the hospital after getting shot in the eye). But they were better known for controversy than airplay. When producer Rick Rubin signed the Geto Boys to his Def American label, a national controversy flared when his distributor, Geffen, refused to release the group’s self-titled 1990 cd. That Geffen didn’t have a problem putting out Andrew Dice Clay’s sexist, homophobic ‘‘comedy’’ albums had rap fans yelling ‘‘double standard.’’

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Chuck D of Public Enemy once said that he understood the rage of the Geto Boys when he visited the Fifth Ward, a beat-down neighborhood with its dirt roads and shanties. In comparison, Chuck D said the ghettos in nyc were like Club Med. Everything about the Geto Boys was harder, even their posse’s choice of drugs. When you rode with the G.B.s you snorted pcp or smoked ‘‘fry,’’ a marijuana-filled cigar soaked in embalming fluid, which produces psychotic thoughts. When Screw took over in the mid-nineties, his legion of ‘‘screwheads’’ introduced a new form of mental dishevelment when they rode around sipping from large Styrofoam cups of Big Red, laced with codeine cough syrup. But sheer brain-rattling volume became its own kind of drug. Listening to screw on a factory-installed system is like watching a killer whale in captivity. If you want to really free Willy, you’ve got to get a custom job. You want the bass to fry your neck hairs, to knock your fillings loose. ‘‘Get more Bass!’’ proclaims the Dynomat, one of several bottom-inducing accessories carried by Custom Sounds in Austin. Unlike hard surfaces, which can make a heavy-duty bass sound distorted, the Dynomat bounces the sound waves like a trampoline. ‘‘Everybody wants the biggest bass sound possible,’’ says Custom Sounds manager Donald McEvers. It’s all about the status of your ride.’’ Besides selling sound systems, which can run as high as twenty thousand dollars, McEvers is often asked to put tv screens into visors and headrests. Plus, the store sells flashy silver tire rims, many which spin at stoplights. ‘‘It’s all for attention,’’ McEvers says. ‘‘You can’t cut corners, you can’t have any limits to what you can add, if you want to be thought of as a major playa.’’ Bass is a sound that you can physically feel. It grabs you and shakes you. In recent years, car shows have added competitions for the loudest bass sound. Instead of decibel meters, however, judges use a device that measures air pressure. Screwheads like to see if their system can blow out a match. Watts has his own measuring criterion when he’s producing. ‘‘I don’t consider myself done with a track until I play it in my car,’’ he says. ‘‘If the trunk ain’t rattling, I go back to square one.’’ It’s all about the big bottom end, those menacing sound waves that won’t back down. It’s about being the baddest mammal on the planet, about slinking in your ride, embracing the bass, and feeling ten feet low and bulletproof.

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ARCHIE BELL AND THE DRELLS ‘‘Hey, everybody! That’s me’’

rchie Bell says he harbors no bitterness—you’ve gotta play with the hand you’ve been dealt and all that. But during the course of a thirtyminute conversation with the man who created one of the greatest singles in Texas music history, with ‘‘Tighten Up’’ in 1967, traces of regret at what could have been seep through. ‘‘That song just never stopped being popular,’’ says Bell from his manager’s office in Copperas Cove. ‘‘Janet Jackson sampled it on ‘Free Zone’ from her latest album. r.e.m. plays it in concert. So many rappers have used the tracks.’’ As the song’s cowriter, Bell has been able to live off ‘‘Tighten Up’’ for more than thirty years. He’s also able to clear up a controversy. In the spoken word intro, is he saying that the Drells ‘‘dance just as good as we walk’’ or ‘‘dance just as good as we want’’? Even though the former is more often cited as the lyrics, it’s really the latter. ‘‘We dance just as good as we want,’’ Bell says. ‘‘Hell, we dance a lot better than we walk.’’ He continues to perform as ‘‘Mr. Tighten Up’’ with a new set of Drells. Still, he’s gotta wonder what sort of career he could’ve had if he hadn’t been drafted into the army and shipped off to Vietnam before ‘‘Tighten Up’’ got the whole country dancing. ‘‘I went down to the draft board to take my physical and the next thing I knew I was on a bus to boot camp in Louisiana,’’ Bell said. ‘‘I didn’t even have time to call my mother.’’ Luckily, the band and mailman-producer Skipper Lee Frazier were prepared for Archie’s sudden departure. A couple weeks earlier, when Bell received his draft notice, they rerecorded an old demo of ‘‘Tighten Up,’’ as well as a new song called ‘‘Dog Eat Dog,’’ which Atlantic Records execs thought

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would be the hit. With ‘‘Tighten Up’’ on the B-side, the single went nowhere, but when Frazier and the band finally convinced the label to flip the record, ‘‘Tighten Up’’ took off. His bandmates kept Archie apprised of the song’s success, but after Bell was shot in the leg during the 1968 Tet Offensive, he had more pressing worries. It was when he was out on a wheelchair run down the hall of the hospital in West Germany where he recuperated that he first heard ‘‘Tighten Up’’ on the radio. ‘‘I said, ‘Hey, everybody! That’s me singin’,’ but nobody believed me,’’ he said. ‘‘They figured I was shell-shocked, crazy. The next time the song came on the radio, they heard me say, ‘Hi everybody. I’m Archie Bell of the Drells of Houston, Texas,’ and then some of them went, ‘Hmmm, maybe it is him.’ ’’ The spoken intro was inspired by disparaging remarks made in the wake of the Kennedy assassination by a dj who said nothing good came from Texas. ‘‘We were from Texas and we were good, so we just let everybody know up front,’’ he said. Riding an irresistible guitar strum, the song finds Bell exhorting his band—one by one—to ‘‘tighten up.’’ ‘‘This was the first song where every player got a solo,’’ Bell said. ‘‘We wanted to get that whole house party feel. That’s what we’d do down in the Fifth Ward, have these big parties at somebody’s house and just jam all night. Everybody would form a circle and two people would have like a dance-off in the middle. All the dancers would kick in a buck and whoever was the best dancer would win the pot.’’ As the song about a nonexistent dance shot up the charts (after three weeks at Number 1, it was knocked from the top spot by ‘‘Mrs. Robinson’’ by Simon and Garfunkel), Bell pleaded with the military to let him go home and record a follow-up, but the best he could do was a series of fifteen-day passes over the course of the next year and a half. Meanwhile, at least three groups—including a white nine-piece from Nashville—were trying to pass themselves off as the Drells in concert. ‘‘I tried to get in the Special Services, so I could at least entertain the troops,’’ Bell said, ‘‘but I got turned down. Jerry Lewis’ kid [of Gary Lewis and the Playboys] got to pull Special Services duty, but not me.’’ Archie and the Drells managed to record two more minor hits for Atlantic on the fly—‘‘I Can’t Stop Dancing’’ hit Number 9 in late 1968 and ‘‘Showdown’’ peaked in the upper teens a couple months later. And the hits just didn’t keep on coming. When Bell was discharged in late 1969, the Number 1 song in the country declared, ‘‘This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,’’ and Bell’s momentum was gone. In 1975 Archie Bell and the Drells were playing at Loretta’s High Hat in

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Longside, New Jersey, when red-hot producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff stopped in, eventually signing the group to their Philadelphia International label. Although they had some success in the dance clubs and on the black music charts, Bell and the Drells couldn’t cross over to the mainstream. Without more hits of its own, the group started padding its set with such r&b standards as ‘‘Stand by Me,’’ ‘‘Midnight Hour,’’ and ‘‘Soul Man.’’ The crowds keep coming to hear ‘‘Tighten Up,’’ however. Like Bell said, the song, cooked up as a Fifth Ward dance-off theme, just never did lose steam, even if the band’s career did.

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FLOYD TILLMAN Honky-tonk Triple Threat

e wrote Bing Crosby’s 1939 smash hit ‘‘It Makes No Difference Now,’’ had his own Number 1 single with 1943’s ‘‘They Took the Stars out of Heaven,’’ and was one of country music’s first great electric guitarists. But Floyd Tillman, who passed away on August 22, 2003, at his home near Houston at age eighty-eight, will best be remembered for a 1949 song that helped usher in the social realism era of country songwriting. ‘‘Slippin’ Around’’ may not have been the first ‘‘cheating song,’’ but it was the first one to top the charts. Tillman was the last of the great 1930s honky-tonk pioneers, having outlived even his longest-lived former Blue Ridge Playboys bandmates Ted Daffan (d. 1996) and Leon Selph (d. 1999). His passing marked the end of a great era in Texas music, though the music he helped create continues to gain new fans. According to Bill C. Malone’s essential Country Music, U.S.A., ‘‘Tillman made significant contributions in three areas of country music—guitar playing, songwriting and singing.’’ Indeed, Tillman’s unique, behind-the-beat vocal phrasing, not to mention his instinctive guitar stylings, made an impression on a young Willie Nelson. ‘‘You could tell, right away, that his music wasn’t the typical country music of the time,’’ Nelson said. ‘‘He had some of those Django [Reinhardt] rhythms in his guitar playing, and he was singing about subjects that just weren’t being sung about at the time.’’ Nelson said that after he met Tillman in the fifties they became fast friends. ‘‘I was asking him about some of his songs one day, and I told him I really liked one called ‘I’ll Keep On Loving You.’ I thought it would take a real special woman to inspire such a sweet love song, and Floyd told me he actually wrote it about his car.’’

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Tillman was born in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1914, but moved to Post, near Lubbock, before he was a year old. He started playing guitar and mandolin as a preteen, often backing fiddle players at ranch dances. In 1934 a twenty-year-old Tillman visited a sister in San Antonio and tried to hook up with a band, any band. When he brought his guitar, a metal resonator, to Gus’s Palm Garden in San Antonio one night, bandleader Adolph Hofner asked him to sit in with his trio. Adolph and his brother Emil had never heard anyone play lead guitar before, and they flipped out on this new sound. Tillman was asked to join the band, even though it meant the three-dollars-per-night pay would now be split amongst four players instead of three. At the time, Texas fiddle band music, enhanced by elements of pop, jazz, and blues by Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, was the rage in dance halls. To get in on the action, Tillman moved to the honky-tonk hotbed of Houston to join the Blue Ridge Playboys, whose piano player for a while was Aubrey ‘‘Moon’’ Mullican. It was in that band that Tillman started singing his songs. Other groups around Houston, including Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers, also cut Tillman material. The guitarist/singer was becoming better known as a songwriter. After he heard the Wanderers’ version of ‘‘It Makes No Difference Now,’’ a shrewd Shreveport politician and musician named Jimmie Davis offered Tillman two hundred dollars for the publishing rights. Tillman held out for three hundred dollars, a princely sum in 1938, though barely a breeze in the windfall that would come the next year when Crosby took the tune to the top of the pop charts. The song has been recorded by everyone from Andy Williams to Ray Charles. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Tillman joined the Army Air Corps, where he, an electronics buff all his life, served as a radio technician at Ellington Field near Houston. Even though he wasn’t separated from friends or his new bride Margarete, Tillman tapped into the loneliness of soldiers overseas when he penned ‘‘G.I. Blues’’ and ‘‘Each Night at Nine.’’ Tillman recorded both those Top Five hits, as well as his first Number 1 single, ‘‘They Took the Stars out of Heaven,’’ while still in the service. With his simple, direct lyrics about everyday life, delivered in distinctive slurs and moans, Tillman helped transform country music from songs about train wrecks and gunfights into the white man’s blues. As a singer and bandleader, he was also inspiring a young breed of postwar West Texans who wanted to make music their way. Tillman’s groups had an influence on rock ’n’ rollers like Buddy Holly,

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Roy Orbison, and Buddy Knox, showing them that they didn’t have to look outside the band for their songs: they could just play their own. Among Tillman’s hits were ‘‘Driving Nails in My Coffin’’ (1946), ‘‘I Love You So Much It Hurts’’ (1946), ‘‘I Gotta Have My Baby Back’’ (1949), and his last hit, 1960’s ‘‘It Just Tears Me Up.’’ His songs have been recorded by everyone from Gene Autry to the Supremes. But even as his career had taken off in the 1940s, it was an emotional roller-coaster ride for Tillman, who married and divorced the former Margarete Hartis three times from 1939 until 1950. Because of the Tillmans’ on-and-off marital problems, it was rumored that ‘‘Slippin’ Around’’ was autobiographical. But Tillman said the idea for the song came to him at a diner in West Texas when he overheard a woman sweet-talking on the phone with a man he assumed was her husband. When she asked the man to call her at home, but to hang up if her husband answered, Tillman said to himself, ‘‘She’s slipping around.’’ Adultery was a taboo subject in the 1940s, and since ‘‘Slipping Around’’ didn’t moralize that cheating was wrong, the song traveled controversial territory. But Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely had a huge hit with ‘‘Slippin’ Around’’ in early 1949, topping the charts for seventeen weeks. Months later, Tillman’s version peaked at Number 5. To appease the ultraconservative country audience, who felt the song was missing a moralizing last verse, Tillman rushed out his own ‘‘answer song,’’ ‘‘I’ll Never Slip Around Again,’’ which warned of the consequences of stepping out on a spouse. It hit the charts three months after ‘‘Slippin’ Around.’’ Fifty years later, Tillman made amends in his own personal life, remarrying Margarete for the fourth time in 1999. He received great honors in his lifetime, being inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984. But when the news of his death from leukemia arrived, those who knew Tillman talked more about the man than the musician. Tillman died without enemies. ‘‘It was always fun to back Floyd,’’ said fiddler Johnny Gimble, who met Tillman in 1948. ‘‘Even when he was gettin’ up there in years, Floyd would have a ball. He’d forget something, but he’d just laugh and the audience would get a big kick out of it. I miss him already.’’

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T-BONE WALKER Architect of Electric Blues

t first Jimmie Vaughan seems a little overwhelmed by the question, as if he’s an Olympic swimmer who’s just been asked to describe the role of water in his sport. ‘‘How significant was T-Bone Walker to the evolution of the blues?’’ he repeats the question. ‘‘Well,’’ he says after a long pause, raising his index finger. ‘‘You look back at everyone who’s ever stood in front of a band playing the guitar and it all traces back to one man. T-Bone Walker was the first person to ever play blues on an electric guitar: How significant is that?’’ But Vaughan knows Walker’s contributions go deeper than having access to new technology. Leaving it at that is like lauding a brilliant author for being the first to write a book using a word processor. ‘‘T-Bone created a whole new language for the guitar,’’ says Vaughan, whose concise leads and impeccable sense of swing and rhythm show that his guitar speaks T-Bone fluently. He reaches for his 1951 Gibson hollow-body electric on the couch in his manager’s office on South Lamar; axe in hands, he seems more comfortable talking about Walker, whose work in the 1940s was as major a musical influence as Texas has produced. Vaughan starts playing riffs you’ve heard on records by the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, and Vaughan’s former Fabulous Thunderbirds and the conversation comes alive. ‘‘You’ve heard this one a hundred times before,’’ he says, playing the driving intro to ‘‘The Crawl,’’ a T-Bird mainstay. ‘‘That’s a T-Bone lick. Here’s another,’’ he says, strumming the harmonic chords that open Walker’s most enduring composition, ‘‘Call It Stormy Monday.’’ Vaughan then hits a note and sustains it with a finger wiggle à la B. B. King, performs a jazz-billy run like the ones Scotty Moore used to play with Elvis Presley, executes the

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bent-note double stops identified with Chuck Berry, then apes the choppy rhythms of nascent funk guitarist Jimmy Nolen of James Brown’s band. These licks all started with Walker, who was born in Linden and raised in Dallas. The electric guitar has been the defining instrument of the past fifty years, and T-Bone Walker was the first guitar hero. ‘‘You know how everyone was blown away when they first heard Jimi Hendrix?’’ Vaughan asks. ‘‘Well, imagine what it must’ve been like to hear T-Bone for the first time, when those riffs were brand-new.’’ Hendrix had contemporaries who were doing amazing things—Clapton, Jeff Beck, Link Wray, Buddy Guy—but before T-Bone there was no such thing as electric blues. He was the template for so many great guitarists who would follow. In Texas, a mecca of electric blues guitarists, you had Pee Wee Crayton of Austin, Orange’s Gatemouth Brown, Beaumont’s Johnny Winter. Dallas gave us Freddie King and the Vaughan brothers, Jimmie and Stevie Ray, and Houston could boast Albert Collins, Johnny ‘‘Guitar’’ Watson, Johnny Copeland, and Billy Gibbons, all carrying T-Bone’s torch. Like Louis Armstrong, perhaps his only rival in terms of American musical innovation, Walker was a born entertainer, who delivered flash with feeling. A former vaudeville dancer who shared stages with Bill ‘‘Bojangles’’ Robinson, among others, Walker had the nimble feet to match his hands. A razor-sharp dresser and silky smooth vocalist, he epitomized the slick uptown sophisticate. He held his guitar like a baby, perpendicular to his body, and caressed the strings on slower numbers. But his blond, hollow-bodied Gibson would suddenly transform into an acrobatic instrument, as T-Bone played it behind his head while he did splits. Unfortunately, there’s almost no film footage of Walker in his postwar prime. But witnesses have described an insatiable showman who bridged Cab Calloway’s wild-eyed swing to Chuck Berry’s propulsive strolls and Hendrix’s histrionics. T-Bone did almost everything Jimi did later—from exploiting feedback to playing with his teeth—but stopped at setting his guitar on fire. (An inveterate gambler, T-Bone didn’t want to blow his stake on replacements.) A true case of being ahead of his time, or at least too early for adequate documentation, T-Bone remains a woefully overlooked figure in the history of popular music. Such Chicago bluesmen as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf are bigger icons. And B. B. King has made a healthy living from the bag of tricks he learned from Walker’s early recordings. Meanwhile, the Martin Scorsese–produced six-part documentary The Blues made only passing mention of the genre’s most important guitarist. ‘‘It’s impossible to spend an hour in a blues club and not hear a dozen

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T-Bone inventions,’’ says Vaughan. ‘‘And half the players have no idea who they’re copying.’’ The way Vaughan found out about Walker in the early sixties was the way he found out about all his heroes, by tracing backwards. ‘‘I heard ‘Hideaway’ on the radio and bought a Freddie King record. And on the back of the record it said that he was influenced by T-Bone Walker, so I went out and got a T-Bone record.’’ A twelve-year-old Vaughan flipped for Walker instantly, then was amazed to find out, months later, that the guitar god was from the same Oak Cliff neighborhood that the Vaughans lived in. Walker had moved to l.a. in 1935, at age twenty-five, but he’d visit Dallas often. One evening in the mid-sixties, Vaughan met his idol at the Empire Ballroom on Hall Street in Dallas. ‘‘He wasn’t even on the bill. It was B. B. King, Freddie King, and Little Milton, but T-Bone had showed up to sit in on organ,’’ Vaughan recalls, with a giddiness that seems to never have subsided. ‘‘He was there at the back door with his two little granddaughters, and my jaw dropped. He was dressed to the nines, as always, and I said, ‘Man, you’re T-Bone Walker! I love your records.’’’ The legend made the kid’s day, talking to him for about ten minutes. Vaughan would see T-Bone several times over the years, until the great pioneer suffered a stroke on New Year’s Eve 1974 and died of bronchial pneumonia three months later. ‘‘He could hit a note like this,’’ Vaughan says, striking the bottom string, ‘‘and sustain it, and the women would fly out of their seats. He was the first guy who could do that.’’ And thus a million would-be guitar heroes were hatched. Aaron Thibeaux Walker grew up around music. His mother, Movelia, picked the guitar and sang the blues, and his stepfather, Marco Washington, played a variety of stringed instruments. A regular guest at the family’s house was the country blues great Blind Lemon Jefferson, who enlisted an eight-year-old T-Bone as his ‘‘lead boy,’’ to guide him from juke joints to street corners in Deep Ellum. You can’t get an education like that at Juilliard. ‘‘He had a jazz player’s instincts, but he was brought up in the blues,’’ says Vaughan. T-Bone’s first instrument was the banjo, which he preferred to the guitar because it was louder. But he made more tip money as a dancer and left Dallas as a teen to tour the South with medicine shows. He also played banjo and guitar with the Cab Calloway orchestra for a week—the gig was first prize in a talent contest—which led to a record deal with Columbia in 1929. But T-Bone, sounding like a pale imitation of blues crooner Leroy Carr, hadn’t

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yet found his identity when he recorded ‘‘Trinity River Blues’’ and ‘‘Wichita Falls’’ as Oak Cliff T-Bone. The 78 didn’t make much noise outside of Dallas. In the early thirties, Walker had a street act with Charlie Christian, an exDallasite living in Oklahoma City, who would be immortalized as jazz’s first great electric guitarist. Let that settle in: The two greatest guitar pioneers of the twentieth century were a pair of Texans who played together for tips on street corners in Oklahoma City. The pair were probably introduced to the electric guitar by Eddie Durham, the San Marcos native who made the first known amplified guitar recording on 1935’s ‘‘Hittin’ the Bottle’’ with the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra. Durham, better known as an arranger and composer (most notably with Count Basie in the forties), was among those who told Walker he needed to relocate to l.a. for more musical opportunities (a move also made by Texans Oscar Moore, Charles Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Johnny ‘‘Guitar’’ Watson, Pee Wee Crayton, and more). So in late 1935, Walker left his wife, Vida Lee, behind in Dallas and took off on Route 66, driving a car and towing another for an auto transport company. His first gig on the vaunted Central Avenue of black nightclubs was as dancer and emcee with Big Jim Wynn’s band. But even though he wasn’t playing guitar onstage, Walker was tinkering with amplification techniques. Hugh Gregory’s Roadhouse Blues book, which meticulously explores the roots of Stevie Ray Vaughan, quotes Wynn as saying that Walker ‘‘had a funny little box . . . a contraption he’d made himself.’’ It wasn’t until July 1942, however, that Walker played electric guitar on a record. Hired as a rhythm player for a session by bandleader Freddie Slack, Walker was given two spotlight turns, on ‘‘Mean Old World’’ and ‘‘I Got a Break, Baby.’’ When Walker interspersed crisply pronounced notes with trumpetlike slurs and yelps, the guitar lost its secondary status. Before Walker, the blues was a solo acoustic form. With amplification bringing the guitar up front, no longer to be drowned out by horns or drums, T-Bone laid the full-band framework that would rule r&b in the postwar decade and eventually spin off into the rock ’n’ roll combo. The electric guitar was invented in 1931, when George Beauchamp devised the so-called ‘‘frying pan’’ lap steel for Rickenbacker. The guitar featured an electromagnetic pickup in which a current passed through a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet, creating a field that amplified the steel strings’ vibrations. For the first few years after their introduction, amplified guitars were strictly the domain of Hawaiian steel guitarists, but that would change in 1936, when Gibson developed a hollow-bodied, Spanishstyled electric, the es150. At first, the idea of an electric guitar was scoffed at by bandleaders, who

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saw the invention as a novelty, unable to produce ‘‘authentic’’ sounds. The appeal to players, however, was that they could, at last, pick out melody lines that could be heard over a band. While in Benny Goodman’s band in the late thirties, Christian shut up the detractors with his complete mastery of the es150, which would come to be tagged ‘‘the Charlie Christian guitar.’’ (Sadly, Christian died from tuberculosis in 1942.) The years 1947–1948 would prove to be Walker’s landmark period. After signing with the Black & White label, led by ‘‘music first’’ mogul Ralph Bass, Walker and his topflight band recorded more than fifty titles in eighteen months, ranging from the raucous ‘‘T-Bone Boogie’’ to the pop ballad ‘‘I’m Still in Love with You’’ to the slow blues classic ‘‘Call It Stormy Monday.’’ Fifteen years later, a twelve-year-old white kid, sitting in his bedroom in T-Bone’s old neighborhood, was trying to duplicate Walker’s solos, trying to make the riffs part of his own musical lexicon. ‘‘I’d try to get into his head when I listened to his records,’’ Jimmie Vaughan says. ‘‘I’d wonder, ‘How did he get from here’’’—he says, strumming a series of repetitive chords—‘‘‘to here?’ ’’—a jazz-inflected arpeggio. The riffs Walker invented have become clichés, pounded into the ground by players who think they’re copying Duke Robillard. Nothing kills a thrill like hearing ‘‘Stormy Monday’’ by a band with three guitarists. You can go out, grab a snack, and be back before they’re done telling you that Tuesday’s just as bad. Walker’s innovations are so dyed into the blues/rock fabric that it’s hard to believe that this music was once revolutionary. But Jimmie Vaughan still remembers how he felt when he first heard T-Bone Walker. ‘‘I told myself that that’s what I wanted to do with my life,’’ Vaughan says. ‘‘[Hearing T-Bone] pretty much ruined any chance that I’d end up with a responsible job.’’ As he turns his es150 on its side, so the strings are perpendicular to his body, Vaughan plays another favorite lick by his hero. ‘‘Hear that tone?’’ he says. Indeed, the notes resonate fuller. ‘‘That’s why he played the guitar like this. Amazing, huh?’’ He’s no longer in his bedroom, but in his manager’s office. And he’s still trying to get inside T-Bone’s musical mind.

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ELLA MAE MORSE ‘‘You sing like a black girl’’

lla Mae Morse. Say that name and listen to the sass in those syllables. Hear the rhythm. Ella Mae Morse: Ella for the elastic vocal daring, Mae for the downhome ease, and Morse for the almost telepathic understanding that she brought to such jumpy hits of the forties as ‘‘Cow Cow Boogie,’’ ‘‘Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,’’ and ‘‘Get on Board, Little Chillun.’’ Ella Mae Morse. Sometimes a name does say it all. When they were booked on the same Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, Elvis Presley told Ella Mae that listening to her records taught him how to sing, but it was the Elvis-led rock ’n’ roll rebellion that would make Morse’s brand of big-band r&b pop almost obsolete. She ‘‘sang black’’ before sounding black was cool, and by the time the rest of the country had caught up, Morse was in her thirties, married to her third husband, and pregnant with the second of her six children. Although Morse, who died in 1999 at age seventy-five, made her last recording in 1957, the buxom belter performed regularly with a jazz trio until the late eighties. ‘‘I loved the music and just being around musicians, but I don’t miss a lot of the other junk,’’ Morse said in a 1996 phone interview from her home in Paso Robles, California. She spoke with the unpretentious spark that was the foundation of her singing style, but in her twilight years Morse was happy to stay at home and listen to her beloved Benny Goodman albums. ‘‘Nowadays you hear a lot about celebrity stalkers, but there have always been people that follow you around and stare. It used to give me the creeps sometimes,’’ said the singer who’s become something of a cult hero because her widespread success was so unjustifiably short-lived. But her music, often augmented by T-Bone Walker on guitar, holds up magnificently, as evi-

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denced by the vibrancy and vitality of Morse’s 1992 cd reissue in the Capitol Collectors Series. Morse was something of a cornerstone at Capitol, giving the label its first million-seller with ‘‘Cow Cow Boogie’’ in 1942, and bringing a young, smooth-singing piano player named Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole to the attention of label founders Glenn Wallichs and Johnny Mercer. ‘‘I was crazy about Nat, so I dragged Johnny and Glenn down to see him at some club in downtown l.a. and Johnny was just knocked out. Glenn didn’t think there was any commercial potential in Nat ‘King’ Cole,’’ Morse recalled with a laugh, ‘‘but those guys had a rule that if one of them was really behind someone they’d go ahead and sign them. They didn’t have to agree.’’ As Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole pioneered the cohesive album concept with Sings for Two in Love and crossed over to the white audience, Morse also was attracting a racially mixed crowd with such juke jivin’ numbers as ‘‘House of Blue Lights’’ and ‘‘Pig Foot Pete.’’ The original version of ‘‘Blue Lights,’’ now a standard, features Morse’s sassy spoken-word intro: ‘‘What’s that, Homey? If you think I’m goin’ dancin’ on a dime, your clock is tickin’ on the wrong time.’’ ‘‘People used to tell me, ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you sing like a black girl,’ and I’d wonder what other way is there to take that than as a great compliment?’’ Morse said. Born in the Dallas suburb of Mansfield, where her British father and Texan mother played drums and piano, respectively, in a jazz combo, Morse was always around music. She was nine when her parents divorced and her mother took her to live in Paris, Texas, where her informal musical education continued on a front porch near the store where Ella Mae would buy candy. Paris was segregated, and the store was right on the white/black border. ‘‘One day I heard someone playing a blues song that I knew,’’ she said, and as she stood and listened, the old black man called her over. The two sang songs together until Ella Mae’s mother came home from her job at a textile factory and fetched her. He called her ‘‘little white baby’’ and she called him ‘‘Uncle Joe,’’ and the unlikely singing partners sang together every afternoon until twelve-yearold Ella Mae and her mother moved to Dallas. ‘‘My parents didn’t understand racism. They wanted no part of that, and I was brought up to believe in equality and acceptance of others,’’ Morse said. A few months before her fourteenth birthday, Ella Mae and her mother went to the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas to audition for the Jimmy Dorsey band, whose singer had bolted after an argument with the bandleader. After persuading her mother to go along with the story that Ella Mae was nine-

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teen, Morse (who had the body of a nineteen-year-old) was hired on the spot and soon found herself singing at the New Yorker Hotel with the Dorsey band. ‘‘I was pretty intimidated by the whole thing,’’ Morse said. ‘‘All the celebrities in the audience made me nervous, and I never could get in the groove.’’ After a disastrous radio appearance, when Morse sang the risqué version of the first number by mistake, then forgot the words to the second song, she was canned by Dorsey and replaced by Helen O’Connell. ‘‘I was devastated,’’ Morse said. ‘‘I was just so young and I’d never really known failure before, but for it to happen up there in the public eye, in New York of all places, was just too much.’’ After Ella Mae recovered in Dallas for a couple of years, the Morses moved to San Diego, where Ella Mae’s mother had a brother. It was there at the Pacific Square Ballroom that something good finally came of Morse’s stint as Dorsey’s ‘‘girl singer.’’ She met up with Dorsey’s former piano player Freddie Slack, who had put together his own band and was looking for a singer for an upcoming session at the brand-new Capitol Records label. In Ella Mae Morse, Slack found everything he was looking for, and then some. But remembering her bouts with nervousness, he wasn’t sure she could swing in the studio. After expressing this concern to Mercer, who was producing the first session, Slack led his orchestra and vocalist Morse in a ‘‘runthrough’’ of ‘‘Cow Cow Boogie,’’ which had originally been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. When the rehearsal take was through, Mercer was ecstatic. ‘‘That’s a take!’’ he shouted. Unknown to the band or the singer, Mercer had the tape rolling and captured the loose rollick that would soon hit Number 1 on the charts. ‘‘I started crying when Johnny said it was a take, and I told him, ‘But I can do it better.’’’ Mercer’s answer was a succinct ‘‘No, you can’t.’’ Throughout her short, yet remarkable, heyday, Morse continued to make music that couldn’t be sung any better, whether she was singing all over the anvil beat of ‘‘The Blacksmith Blues’’ (1952), her last hit, or burying Tennessee Ernie Ford in their duet on ‘‘Hog-Tied over You.’’ And she kept hearing the same thing, even from unlikely sources. When he first met Ella Mae, Sammy Davis Jr. stood there with his mouth open. There was no way the singer of hard-swinging r&b numbers was white. ‘‘Ella, baby, I thought you were one of us!’’ Davis exclaimed. ‘‘I am,’’ was the swift reply from Ella Mae Morse.

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SLY STONE The Funk Grows in Texas

sually you’re surprised, one way or the other, when someone famous turns fifty. You thought he or she was older or younger. It made perfect sense, however, when Sylvester ‘‘Sly Stone’’ Stewart hit the big 5-0 on March 17, 1994. I remember thinking, at the time, that forty-nine would’ve been too young and fifty-one too old for the musical genius who, as leader of Sly and the Family Stone, practically invented funk music and influenced such artists as George Clinton, Rick James, and Prince. Sly just seems to wear the big, even numbers as naturally as he once wore star-spangled headbands and purple cowboy outfits. Not many people know this, but Sly Stone was born in Dallas and lived in Denton until the age of six, when his father, K. C., moved the family to Vallejo, California. Like his essential thumb-popping bassist/cousin Larry Graham, a native of Beaumont, Sly sang in his family’s gospel group from infancy to puberty. After that, he kept taking it higher and higher until there was no place to go but down. Though he saluted his Texas heritage with the yodelin’ ‘‘Spaced Cowboy’’ on There’s a Riot Goin’ On, his brilliant mess from 1971, Sly is more commonly associated with the Bay Area. There, he first made a name for himself as the teenage producer of pop hits by the Beau Brummels (‘‘Laugh Laugh’’) and the Mojo Men (‘‘Sit Down I Think I Love You’’). During that earlyto-mid-sixties period, Sly also produced such tracks as ‘‘C’mon and Swim’’ by Bobby Freeman and the original version of ‘‘Somebody to Love’’ by the Great Society, Grace Slick’s pre–Jefferson Airplane group. K. C. Stewart, an ex-musician and sometime preacher, encouraged his children to pursue music careers, and he even worked as tour manager when Sly formed the Family Stone with his brother Freddie, sister Rose, and cousin Graham. Trumpet player Cynthia Robinson, drummer Greg Errico,

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and sax player Jerry Martini rounded out this group that erased the boundaries of race, sex, and musical styles back when Prince and the Revolution were wearing swaddling clothes. George Clinton was also wearing diapers, but that’s another story. The Family Stone’s eternal moment came at the Woodstock festival on August 16, 1969, when they tore up a crowd of four hundred thousand with a wicked version of ‘‘I Want to Take You Higher.’’ Because of transportation problems and scheduling snafus beyond their control, Sly and the band didn’t go on at Woodstock until 3:30 a.m. When they revved up their turbulent soul revue, though, it became midnight all over again. In later months and years—in less cosmic venues, however—this concept of timelessness didn’t hold. It seemed that Sly never wanted to take the stage until 3 a.m. If he showed up at all. In his return to the Dallas area, headlining the first night of the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville in September 1969, Sly kept nearly fifty thousand fans (and dozens of relatives) waiting for nearly two hours as he sat backstage in his limo, doing God knows what. ‘‘We were afraid there would be a riot or something,’’ recalls Angus Wynne, one of the festival’s promoters. ‘‘We were pleading for him to go onstage, but he wouldn’t get out of that limo until he was good and ready.’’ In 1970, at the height of his popularity, Sly missed more than twenty-five shows. The party life was starting to take hold, and, not coincidentally, Sly dried up creatively. He got married onstage at Madison Square Garden in 1974, probably to sell some tickets and get some good publicity for a change. But the ensuing marriage-inspired lp Small Talk stiffed with the public and was panned by critics. Five months after being married by Sly’s uncle, Bishop Stewart of Denton, in front of nineteen thousand concertgoers, bride Kathy Silva filed for divorce and took custody of the couple’s son. Amid various drug busts and lawsuits, it all started slip-slip-slipping away for the man whose ‘‘different strokes for different folks’’ line from ‘‘Everyday People’’ became a mantra for freedom and multiculturalism. In the band’s formative years, Sly would constantly scribble ideas into a series of notebooks, but by the end, it was all he could do just to show up, pressed between two bodyguards. If this is starting to read more like an obituary than a birthday acknowledgment, that’s because ‘‘Sly Stone’’—the unpredictable musical visionary who brought poetry to dance music, anger to pop, and soul to nursery rhymes—pretty much died in the late seventies. He burned brilliantly, but for only a very short time. His last studio album, which wasn’t very good, came out in 1982. His next

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album, which won’t be very good, has been rumored to be on the way for the past decade. This from an artist who released three classic albums from 1968 to 1971. What if you only get so much juice, and you can either pace yourself over a long career or use it all up as fast as you want to? Usually the brilliant flameouts, from Phil Spector to John Fogerty to Chuck Berry, meet at the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner. That’s where Sly was last seen and (barely) heard from. It was January 1993, and he and the Family Stone were inducted into the Hall. Wearing a turquoise leather jumpsuit that looked like it had been hanging in a closet since 1978, Sly didn’t look so good. He made his way to the podium, weakly, frailly, said something about how he’d be back, and then slowly picked his way across the stage. The audience stood and clapped wildly, as much in pity for the present as in awe for the past. You want to blame the drugs or the ‘‘distractions,’’ as his people call them, but it goes deeper than that. His brother Freddie and sister Rose returned to gospel, to the mother church, as did cousin Larry Graham, so it probably wasn’t the temptations of the road that led Sly astray. Maybe it was the beat that kept going in his head when everyone else was fast asleep. At first, it drove him to excellence, but after a while, it started making him crazy. What kind of person would rather sit in a limo than go out onstage where fifty thousand people are ready to applaud his every ‘‘uh-huh’’? Ever wonder what’s going through that head? In 1948 a four-year-old boy stood in front of the congregation of a church in Denton and sang ‘‘On the Battlefield of My Lord,’’ and maybe deep in the hearts of a few parishioners was the belief that this baby would one day sing his simple song for the world. That four-year-old went on to forever change the landscape of popular music. And maybe now Sylvester Stewart’s talent looks like a big waste, but for a time he did take us higher. It was only for a brief, mist-shaded moment, but sometimes that’s all you get.

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ERNEST TUBB The Original E.T.

rnest Tubb, the father-protector of pure Texas honky-tonk music, died of emphysema on September 9, 1984, but since he created a spirit, he gets to live forever. A song like ‘‘Walking the Floor over You,’’ which ‘‘The Texas Troubadour’’ recorded in Dallas in 1941, is so simple in message, so basic in structure. Yet, you not only hear that song, you can practically see it as well. Many of Tubb’s songs, including ‘‘Thanks a Lot,’’ ‘‘Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin,’’ and ‘‘Soldier’s Last Letter,’’ set a time and place as if there are visual dimensions to those nasal tones. You’ve been to that place that he’s singing about, but it’s either been modernized beyond recognition or it went out of business a few years ago. It’s good to go back, though, even for as long as it takes Ernest Tubb to sing ‘‘I Love You Because.’’ E.T., they used to call him, and many of his die-hard fans still do. It’ll take more than a billion-dollar Spielberg movie to make longtime country fans think of calling anyone or anything else E.T. He wasn’t flashy, but that was the point. Ernest Tubb will long be justifiably revered because he stayed true to his musical vision and brought Texas honky-tonk to the masses without sweetening it for easier consumption. In 1947 he became the first country artist to headline at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, but he played every roadhouse in Texas that year, too. Tubb and the Texas Troubadours played dance music, pure and simple. But when they started drawing rowdy crowds, especially in the oil towns of East Texas, they had to turn up the guitars and beat on the drums so the music could be heard over the chattering crowd. Amplification is at the core of the honkytonk style, and Tubb and his Troubadours were one of the first country bands to feature an electric guitar.

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Another change credited to Tubb was replacing the term ‘‘hillbilly music’’ with ‘‘country and Western.’’ ‘‘Hillbilly’’ was considered a derogatory term at the time, especially if, like Tubb, you came from the flatlands of Texas (born in Crisp, he grew up with a succession of relatives in West Texas after his parents divorced). ‘‘If you call me a hillbilly, you’d better say it with a smile,’’ Ernest would say. He was never seen in public without wearing a tailored suit and a tengallon hat. By brushing a layer of Texas grit on country music, Tubb expanded the range of what was heard on the Grand Ole Opry, which he joined in 1943. Tubb was the great ambassador of honky-tonk. ‘‘The thing I always liked about E.T.’s style is that he brought a lot of blues to country music,’’ says Austin musician Junior Brown, who wrote and recorded ‘‘My Baby Don’t Dance to Nothin’ but Ernest Tubb,’’ perhaps the most heartfelt tribute song since the Buddy Holly ode ‘‘American Pie.’’ Ernest Tubb was inspired to play music by the blue yodels of Jimmie Rodgers, so it was only natural that he would keep the Delta influence in his country. Plus, Tubb featured guitarists like Billy Byrd and Leon Rhodes, who were always interested in what T-Bone Walker was up to on the other side of town. Tubb never did meet ‘‘the Singing Brakeman,’’ though they both lived in San Antonio in 1933, the year of Rodgers’s death. Soon after, Ernest impressed Rodgers’s widow, Carrie, with his dedication to the Rodgers style, and she not only gave the upstart her husband’s old guitar, she helped him obtain a recording contract with Victor Records in 1936. After he had his tonsils removed in 1939, Tubb couldn’t yodel very well, so he switched to making hard-edged country dance music. Junior Brown was lucky enough to meet his idol several times through the years, first at the Hitching Post in Albuquerque in 1969. ‘‘He brought a lot of dignity to country music, and you can truly say that Ernest Tubb never sold out,’’ Brown says. ‘‘He stuck to his style, no matter what else was hip at the time, and whenever we’d talk, he’d emphasize how important it is for the younger players to keep country music going.’’ And Junior Brown has been carrying out that mission with his ‘‘guit-steel’’ contraption. ‘‘E.T. is not the only influence in my music, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of another musician who’s had such a profound effect on me,’’ Brown says. ‘‘Even more than whatever I learned from him musically, Ernest Tubb taught me a lot about taking pride in country music, the real country music.’’ Brown’s sense of authenticity was tested when Marty Stuart, then a Nashville star, asked Brown if he wanted to come on board Tubb’s old tour bus,

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which Stuart had just bought. ‘‘Nah,’’ Brown answered. ‘‘The last time I was on that bus, so was Ernest Tubb.’’ Tubb, who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1965, owned a landmark record store in downtown Nashville, just a couple blocks from the Ryman Auditorium. An unknown Loretta Lynn performed at the store, a scene re-created in Coal Miner’s Daughter, with Tubb playing himself. Perhaps the most fitting vignette about Ernest Tubb comes from John Morthland’s book The Best of Country Music. Morthland last saw Tubb in December 1981. At the time, E.T. had found an audience with roots-crazy punk rockers, and he was playing in a Manhattan club full of kids in Mohawks and leather jackets. According to Morthland, he was ‘‘singing to the trendies with more vigor and enthusiasm than you’d dream possible from a man pushing 70, and not altering his show a bit for this audience, either. They had to take Ernest Tubb the way everyone else did or not take him at all.’’ So let’s flip the guitar, as E.T. did thousands of times at the end of a performance, and give a hearty ‘‘thanks’’ to the honky-tonk pioneer who helped preserve a style that continues to define his home state to fans the world over.

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ARIZONA DRANES The Gospel Beat

rizona Juanita Dranes went to Chicago from Texas in June 1926 accompanied by a note that read as if it had been pinned to her sweater. ‘‘Since she is Deprived Of Her Natural Sight, the Lord Has Given Her A Spiritual Sight that all Churches Enjoy,’’ read the introduction from Dallas church elder E. M. Page to Elmer Fearn, owner of the Okeh Phonograph Company’s Chicago branch. ‘‘She Loyal and Obedient, Our Prayers Assend for her.’’ Blind, uneducated, sickly, and poor, this ‘‘holy roller’’ must’ve seemed quite lost at the big-city recording studio. But when she sat at the piano and started thumping out a sinful rhythm, while wailing about the glories of salvation, Dranes made musical history—the kind not always written about in books, but passed on and modified by a succession of great players. The sanctified Church of God in Christ song leader infused her gospel songs with barrelhouse flair and unleashed a sharp vocal that quivered like an arrow on impact. The template Dranes created with six tracks in one day came to be called ‘‘the gospel beat’’; it’s still played against a polyrhythm of hand claps in black church services today. It’s not known if the style was an invention of Dranes or something she nicked from the ‘‘fast Texas’’ boogie-woogie pianists who played in Deep Ellum, not far from Dranes’s State-Thomas neighborhood. No sacred-singing, female piano player had ever been recorded before Dranes, and ‘‘Father of Gospel’’ Thomas Dorsey didn’t record his first ‘‘Christian blues’’ until 1928. Among those who forever changed her approach to church music after hearing Dranes was Roberta Martin, the Arkansas native who would become the most famous pianist of gospel’s Golden Age (1940s to 1960s). But where fifty thousand mourners turned up for Martin’s memorial ser-

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vice in Chicago in 1969, Dranes died in obscurity six years earlier in Los Angeles. There were no newspaper obituaries, no tributes to this most influential of all female Texas musicians, whose stylistic offspring include such rock ’n’ rollers as Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. Even the writer of the liner notes for Document’s 1993 collection of Dranes’s complete recorded works (twenty-two tracks from 1926–1929) had no idea what had become of his subject. ‘‘For all we know,’’ writer Ken Romanowski concludes in the album notes, ‘‘Dranes may still be in a storefront church somewhere, fanning the flames of a sanctified fire.’’ Actually, she’s been gone more than forty years. In 1963, Dranes died of cerebral arteriosclerosis in a Long Beach, California, hospital. According to the death certificate, Dranes was born April 4, 1894, but she may have been born before that. The 1900 U.S. Census, which had her living in a racially mixed neighborhood in Greenville, Texas, the middle child of five raised by widowed Cora Dranes, lists Arizona’s birth date as May 1889. Census takers of the time were notorious for inaccuracy (her name was spelled ‘‘Arzona Draines’’), so this newfound information doesn’t necessarily disprove the death certificate, especially since her birth year was entered as 1891 in the 1910 census, when she was a student at the Texas Institute for Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Colored Youth on Bull Creek Road in Austin. Though the age limit at the school was nineteen, perhaps music teacher Lizzie S. Wells fudged a bit to keep a prized student with her longer. At any rate, when Dranes stepped into the Chicago studio for the first time in 1926, she was much older than the twenty or twenty-one years reported by most bios. Dranes’s recording career was over by 1929, but she continued playing at Church of God in Christ services. She’s believed to have lived in the early 1930s in Memphis, where the cogic denomination, founded in 1907 by Charles Mason, is headquartered. She is believed to have later lived in Oklahoma City, where ninety-yearold Helen Davis recalls Dranes playing conventions for the church. ‘‘She’d play before Bishop Mason spoke,’’ recalls Davis, a Lott native who now lives in Los Angeles. ‘‘She’d get the whole place shouting. She was a blind lady, see, and she’d let the spirit overtake her. She’d jump up from that piano bench when it hit her.’’ Dranes’s last known public concert was in 1947 in Cincinnati. The next year she moved to Los Angeles, where she spent the last fifteen years of her life. l.a. was where her mentor, the Reverend Samuel Crouch, had moved from Fort Worth. The great uncle of singer/pastor Andrae Crouch founded the Emmanuel Church of God in Christ in South Central l.a. in the thirties. ‘‘She wasn’t a member of Emmanuel,’’ recalls longtime parishioner

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eighty-seven-year-old Willie Bell Lewis. ‘‘But Sister Dranes would play there whenever she visited. She was a big star in gospel music.’’ Lewis says she had no idea Dranes had been living in l.a. at the time of her death. In a way, it was fitting that Dranes would die in the City of Angels, where the hard gospel style she perfected was virtually created in 1906. At the integrated Azusa Street Revival, churchgoers were urged to lose all control, even speaking in tongues, when the Holy Ghost was received. Led by black preacher William J. Seymour, the fervent foot-stomping, sanctified event ushered in the Pentecostal movement. Azusa Street participant Charles Mason formed the Church of God in Christ in Memphis. Hatching a number of gospel greats, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (who based her blazing guitar style on Dranes’s piano style), Blind Willie Johnson, Marion Williams, Margaret Allison of the Angelic Gospel Singers, and Ernestine Washington and Andrae Crouch, cogic, as it would be called, would go on to become the largest black Pentecostal church in the United States. But Dranes, the denomination’s first musical star, is now almost completely forgotten except by the few still living who saw her perform. There is no mention of her in the official cogic history. Having to rely on faded memories, incomplete county records (especially concerning African Americans), and artifacts that were long ago unloaded at garage sales, musical archaeologists are left with the bones from a magnificent feast of soul and innovation. But the biographical blanks only make Dranes’s music less cluttered with trivial concerns. She remains more spirit than human, and when she sings, ‘‘He is my story, He is my song,’’ that’s all you need to know about the singer. Like the best gospel performers, she was an otherworldly vessel fueled by faith, a pet of the force that distributes talent discriminately. They can’t be contained, the voices that are unified, sanctified, and possessed by a fiery spirit, and so they burst out—reaching, reaching, reaching for heaven’s gate.

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FREDDIE KING The Stinging Leads Heard ’cross the Atlantic

f you’ve spent any time in a Texas blues club, you’ve heard not only T-Bone Walker but Freddie King, whose influence goes beyond notes, style, and material. The ‘‘Texas Cannonball’’ is there in the stinging leads that pierce precaution and in the low-slung blues breakers that remind everyone to tip the waitress or bartender. King’s been dead since 1976, the victim of heart failure at age forty-two, yet he’s still alive in the growling defiance of lastcall favorite ‘‘Goin’ Down,’’ and he lives in the raw tenderness of a bluesman’s regret. When King sang ‘‘Have you ever loved a woman so much that you tremble in pain?’’ you could be certain that this huge, soulful man had, so it was easier to admit that so had you. Like the comfort zone marked by the smell of good barbecue, the spirit of Freddie King (or ‘‘Freddy,’’ as it was spelled in the early years) engulfs blues joints. He practically stamped the walls with his outline, so massive was his stage presence in form and function. Texas blues is about loving all kinds of music with guts, whether it’s country, jazz, or r&b, and it’s about respecting the past while blazing new trails. Although Walker invented electric blues, it was King who best revved it up for the rock crowd. Moving from Texas to Chicago with his family at age sixteen (then back to Texas in his thirties), Freddie King merged the most vibrant characteristics of both regional styles and became the biggest guitar hero of the mid-sixties British blues revivalists, who included Eric Clapton, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, and Peter Green–era Fleetwood Mac. Closer to home, this ‘‘Country Boy’’ with urban intensity could count such guitarists as Stevie and Jimmie Vaughan, Bill Campbell, and Denny Freeman among his disciples. He also had a big fan in Leon Russell, who signed Freddie to his Shelter label in 1970 and played the great piano part on ‘‘Goin’

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Down.’’ Look at Walker as Jim Brown, the original fleet bruiser, and King as Gale Sayers, the fabulous juke-stepper who took the running-back position to new sensational heights. But just as Sayers tore out his knee and his career by taking one impossible cut too many, King’s tireless appetite for life, which included countless late-night/early-morning jams, probably had a lot to do with shortening his life. ‘‘It was an untimely tragedy, a major loss,’’ said former Armadillo World Headquarters owner Eddie Wilson. ‘‘When he was alive, he was the most alive human being you’ve ever seen. He just seemed so young and healthy even a few months before he passed away.’’ During a twenty-year recording career, King registered only one Top 40 hit, when ‘‘Hide Away’’ peaked at Number 29 on the Billboard singles chart in 1961. But he was a sensation at hippie rock clubs all over the United States, from the Fillmore East to the Fillmore West. And he always stole the show in the European festivals. The Armadillo is best known today as the place where Willie Nelson brought the beer-drinking rednecks and pot-smoking hippies together. But in the seventies it was, simply, ‘‘the House That Freddie Built.’’ King always packed the place, sometimes four nights in a row, and he always sold more beer than anyone else, because beer just tasted colder when Freddie was playing searing guitar leads. King showed just how powerful an electric guitar could be. Quite simply, you would go see Freddie to have your ass kicked. The first time King played the Armadillo, in 1970, soon after it had opened, he and Wilson agreed to a fifty-fifty deal, the hacker’s split. But even after King became one of the club’s biggest draws, he never renegotiated his take. He just lived to tear it up in front of a crowd convinced they were seeing God. ‘‘There was nobody, and I mean nobody, who could play the guitar better than Freddie King. And there was nobody could sing better. He was just a big bear full of talent, and pity the fool who tried to out-flash him,’’ Wilson said. King’s former bassist Bill Willis remembered one young hotshot l.a. guitar slinger who found out the hard way that you don’t mess with the King. ‘‘This kid, he came up there with a wild look in his eyes, and he just took off,’’ Willis said. ‘‘And Freddie’s over there, smiling, saying ‘Go on, man.’ And the kid just kept playing and playing like it was his big night. Well, when he finally played himself out, it was Freddie’s turn, and he just buried the kid. I wouldn’t be surprised if that guy sold his guitar the next day. When Freddie

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felt that he’d been called out, the intensity burned a little harder, and he just tore it up.’’ As a guitar player, King could be the embodiment of ferocity, but Willis remembers the bandleader as a laid-back fellow offstage. ‘‘Back in those days, there’d be some ornery cats in the blues field and a lot of big egos, but Freddie was different,’’ Willis said. ‘‘He just had so much humanity inside him. When we were recording, he’d never say, ‘Why don’t you play this bass line instead of that one?’ His whole thing was getting the feeling of the song, and all the other musicians were responsible for getting into it on their own. We’d do a take, and if it wasn’t what he was looking for, he’d just say, ‘That wasn’t the right feeling; let’s do it again.’ There were never any instructions. It was all intuitive.’’ Willis played on the first King album, Freddy King Sings, for Federal Records of Cincinnati in 1960 and recalls those sessions, arranged by piano player Sonny Thompson, as magic. ‘‘Have You Ever Loved a Woman?,’’ ‘‘Hide Away,’’ ‘‘You’ve Got to Love Her with a Feeling,’’ and ‘‘I Love the Woman,’’ each a blues-bar standard (with ‘‘I Love the Woman’’ cited by Clapton as the song that persuaded him to play the blues), all were recorded on the same day. The money spent for studio time for King on November 26, 1960, in Cincinnati is the electric-blues counterpart to the twenty-four dollars that bought Manhattan. Willis, who currently plays the bass parts on a Hammond B-3 organ in Jimmie Vaughan’s band, said two things set King’s guitar style apart. First, there was his infusion of country picking into blues numbers. ‘‘Freddie could’ve been a great country guitarist,’’ Willis said. But hearing King’s version of ‘‘Remington Ride,’’ written as a steel guitar showcase by Herb Remington, makes it plain a correction is in order: King was a great country guitarist. The other most remarkable aspect of King’s playing was the way his solos seemed to take on the characteristics of his vocals. ‘‘Sometimes the guitar parts were like a second singer,’’ Willis said of the way King bent the string into a wail or played chords that had a breathy quality. Perhaps because of this ‘‘vocal-lead’’ style of guitar playing, King specialized in instrumentals that generally had a lot more swagger and swing than the rest of the genre. Even without lyrics, such numbers as ‘‘San-Ho-Zay,’’ ‘‘The Stumble,’’ and ‘‘In the Open’’ (Stevie Ray Vaughan’s set-opener for years) set a vivid scenario. Chief among King’s wordless classics, however, is ‘‘Hide Away,’’ which has been the compulsory blues instrumental for over forty years. If you’ve spent any time in Texas blues clubs, you’ve heard it. Playing ‘‘Hide Away’’ is like showing your license to play the blues, and al-

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though the tune is a collage of riffs from Hound Dog Taylor, ‘‘Peter Gunn,’’ and ‘‘The Walk,’’ Freddie King made the track all his own. ‘‘Hide Away’’ is not about ownership or credit; it’s about that feeling, man. It’s about digging into your soul with your fingers and pulling out something you didn’t know you had. It’s about taking a fifty-fifty split with life and getting the most out of every minute, every note.

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RONNIE DAWSON The Blond Bomber

o performer ever seized a second coming, a new start, so completely. Ronnie Dawson, who had recorded such rockabilly classics as ‘‘Action Packed’’ and ‘‘Rockin’ Bones’’ in Dallas in the late fifties, was tracked down in 1987 by a British record collector who wanted to include an ancient Dawson track on a compilation. ‘‘What I really want to do,’’ Dawson told Barney Koumis, ‘‘is play over there.’’ Dawson, who died of cancer in November 2003 at age sixty-four, was hailed a hero at his first concert overseas. Unlike most other vintage rock ’n’ rollers, who play perfunctory sets on the way to the merchandise/autograph booth, Dawson was electrifying, spraying the air with guitar licks, leaping from drum risers, infusing his old songs with new purpose. The skinny kid tagged ‘‘the Blond Bomber’’ in his Big D Jamboree days in Dallas might have been pushing fifty, but he was pushing it hard, man. The term ‘‘rockabilly’’ was invented to describe the spectacular midfifties collision between blues-based rock ’n’ roll and the hard-core country music of the day. Rockabilly was where the foot stomp met the yelp to create a glorious moan, but since the draft-day death of young Elvis in 1959 and the 1960 car crash that killed Eddie Cochran and injured Gene Vincent, the genre slowly has evolved to the point where it’s now more about hairstyles, fashion, showy dance steps, and a steady stream of clichés such as ‘‘Go, cat, go!’’ But that rockin’ rooster Ronnie D. Dawson was the real deal, pumping out music so ageless that he could’ve had a side career endorsing vitality products. Dawson credited clean living and a satisfied mind with his vigorous presentation at a time when most of his contemporaries are either dead or out to lounge. ‘‘I think a lot of the old guys got ripped off so bad that

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it made them bitter,’’ he said in 1996. ‘‘In the early days, the business was stacked against the musician. It may still be that way. I don’t know, because I never really had much money to rip off.’’ Dawson was the nicest, most humble guy you could meet, right until he tore a hole into your chest with a relentless array of machine-gun riffs and supercharged vocals. Dawson was mere rockabilly act like Robert De Niro is an Italian actor— there’s that, and there’s so much more. His 1994 album Monkey Beat (which includes the entirety of 1988’s Still a Lot of Rhythm) contains a few standard ’billy breadsticks such as ‘‘Crazy Shoes,’’ ‘‘This Is the Night,’’ and the Reverend Horton Heat’s ‘‘Rockin’ Dog,’’ but even those relative ho-hummers sound a little more soulful than the usual gabardine rockers. It’s on the rougher-hewn tunes such as ‘‘Up Jumped the Devil’’ and ‘‘Little Mixed Up’’ that Dawson really marks his turf. The explosion of passion is reminiscent of Jerry Lee Lewis’s remarkably raw and gutsy Live at the Star Club (1964), which also featured a backup band of roots-crazed Europeans. The thing that long has distinguished Texas music for the world is the way the blues seem to creep into everything, from Ernest Tubb’s honkytonk music to Buddy Holly’s melodic rock and even Trini Lopez’s hardstrumming folk pop. The blues are in full effect on Monkey Beat, and you gotta hand it to the Limeys for being the ones to notice. At the time of this comeback, Dawson was making most of his money singing jingles (he was the voice of Hungry Jack pancakes, among others) and spending much of his free time serving as a mentor for the burgeoning Dallas rockabilly scene, especially for Heat, who covered several Dawson songs. ‘‘Even though I kept a lower profile for a while, I never did give up the ghost,’’ Dawson said. ‘‘I always kinda hoped it would be like this; I knew it would just be a matter of getting the right break.’’ Blues-tinged rockabilly has been his main emphasis throughout his nearly forty-year career, but Dawson also has followed other musical endeavors such as joining the Levee Singers, who were Dallas’s answer to the Kingston Trio, from 1961 to 1968. Dawson said his highlight with that group was opening for Count Basie at the University of Texas’s Gregory Gym in the mid-sixties. ‘‘I did the folk thing for a while, and I also had a pretty good country-rock band called the Steel Rail Band from ’69 until around ’74,’’ Dawson recalled, ‘‘but that jumpin’ rhythm and blues has always been dearest to my heart.’’ In the early sixties, Dawson was signed to the r&b division of Columbia Records under the name Commonwealth Jones. That deal yielded only one single, ‘‘Do Do Do,’’ which didn’t make the charts. Dawson also worked as a

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session musician, playing drums on the hits ‘‘Hey, Paula’’ by Paul and Paula and Bruce Channel’s ‘‘Hey! Baby’’ (which also features Delbert McClinton on harmonica). Spending his earliest years in Corsicana, where his father owned a ‘‘fillin’ station,’’ Dawson moved with his family to Waxahachie when the business folded. Small world that it is, Dawson’s first friend in Waxahachie was Bill Ham, who went on to a mega-successful career managing ZZ Top and Clint Black. ‘‘Our backyards connected, and Bill kinda took me under his wing,’’ Dawson said. ‘‘But he was actually better friends with my father. They used to go coon hunting together.’’ Dawson’s father, Pinky, led a Western swing band, the Manhattan Merrymakers, while Ronnie was a small boy, but the elder Dawson quit the business after being seriously injured in a car crash that killed two of his bandmates. ‘‘We moved around a lot, and my dad always sought out the town’s musicians and did a little jamming, but he never really got back into an official band,’’ Dawson said. Less than a year out of high school, Ronnie was one of the stars of the Big D Jamboree, helped by a regional hit of his cover of a Johnny Dollar song, ‘‘Action Packed.’’ Sounding like a teenage girl, the high-pitched Dawson punctuated the rollicking ditty with spoken jive such as ‘‘Give me the downbeat, Mastro’’ [sic] and ‘‘You hear me, I said ‘action-packed.’’’ Dawson received a lot of encouragement in the early years from Gene Vincent, who was living in Dallas and trying to get his career back on track. ‘‘Gene was a real good guy, and he wanted me to go on tour with him, but I could see that him and his band were burnin’ it at both ends, so I chose to stay at home,’’ Dawson said. It turned out to be a good thing, too, because Vincent and those latest Blue Caps weren’t drawing too well, and they ended up being stranded in Missouri without money. For Dawson, the temptations of fame and fortune were never enough to lead him into a situation that he didn’t feel comfortable with. ‘‘I like working with nice people and playing for nice people,’’ Dawson said, sounding a little like Andy of Mayberry. Maybe that’s not as wild as setting pianos on fire or marrying your cousin, but Dawson gladly took the hand he was dealt. Neil Young might have sung that ‘‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away,’’ but Dawson proved that you don’t have to do either. You can just follow your heart, pace yourself, and make the best music of your career in your fifties and sixties. Dawson performed for the last time on March 29, 2003. Stricken with inoperable cancer, which had spread from his tongue to his lungs and throughout his body, Dawson took the stage a frail skeleton.

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Fans in the audience, as well as Dawson’s Austin-based backing band, High Noon, had tears in their eyes. Everybody knew the elder statesman of Texas rockabilly didn’t have much time left. But when he plugged in his guitar and started ripping into the lead of ‘‘Red Hot Mama,’’ he made everybody forget just how sick he was. ‘‘It was the most incredible display of courage I’ve ever seen,’’ said Steve Wertheimer, whose Continental Club helped organize Dawson’s finale. ‘‘I love you all!’’ Dawson said on that cold March afternoon at Fiesta Gardens, his last words onstage. ‘‘And we’re the richer for it!’’ a female fan called back.

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BILLY JOE SHAVER ‘‘The second time I done it on my own’’

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hen Billy Joe Shaver gives directions to his modest house on the outskirts of Waco, he says to disregard the handwritten sign on his front door. ‘‘Please do not disturb I haven’t slept in two days,’’

it says. ‘‘That’s just so some ol’ drunks don’t come by at five in the morning to talk,’’ Shaver explains. ‘‘’Course I used to be one of ’em, so I really can’t complain too much.’’ The self-effacing ‘‘lovable loser and no-account boozer’’ left the bottle behind long ago and returned to his honky-tonk hero status with a stunning 2001 album, The Earth Rolls On (New West). The old chunk of coal has become a diamond in the eyes of critics, who are gushing over Shaver like they haven’t since 1993’s Tramp on Your Street. Fans are packing his shows and lining up afterward to shake his two-fingered right hand and give him homemade gifts. But the troubadour in the blue work shirt, whose face is the map of Texas music, can’t fully enjoy the revival. He doesn’t even listen to the record because hearing it just reminds him of the hole in his band, the hollow in his heart, where his son Eddy used to be. The thirty-eight-year-old ex-prodigy, who started playing professionally with his dad at age twelve with a guitar Dickey Betts gave him, succumbed to a heroin overdose on December 31, 2000. When Billy Joe first got the call from Waco police at three a.m., he said there was a mistake: his son was in Austin. But Eddy and his new wife had checked into the Lexington Motel off i-35 hours after receiving an advance to record a solo album for Antone’s Records. ‘‘We knew going in that it was our last record together,’’ Shaver says. ‘‘So we worked really hard to make it a good ’un. I really think that Eddy did some of his best playing ever on this record.’’ The theme of the album, which

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opens with the positively bouncing ‘‘Love Is So Sweet,’’ is that life is hard, but worth it. Often accused by Texas singer-songwriter purists of overplaying, Eddy shows relative restraint, finger painting the moods of songs such as ‘‘Star of My Heart,’’ which his father wrote in 2000 while Eddy was in treatment for heroin addiction. The album ends in soaring possibility as the guitarist finally cuts loose on the title track about finding a light in the darkness of tragedy. A great singer leaves behind his songs and his voice, but when amazing guitarists die, they’re gone and all the posthumous releases in the world won’t bring back the thrill of being in the same room with them and their guitar. ‘‘It’s just such a loss,’’ says Shaver, the deeply religious man who has known great blessings and, it seems, great curses as well. A year before losing his son, Billy Joe knelt at the deathbed of Eddy’s mother, Brenda, the woman he’d married three times (and divorced twice) since they met at a high school football game in Bellmead when she was sixteen and he was a twenty-yearold just back from the navy. ‘‘She was my first love and my last,’’ Shaver says, showing a photo of a beautiful young woman with light brown hair and slightly angled eyes that would be passed on to Eddy. ‘‘She was a farm girl,’’ Shaver says, then smiles at a favorite memory. ‘‘She’d be out there driving a tractor in her bikini.’’ The Shavers weren’t always on the same page as far as Billy Joe’s career was concerned, and he let Brenda convince him that being on a record called The Outlaws, which went platinum in the late seventies with Tompall Glaser in the Billy Joe slot, could tarnish the image he wanted to cultivate. Much of the couple’s conflict arose when Billy Joe took off for days, especially when he was running with that drunken rascal Townes Van Zandt. ‘‘Brenda hated Townes with a passion,’’ Billy Joe says. When she was dying of cancer, Billy Joe says he tried to keep her alive as long as possible by telling her that when she got to heaven, Townes would be waiting. A few months before Brenda died, Billy Joe’s mother, Victory, passed away. Her name was the title of a gospel album Billy Joe and Eddy recorded in 1998. ‘‘I always figured I’d be the first to go,’’ Shaver says, and looking back on a rough-and-tumble life of bare feet and bare knuckles and bared soul, you believe him. His father, who had another family, bailed on Billy Joe before he was born. With his mother having to work two jobs, baby Shaver and his older sister were raised by their grandmother in Corsicana. ‘‘She gave us reality,’’ Shaver recalls. ‘‘Our grandmother told us straight out that there wasn’t no Santa Claus, but just play along with the other kids. Unless the Salvation Army dropped off something, we didn’t get no Christmas presents.’’ Grandma was also a strict disciplinarian. When a ten-year-old Billy Joe

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snuck off to see comic hillbillies Homer and Jethro, as well as a little-known opening act named Hank Williams (an experience recounted in ‘‘Tramp on Your Street’’), his guardian was waiting up with a switch in her hand. ‘‘I think the reason I remember that show so well was because of the whippin’ I got,’’ he says. When his grandmother died, twelve-year-old Billy Joe moved to Waco to live with his mother, who worked as a waitress at a honky-tonk called the Green Gables. ‘‘I was barefoot, wearing overalls held together by safety pins, and people would give me nickels for the jukebox,’’ he says of nights spent with the bouncer as his babysitter. ‘‘There were a lot of military people around Waco then, and I guess I reminded them of their kids back home, so they treated me real good.’’ Shaver had felt at home in the roadhouse that smelled of beer and smoke, where the jukebox always seemed to play Lefty Frizzell when he walked in. Back at home, Billy Joe clashed with his stepfather and often took off on freight trains or rode his thumb right outta Waco. When he turned seventeen, his mother signed the papers for him to join the navy. ‘‘I was glad to go, and they were glad to see me go,’’ he says. The navy experience didn’t turn out too well for the hotheaded recruit, however. Shaver spent the last several months of his enlistment in the brig at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after he decked an officer at a party. Billy Joe was facing a court-martial, but after penning a plea to the commanding officer, explaining his side of the scuffle, Shaver says he was released with an honorable discharge. He’s always managed to find the words that would get him out of seemingly hopeless situations. To know Billy Joe Shaver and not have a story to tell is like coming home from a Willie Nelson Picnic without a sunburn. There are famous Billy Joe stories, like how he lost three fingers at the knuckle on his right hand in a saw accident at Cameron Mills when he was twenty-two. Shaver had read an article about how a man in Asia had recently had his severed fingers reattached, so he gathered up his three lopped digits. ‘‘The doctor said he couldn’t do anything for me,’’ Shaver says. ‘‘I told him that in Japan they just sewed somebody’s fingers back together and he said, ‘Well, this ain’t Japan.’’’ He returned to work with his hands bandaged and his fingers in a jar. When a woman at the mill asked for his fingers for some sort of voodoo ritual, he gave them to her. There’s also the one about the time he spent six months in Nashville tracking down Waylon Jennings, who had promised to do an entire album of Shaver songs after hearing ‘‘Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me’’ during an impromptu guitar pull in a trailer backstage at the infamous Dripping Springs Reunion show in 1972. ‘‘Waylon asked me if I had any more

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of them ol’ cowboy songs, and I said I had a whole sack full of ’em,’’ Shaver says. But afterward Jennings wouldn’t return Billy Joe’s calls. Frustrated and broke, Billy Joe finally made contact with Waylon in the hall of a recording studio late at night. ‘‘I told him that if he didn’t make good on his promise to record my songs I’d whip his ass right there. I was so pissed off I didn’t even notice these two big biker bodyguards at his side.’’ Before the two could pounce on Shaver, Jennings raised a halting hand and sat down with the fuming songwriter to talk about the album that ‘‘hey-Hoss-I’mstill-gonna-do-but-I-just-been-busy.’’ ‘‘Waylon asked me if I knew just how close I came to getting a major ass-whipping,’’ Shaver says with a laugh. When Jennings recorded Honky Tonk Heroes in 1973, he broke enough rules for the album to be considered the opening salvo of the ‘‘outlaw country’’ movement. Besides recording ten tracks by an unproven songwriter, Jennings insisted on using his own touring band in the studio. The result was a record that holds up like Creedence Clearwater Revival, riding a great groove on the title track and then taking a touching turn on ‘‘You Asked Me To,’’ Billy Joe’s love song to Brenda. But even as the thirty-three-year-old Shaver finally caught his big break, he fought Jennings every step of the way in the studio. ‘‘He wanted to change some lyrics or do the songs a little bit different, and I didn’t want him to,’’ says Shaver, whose songs are so much a part of him that he never sings other writers’ material in concert. But even as he’s stubborn about his precious compositions, the word that friends most often use to describe Shaver is ‘‘humble.’’ Austin guitarist Stephen Bruton, who played on the 1973 debut Old Five and Dimers (‘‘Billy Joe couldn’t believe that he was really making a record’’), says that whatever success Shaver has attained since then, including writing a Top Five hit for John Anderson (‘‘I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal’’), hasn’t changed him a whit. He still carries himself like ‘‘the hobo with stars in my crown’’ of one of his earliest songs, ‘‘Ride Me Down Easy.’’ Asked about his time as a bull rider in the early sixties, Billy Joe will say, ‘‘Well, I didn’t really ride ’em. I just tried to stay on as long as I could.’’ Told that he’s the best damn songwriter Texas has ever produced, Billy Joe will start talking about Van Zandt and Willie Nelson. But Shaver earns a nod as the musical poet laureate of the Songwriter State, not just because he has the ability, like Springsteen, like Waits, like Prine, to nail an entire set of emotions and circumstances with a single line (his most famous: ‘‘Well, the devil made me do it the first time / the second time I done it on my own’’ from ‘‘Black Rose’’), but also because in Billy Joe’s lyrics you can hear music. The rhythm of his words is all the beat you need, as

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evidenced by this classic chorus: ‘‘I been to Georgia on a fast train, honey / I wudn’t born no yesterday / Got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth grade education / Ain’t no need in y’all treatin’ me this a-way.’’ Can’t you just hear Eddy’s finger-pickin’ in the background on the tune that whooshes down the tracks? Billy Joe wrote ‘‘Georgia on a Fast Train’’ after repeated snubs by Nashville when he first started hitchhiking there in the late sixties. He had been trying to follow his thumb to l.a. but couldn’t get a ride west, so he crossed Interstate 10 outside of Houston and caught a truck driver headed to Tennessee. Unable to afford a demo tape, Shaver tried to play his songs for record execs, but was turned away at the front desk. Finally, he got Bobby Bare to listen, and soon Music Row was buzzing about the square-jawed hayseed from Waco who could put complex issues in simple turns as he did with his Vietnam morality ditty ‘‘Good Christian Soldiers’’ (‘‘It’s hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun’’). Kris Kristofferson, who recorded only his own material to that time, laid claim to ‘‘Christian Soldiers’’ (Bare added the ‘‘Good’’ to the title and, according to Shaver, took a songwriting co-credit), thus kicking off Shaver’s career as a Nashville songwriter. Then came the call to come down to Dripping Springs in the summer of 1972, where he would meet Waylon and, eventually, his life and country music would change. ‘‘I really do think that Billy Joe has an angel following him around,’’ says Freddy Fletcher, Willie Nelson’s nephew, who played drums for Shaver in the late seventies and early eighties. ‘‘We’d find ourselves in terrible predicaments out on the road, but somehow Billy Joe would find a way out of it.’’ Once during a snowstorm near Minneapolis, Shaver’s van skidded off the road and was sideswiped by an oncoming truck. The impact shoved Shaver’s van back into its rightful lane. Another time Shaver escaped unscathed after baiting a crowd in Baton Rouge. ‘‘It was at a place called Jim Beam Country, during the Urban Cowboy craze, and the audience wasn’t listening to a single word Billy Joe was singin’. They wanted to hear Johnny Lee covers or whatever,’’ Fletcher says. ‘‘At one point Billy Joe announced, ‘There ain’t a cowboy among the whole bunch of ya. Y’all look silly with your feathers in your hats.’ ’’ A few roughnecks had to be held back by their buddies after the set, but soon Shaver and band were on the road to the next adventure. These days, the mellower Shaver carries an attaché case wherever he goes, even if it’s just to Griff’s truck stop near Crawford for chicken-fried steak. His usual lunch partner when he’s not on the road is mechanic Jim Hollingsworth, his friend since seventh grade. ‘‘After he started getting some fame

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in Nashville, some people asked me if I knew Billy Joe Shaver,’’ Hollingsworth says. ‘‘They said I went to school with him, he was in my class, but I told ’em I didn’t know any Billy Joe Shaver. Only Shaver I knew was Bubba Shaver.’’ Billy Joe was always Bubba Shaver until he started signing his poetry with his real name after he dropped out of school. ‘‘It was considered a sissy thing to write poems, so I made them print them anonymously in the school paper,’’ Shaver says. His words made an impact on his ninth-grade homeroom teacher at LaVega High, who was the first to tell Bubba he had real talent. Hollingsworth and Shaver recently paid a nursing home visit to Mrs. Legg, now 103 years old, and she recited one of Billy Joe’s old poems from memory. On the way back from Griff’s, Shaver pulls his white van alongside the Chapel Hill cemetery and gets out. ‘‘I prayed every day to Jesus, asking him how I could help my son,’’ Shaver says as he takes a slow walk to the middle of the graveyard. ‘‘But that heroin is stronger than love.’’ Eddy is buried next to his mother, whom Billy Joe said he never really got over losing in 1999. The father and son had their share of squabbles. ‘‘Blood Is Thicker than Water,’’ from The Earth Rolls On, even contains some salacious details. After Billy Joe goes after Eddy’s new wife as ‘‘the devil’s daughter,’’ portraying her as someone who’d steal the rings off Eddy’s dead grandmother’s fingers, the son takes a verse out on his old man. ‘‘I’ve seen you puking your guts and runnin’ with sluts while you were married to my mother,’’ he sings before coming around with ‘‘But you’re always gonna be my father.’’ ‘‘Eddy was always straight with me,’’ Billy Joe says of the son who was also his best friend. ‘‘He told me after he’d first tried heroin that he didn’t know what the big deal was.’’ Some of Eddy’s friends were using regularly, according to Billy Joe, and it wasn’t long before the son was hooked. ‘‘I don’t blame Eddy, because I’ve been there myself, but I still can’t believe he would do that to himself.’’ Billy Joe runs his fingers across the letters of Eddy’s name, the closest he can come to touching his only son. Later, Shaver tells the story of how drugs and alcohol almost drove him to end his life. It was in the late seventies, and the family of three was living in Nashville. One night he awoke from a drunk to see Jesus sitting at the foot of his bed, shaking his head. ‘‘I got up and got in my pickup and just started driving.’’ He ended up standing on a cliff and contemplating jumping off. Like the Robert Duvall character in The Apostle, featuring Shaver as the best friend, Billy Joe asked Jesus for direction. After dropping to his knees and praying, Shaver headed back down the trail and started humming a song that had just come into his head: ‘‘I’m just an old chunk of coal,’’ he sang,

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‘‘but I’m gonna be a diamond someday.’’ The next morning he and Brenda started packing for Houston, where he would be away from his accomplices in sin—the dealers and friends who didn’t want to drink alone. As he kicked his habits cold turkey, living off random royalty checks and wasting away, Shaver got a call out of the blue that would put him back on track. It was from Willie Nelson, whom he’d known since the late-fifties honky-tonk circuit. Willie and Emmylou Harris were about to start a tour of arenas, and, although there wasn’t time to put his name on the bill, Shaver could open the shows and make a few hundred bucks a night. ‘‘I can’t tell you all the times Willie’s bailed me out of situations, but that was a big ’un,’’ Shaver says. ‘‘I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get up on a stage again.’’ It was a call from Willie on the morning of December 31, 2000, that helped Shaver get through his most difficult day. ‘‘When Eddy died, Willie said I needed to be among friends.’’ Shaver had a New Year’s Eve gig scheduled at a club near Willie’s Pedernales ranch forty miles outside Austin, and Billy Joe was finally able to convince himself that Eddy would want the show to go on. It was, Billy Joe says, the toughest gig of his life, the memories flooding each song until Willie and pals had to take over. But he got through the night, thanks to some advice from Willie, who lost a son to suicide several years ago. ‘‘Willie told me that there are just some thoughts that I’m gonna have to learn to let go, like ‘What could I have done differently to save him?’’’ At Eddy’s grave, Billy Joe picks up a little Texas flag that somebody stuck in the dirt, not yet covered with grass. ‘‘You will always be around,’’ it says. ‘‘That’s from ‘Live Forever,’ that song we wrote together,’’ Billy Joe says. ‘‘Eddy had that beautiful melody and the guitar part, and after he played it for me it just stuck in my head. I thought, ‘Man, I gotta really come up with something special for this one.’ ’’ A few months later, Billy Joe was driving the band back from a gig one night—he always drives—and he started thinking about how some songs seem to have lives of their own. With Eddy’s melody in his head on that long drive home, Billy Joe came up with the verse that brings context to the crazy life of a drifter with a sack full of ‘‘cowboy songs.’’ ‘‘Nobody here will ever find me / But I will always be around / just like the songs I leave behind me / I’m gonna live forever now.’’

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BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON The Soul of a Man

hen Jack White of the red-hot White Stripes announced, ‘‘It’s good to be in Texas, the home of Blind Willie Johnson,’’ at Stubb’s in June 2003, most in the sold-out crowd likely had never heard of the gospel blues singer/guitarist from Marlin, who pioneered a ferocity that still lives in modern rock. We have become used to being saluted as the home of T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and others. But who is this Blind Willie Johnson? The first songs he recorded, on a single day in 1927, are more familiar. ‘‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine’’ was covered by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton did ‘‘Motherless Children,’’ Bob Dylan turned Johnson’s ‘‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’’ into ‘‘In My Time of Dying’’ on his 1962 debut lp, and ‘‘If I Had My Way I’d Tear This Building Down’’ has been appropriated by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Staple Singers. Johnson’s haunting masterpiece ‘‘Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)’’ was chosen for an album placed aboard Voyager 1 in 1977 on its journey to the ends of the universe. Foreseeing an extraterrestrial intercept, astronomer Carl Sagan and his staff put together ‘‘Sounds of Earth’’—including ancient chants, the falling rain, a beating heart, Beethoven, Bach, and Blind Willie. Should aliens happen upon the spacecraft and, with the record player provided, listen to that eerie, moaning, steel-sliding memorial to the Crucifixion, they will know almost as much about the mysterious Blind Willie Johnson as we do. Beyond five recording dates from 1927 to 1930 that yielded thirty tracks, the singer remains a biographical question mark. Only one picture of him, seated at a piano holding a guitar with a tin cup on its neck, has ever been

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found. A search on the Internet or a browse of libraries and bookstores reveals only the slightest information on this musical pioneer, and almost all of it is wrong. Months on the trail of the man, whose music rang with an intensity previously unrecorded, turns up a living daughter and a death certificate—and little else. Finding witnesses who knew Johnson is about as easy as interviewing folks who lived through World War I. Many are dead or too old to remember. Or, like Sam Faye Kelly, the only child of Blind Willie and his backup singer Willie B. Harris, they’re too young to realize what was going on six, seven decades ago. ‘‘I remember him singing here in the kitchen and reciting from the Bible,’’ said Kelly, 72. ‘‘But I was just a little girl when he went away.’’ And while the death certificate corrects some previously accepted misinformation (he was born in 1897 near Brenham, not 1902 in Marlin, and died in 1945, not 1949, in Beaumont), the document doesn’t tell you how he lived from 1930, when his recording career ended, until his death. It doesn’t tell you how many times he was married and how many kids he fathered. It doesn’t tell you how he learned to play such a wicked bottleneck guitar or which Pentecostal preachers he modeled his singing voice after. It doesn’t verify the widespread legend that Willie was blinded when a stepmother threw lye in his face at age seven to avenge a beating from his father. Refuting the myth that Johnson died of pneumonia, from sleeping on a wet mattress after a fire, the certificate reports the cause of death as malarial fever, with syphilis as a contributing factor. But when it also lists blindness as a contributor, the coroner’s thoroughness becomes suspect. Unquestioned is the opinion that Johnson is one of the most influential guitarists in music history. ‘‘Anybody who’s ever played the bottleneck guitar with some degree of accomplishment is quoting Blind Willie to this day,’’ said Austin slide guitarist Steve James. ‘‘He’s the apogee.’’ An instinctive virtuoso, Johnson made his guitar moan, slur, and sing, often finishing lyrics for him, and throughout the years Clapton, Jimmy Page, Ry Cooder, and many more have expressed a debt to the sightless visionary. And yet, the 1993 double-disc Complete Blind Willie Johnson has sold only about fifteen thousand copies on Sony/Legacy. No doubt, more than half of those sales were to guitarists. Nineteen thirties Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson grew into a full-blown rock icon in part because of the mysteries of his life and death, but Willie Johnson has not benefited from his enigmatic existence. Even though his guitar-playing inspired a host of Delta bluesmen, from Johnson and Son House to Muddy Waters, Blind Willie refused to sing the blues,

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that style of prewar music preferred by collectors and historians. He sang only religious songs, which explains a big part of his relative obscurity. His gruff evangelical bellow and otherworldly guitar were designed to draw in milling, mulling masses on street corners, not to charm casual roots-rock fans decades later. When word got out late last year through the community of music historians and record collectors that Blind Willie had a daughter, who was still living in Marlin, twenty-eight miles southeast of Waco, there was a collective gasp of hope that new information would surface. Maybe there was a box with pictures, letters, or gospel programs that would fill in the huge gaps. Maybe Willie B. Harris had told her daughter details about her father, like how he lost his sight and where he learned his songs. The discovery of an heir also stirred the interest of musical estate managers, such as Steve LaVere of Mississippi’s Delta Haze company, who visited Kelly in November 2002. In his role of managing the estate of Robert Johnson, LaVere has aggressively collected back royalties from Columbia Records and such performers as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. ‘‘It’s all about getting the pennies to roll in your direction—we’re talking about eight cents a record [in songwriter royalties],’’ LaVere said. ‘‘Eventually, the pennies turn into dollars.’’ But when LaVere left Marlin to return to his offices in Greenwood, Mississippi, he didn’t have a signed contract that would give him the right to represent the estate of Blind Willie Johnson. ‘‘I was a little miffed,’’ he said. ‘‘I thought we had laid out the groundwork on the phone and would be able to sign a deal, but some people just don’t know what they have, what it’s worth, and they’d rather do nothing than feel like they might get cheated.’’ Kelly said she just didn’t want to rush into anything. ‘‘You know, old people don’t like to sign stuff right away,’’ she said as she maneuvered her wheelchair through the cramped quarters of 817 Hunter Street, where Blind Willie lived with Kelly’s mother in the early thirties. It’s a four-room box with a sagging roof and walls warped by the heat. Kelly said that she’s never received a penny from her father’s music. But first she has to fly the flag, said lawyer William Krasilovsky, who wrote This Business of Music, the industry bible. ‘‘You say, ‘Here we are. We represent the heirs of Blind Willie Johnson.’’’ Until an estate is established, there’s no place to send royalties that may be due. ‘‘I guess I should hire someone to see about getting some money for the family,’’ Kelly said. ‘‘I need to make a move here.’’ But just how much money might she be due? First off, forget about lucrative songwriting royalties. Almost all of Johnson’s material was derived from such public domain sources as religious hymns and old Negro spirituals.

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But Krasilovsky said the Blind Willie estate could earn money by copyrighting his arrangements. ‘‘Does the work have distinctive fingerprints of originality that qualify for a new derivative copyright of public domain material?’’ he asked, reading from a book on copyright law. ‘‘Distinctive fingerprints’’ fits Blind Willie’s truly original style like the steel cylinder he used to slide over his pinky. ascap and bmi, organizations that collect songwriting royalties for artists and publishers, pay about half as much for copyrighted arrangements as they do for original compositions. Blind Willie Johnson’s recordings were probably made under the ‘‘work for hire’’ agreement prevalent at the time, which means that Sony can claim ownership of the masters. But that’s a contention that makes music historian Mack McCormick bristle. ‘‘They can’t produce a contract, they can’t produce the masters,’’ he said. ‘‘Look at the source material for the Blind Willie set. They had to borrow 78s from collectors. Sony claims they own the music and they don’t even have copies of the fuckin’ records!’’ California-based estate manager Nancy Meyer, whose Bates Meyer company represents the heirs of T-Bone Walker and many other vintage blues and jazz players, said if she were hired by Kelly, she’d form a publishing company and file copyrights for all Blind Willie’s recordings. ‘‘Since the material was never copyrighted, the clock hasn’t started,’’ she said, referring to the amount of time that passes before the material is deemed ‘‘public domain’’ and therefore free for anyone to use. Copyrights are protected for a twenty-eight-year term from the date the copyright was originally secured, with a twenty-eight-year renewal period, followed by a nineteen-year term of renewal, for a total of seventy-five years. Still, Krasilovsky said, record labels and artists’ management could claim ‘‘abandonment,’’ as several did when LaVere hired Krasilovsky in 1974 to collect royalties for the Robert Johnson estate. But several others, including Eric Clapton, handed over money without protest. ‘‘He was a gentleman,’’ Krasilovsky said of Clapton, who had a huge hit with Johnson’s ‘‘Crossroads’’ while a member of Cream. ‘‘He said, ‘I don’t rip off music.’’’ The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, meanwhile, were taken to court and ended up settling with the Johnson estate. LaVere estimates that in the thirteen years since the release of the Robert Johnson boxed set on Columbia, Johnson’s catalog has earned well over $10 million, with LaVere taking a 50 percent commission. One act intent on doing right by their influences was Peter, Paul, and Mary, who insisted that the Reverend Gary Davis receive royalties for their version of ‘‘Samson and Delilah’’ (a slight variation of ‘‘If I Had My Way’’), which they learned from his recording. ‘‘He wouldn’t sign the paper to declare that he was the sole writer,’’ said Krasilovsky, who represented Davis.

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‘‘Here he was, playing on the streets with a tin cup, and he refused to sign. I asked him who did write the song and he said ‘God’ and I said, ‘That’s allowed.’ ’’ Davis eventually received a check for $90,000. ‘‘Z’rontre!’’ Kelly called out to her great-grandson, her voice cutting through the loud cartoons being watched in the living room by two kids lying on the floor. ‘‘Come here and get Mama that box of papers.’’ A little boy bounded in from the bedroom and climbed up on a chair to reach a rectangular plastic box. ‘‘This boy’s only three years old and he can do everything for me, even fetch me some water,’’ said Kelly, who’s stricken with arthritis and other ailments. ‘‘He’s my legs.’’ She pulled out a few fragile documents, including a birth certificate that says that she was born June 23, 1931, to Willie Johnson, occupation listed as ‘‘musician,’’ and a mother whose maiden name was Willie B. Hays. Kelly said she remembers her father staying with her mother until she was about seven or eight years old. That would put him in Marlin until at least 1938. But two years after Kelly’s birth, her mother had a daughter, Dorothy, with a man named Joe Henry, according to Kelly. Six years later came Earline, from another father. Kelly recalls that her parents had remained married even as Willie B. Harris was having kids with other men and Blind Willie was drifting from street corner to church to train station for months at a time. ‘‘We was working people, see,’’ said Kelly. ‘‘My mother understood that my father had to leave Marlin to make money. She worked seven days a week as a nurse. I’d say, ‘Mama, please stay home today’ and she’d say, ‘But I gotta work’ and I’d understand.’’ During the era in which Blind Willie recorded, artists didn’t expect royalties. They took whatever the labels paid them, usually around twenty-five to fifty dollars per record, and the labels claimed all rights. ‘‘They had just made a record,’’ Columbia field recorder Frank Walker, who helmed Johnson’s remarkably fruitful 1927 session, said in an interview in the sixties. ‘‘To them that was the next best thing to being president of the United States.’’ Johnson’s first 78 rpm—‘‘If I Had My Way’’ backed with ‘‘Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time’’ (titled ‘‘Motherless Children’’ by Clapton)—sold a remarkable fifteen thousand copies, even more than Bessie Smith’s recordings of the day. By 1930, however, the Depression dried up demand for gritty country blues/gospel, and Blind Willie’s recording career was history. But Johnson kept on the move, as was his nature, playing ‘‘from Maine to the Mobile Bay,’’ according to what his touring mate Blind Willie McTell told John Lomax in a 1940s interview. ‘‘People recalled hearing him at times over ktem in Temple and on a

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Sunday-morning church service broadcast by kplc in Lake Charles,’’ said McCormick. ‘‘He left memories in Corpus Christi during wwii when there was a fear about Nazi submarines prowling the Gulf of Mexico. Someone must have told him submarines often listened to radio stations to triangulate their position. He went on the air with new verses to one of his songs, probably ‘God Moves on the Water’ about the Titanic, offering grace to his audience, then followed with a dire warning to the crew of any listening U-boat with ‘Can’t Nobody Hide from God.’’’ Blind Willie’s music was revealed to a new generation of country blues enthusiasts (including Bob Dylan) with the 1952 release of the Harry Smith anthology American Folk Music, which included Johnson’s ‘‘John the Revelator.’’ The Blind Willie Johnson album came out on Folkways in 1957, with a key detail wrong. Blind Willie’s second wife, Angeline Johnson, who was tracked down by music historian Samuel Charters in 1953, was credited with the backing vocals performed by his first wife, Willie B. Harris. This error was uncorrected until the mid-seventies, when a Dallas music collector named Dan Williams drove down to Marlin to see if he could find anyone who knew Blind Willie. ‘‘I approached a group of elderly black people near the town square and one of them said he was related to Blind Willie’s ex-wife, the one who sang on his records, and I thought I was going to meet Angeline Johnson,’’ Williams recalls. ‘‘Nobody knew anything about a Willie B. Harris.’’ After hearing Harris sing along to the Blind Willie records and talk about details of the recording sessions that only those present would know, Williams ascertained that she was, indeed, the background singer. ‘‘She talked about meeting Blind Willie McTell at the last session in Atlanta [April 20, 1930] and I did some research and found out that, sure enough, McTell recorded at the same studio the same day.’’ Charters made the correction, crediting Harris, in his notes to the 1993 boxed set, but repeated Angeline Johnson’s contention that she married Blind Willie in Dallas in 1927. There is no record of such a marriage in Dallas County, or in the county clerk’s offices of Falls, McLennan, Bell, Milam, Jefferson, or Robertson Counties. But then, neither is there evidence, besides Kelly’s birth certificate listing her as legitimate, that Blind Willie and Willie B. were ever married. Researching history about long-dead bluesmen is fueled by random payoffs, much like slot machines and singles bars. You run your fingers down the pages of big, dusty books for hours and then you find a bit of information, a bit of new evidence, and it all becomes worth it.

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But dozens of hours in search of details on the life of Blind Willie Johnson resulted in almost zero positive reinforcements. A five-hour drive to Beaumont yielded the slightest new info; a city directory shows that in 1944, a Reverend W. J. Johnson, undoubtedly Blind Willie, operated the House of Prayer at 1440 Forest Street. That’s the address listed on Blind Willie’s death certificate as his last residence. Besides the entry on the death certificate, there is no evidence that Blind Willie Johnson is buried in Beaumont’s ‘‘colored’’ Blanchette Cemetery, a seemingly untended field littered with broken tombstones and overrun with weeds. If Johnson had a headstone, it’s gone now. When the cemetery floods, a man who lives across the street said, sometimes wooden coffins can be seen floating away amongst the debris. There is no peaceful rest, no solitude for the ages, for the migrant musician. His music, meanwhile, continues its journey to the galaxy’s backyard. Ry Cooder, who based his desolate sound track to Paris, Texas on ‘‘Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground),’’ described it as ‘‘the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.’’ On that Voyager 1 disc is hard evidence that we are a spiritual people, that we hurt and we heal, that we do indeed have souls that live long after we’re buried.

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CINDY WALKER The First Lady of Texas Song

o you want to hear my new song?’’ the voice on the other end of the phone asks, as giddy as a teenager. ‘‘I just got it back from my demo guys in Fort Worth, and I think it’s a real good ’un.’’ The recording starts with a gentle guitar strum from Rich O’Brien, leading into the yearning voice of former Texas Playboys singer Leon Rausch, and out rolls, at a lingering, lovelorn pace, a timeless song that could’ve just as easily been pitched to Lefty Frizzell as Clay Walker. ‘‘The woman, the other woman in my life / Is the woman I love besides my wife,’’ the song opens. But it’s not a cheating song. After a couple verses it turns out that the other woman is ‘‘the mother that God gave to me.’’ When the tune’s over Cindy Walker asks, ‘‘Do I still have a hit in me?’’ then lets out the hearty laugh of a Western movie saloon keep. She plays a couple of other week-old tunes over the phone, just like they did in the days when mp3 could’ve been the name for some kind of war ration. ‘‘Highway 80’’ rambles down that coast-to-coast stretch of blacktop like a carefree travelogue, while the torchy ‘‘Is It Love’’ conjures a wineglass lying on the floor, either the litter of love or the vessel of empty promises. The royalty checks to her hometown of Mexia, about fifty miles due east of Waco, may have lost a few zeros from those of the forties and fifties, when Walker tailor-made hits for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and got her material onto the charts via Roy Orbison (‘‘Dream Baby’’), Jim Reeves (‘‘Distant Drums’’), Webb Pierce (‘‘I Don’t Care’’), and Eddy Arnold (‘‘You Don’t Know Me’’). But Walker has never stopped writing songs and pitching them. Her favorite tune is always the one she just wrote. ‘‘Cindy Walker has never written a bad song in her life,’’ says Orbison’s producer Fred Foster, who discovered Dolly Parton, the only female song-

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writer whose output rivals Walker’s. ‘‘She’s just this incredible bundle of talent and energy.’’ Foster says he once asked Walker how she could write one of the best drinking songs ever, 1948’s ‘‘Bubbles in My Beer,’’ without having ever stepped inside a honky-tonk. ‘‘The imagination is a wonderful thing,’’ she answered. More than 450 of her songs have been recorded, by everyone from Elvis Presley to Michael Bolton, and yet most people who hear the name Cindy Walker would probably think she’s the actress from Laverne and Shirley. The first female inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1970) is only the second-most-famous person from Mexia, right behind Anna Nicole Smith. But where the stripper-turned-national-curiosity has painted her fame in gaudy strokes, songwriter Walker is a portrait of class, happily toiling in relative obscurity with the knowledge that notoriety is fleeting, but great songs are immortal. When Cindy Walker declines to give her age, it seems less an act of vanity than one of compassion for those who whine of burnout at half the years. Age ain’t nothing but a number, so go ahead and work the arithmetic. It was sixty-three years ago, in 1940, that Walker received, or rather grabbed, her first break as a songwriter. She was twenty-two, accompanying her father, a cotton buyer, and mother on a business trip to Los Angeles. The headstrong Cindy wasn’t just there to gawk at movie stars and studio lots. She wanted to pitch the songs she’d been writing on her Martin guitar since she was twelve. ‘‘I saw a building called the Crosby Building,’’ Walker recalls of a drive down Sunset Boulevard. ‘‘I told my daddy to pull over, I wanted to get one of my songs to Bing Crosby, but he just laughed.’’ Just because it was called the Crosby Building, he said, that didn’t mean it had anything to do with Bing Crosby. The parents humored their daughter, but then were stunned when she ran outside a few minutes later and practically pulled her mother out of the car. It turned out that, indeed, Bing’s brother and manager Larry Crosby owned the building, and he just so happened, in that era of Western movies and Zane Grey novels, to be looking for the sort of cowboy songs this gal from Texas specialized in. ‘‘I said, ‘Mama, c’mon, you gotta back me up,’’’ Walker says. Her mother, Oree Walker, the daughter of noted hymn writer F. L. Eiland, was an exceptional piano player who fashioned her daughter’s hummed melodies into full-fledged compositions. ‘‘I was nothing without my mama,’’ Walker says, ‘‘but she said she wouldn’t do it, she wasn’t prepared.’’ After some cajoling, Cindy’s mom finally re-

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lented, on the condition that Cindy not tell anyone that Oree, who could’ve passed for her sister, was her mother. Larry Crosby liked ‘‘Lone Star Trail’’ so much he set up a time the next day for Cindy to play it for Bing, who claimed the tune on the spot. ‘‘I’m a natural-born song plugger,’’ Walker says. ‘‘I’m not intimidated by anyone. My father didn’t know the music business at all, but he told me to treat it like any other business. Know the market and sell, sell, sell.’’ When the Crosbys sent Cindy to record demos of other songs, the head of the Decca label happened to be in the studio, and he offered Walker a record deal as an artist. After just two weeks in l.a., Walker had the country’s biggest recording artist cut one of her songs, and she had her own record deal. The Walker family decided to stay. Cindy had a Number 5 hit singing ‘‘When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again’’ (which she didn’t write) in 1944 and starred in several ‘‘soundies,’’ three-minute snippets that played between Western double features. But she soon returned to her true calling, as a full-time songwriter. ‘‘The label was seeing songs that I wrote for other people become hits, and so they’d say, ‘Why didn’t you sing that one for us?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I didn’t write that song for me to sing, I wrote it for the one who did it.’’’ Besides a gift for simple, evocative lyrics and swaying melodies, Walker has a knack for crafting songs to the strengths of certain artists, like the smooth ballad ‘‘Anne Marie’’ for country crooner Reeves or the wacky ‘‘Barstool Cowboy from Old Barstow’’ for Spike Jones and the City Slickers. But her most special writer/artist relationship was with ‘‘the King of Western Swing,’’ Bob Wills, who recorded more than fifty Cindy songs. Although Walker had quickly become a favorite writer of such fellow Texpatriates as Tex Ritter, Dale Evans, Al Dexter, and Gene Autry, she longed to get songs to Wills and his spectacular band, who were living in Tulsa at the time. Walker was on her way to the corner mailbox one day to send off a package of songs to Wills when she saw a tour bus with ‘‘Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys’’ emblazoned on the side. ‘‘I called up just about every hotel in l.a. looking for Bob Wills,’’ she says. The persistence paid off when Walker finally got ahold of Wills’s manager, O. W. Mayo, who said to bring her guitar and her best new songs to his hotel. That afternoon, Walker pitched ‘‘Cherokee Maiden,’’ ‘‘Dusty Skies,’’ and ‘‘Blue Bonnet Lane,’’ which would all become Wills standards. When Wills and the Playboys were tapped by Columbia Pictures to make eight films, they hired Walker to write new music to go with the plots. She wrote thirty-nine tunes for the Wills movies, and not a single one was turned down.

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It never dawned on Walker that, as that rare female hit songwriter, she was bucking tradition. The acts having hits with her material certainly weren’t making gender an issue. ‘‘The one thing that everybody in the music business is always looking for is a good song,’’ she says. ‘‘If you could write some, it didn’t matter if you were male, female, orangutan.’’ Success is a great equalizer. She didn’t let the guys push her around, either. Ernest Tubb wanted to record Walker’s ‘‘China Doll,’’ for instance, but he wanted to change the line ‘‘tiny pale hands’’ to ‘‘little brown hands.’’ Walker refused. The china doll in her mind had tiny pale hands. Tubb declined to record the song as is, but it was eventually taken to the pop charts by the Ames Brothers. ‘‘I don’t feel rejected if someone passes on one of my songs,’’ Walker says. ‘‘I just think, ‘Well, it’s not right for them, but it’s right for someone’ and go about finding that right person.’’ Despite a vibrant personality, Cindy Walker has a reputation for being shy of the spotlight. In fact, she initially declined to show up for her own tribute in Austin in February 2004, telling organizers that she didn’t want people to make a big fuss over her. But when her close friends Leon Rausch, Rich O’Brien, Ray Benson, and Johnny Gimble signed on, Walker had a change of heart. ‘‘We were going to put Cindy and her guests in the opera box [above the stage],’’ says Rose Reyes of Texas Folklife Resources, ‘‘but she said she wanted to be in the front row.’’ Cindy Walker, who calls everyone ‘‘honey’’ or ‘‘dear,’’ is not an opera box kinda gal. Although her mother was able to bring elegant accompaniment to Cindy’s songs, Oree was unable to get her Rebecca off Sunnybrook Farm. ‘‘Mama was just so prim and proper, and I was the opposite,’’ Walker says with a laugh. ‘‘They were quite a mother-and-daughter team,’’ producer Foster says of the Walkers, who stayed at the Continental Apartments on Nashville’s West End for six months out of the year to pitch songs. ‘‘They related so well to each other. There was always a lot of banter back and forth when they played. And, oh, how Mama could cook! Her Southern cooking was legendary in Nashville.’’ So tight were the mother and daughter (Cindy’s father died in 1948) that when Oree Walker passed away in 1991, some friends worried that Cindy, who was married only once and only briefly, would have trouble finding the strength to go on. She still had her songs, though the one who helped give them lift was gone. ‘‘I miss Mama every day,’’ she says. ‘‘Every time I sit at the piano, Mama’s grand piano, I remember how she played ‘In the Misty Moonlight’ the day

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before she died.’’ Cindy recalls, with a smile you could practically see over the phone, how she used to get so excited when she finished a song that she’d sometimes wake her mother in the middle of the night to get her to play it. A song was never finished until Mama gave it her touch. ‘‘It’ll be just as good in the morning,’’ Oree Walker would say, then doze on back to sleep. When Cindy Walker was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1997, she brought many in the crowd to tears when she recited a poem about the dress she was wearing, which her mother had made. The freespirited Cindy, then seventy-nine, also brought a bit of refreshing energy to the staid proceedings, just by being her buoyant, unpretentious, nonfrilly self. She seemed like someone who could’ve settled the West, instead of just writing songs about the new frontier. It’s a quiet life in Mexia, where Walker lives in the three-bedroom house she’s been in for fifty years. Although old friends adore her and younger artists and songwriters figuratively kiss her feet at any opportunity, Walker says she doesn’t really like too many visitors. You can’t write hit songs with company coming around, after all. The honors and tributes stack up, like her induction into Broadcast Music Inc.’s exclusive ‘‘Million-Aires’’ club, signifying that her songs have been played on the radio more than a million times through the years. But hearing those songs sung and played masterfully, as Ray Charles did with ‘‘You Don’t Know Me’’ in 1962 and George Jones with ‘‘The Warm Red Wine’’ the same year, is all the reward she ever needed. ‘‘Do you want to hear my new song?’’ From the lips of Cindy Walker, a true Texas treasure, those words are precious.

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WILLIE NELSON The Red-Headed Stranger at 70

illie understood. When Frank Sinatra kept touring well into his seventies, reading the words of his classic songs off giant TelePrompTers, critics and fans wondered why he didn’t retire. How much money did he need? But Willie Nelson knew that concert receipts had nothing to do with his friend and idol’s busy schedule. ‘‘When you sing for people and they throw back all that love and energy,’’ Willie says, ‘‘it’s just the best medicine in the world.’’ When Nelson’s seventieth birthday came, on April 30, 2003, the eternal red-headed rascal was inundated with tributes, including a celebrity-heavy affair in New York that was televised on the usa Network. The phases and stages of Willie’s career have found him evolving from the honky-tonk sideman to the hit Nashville songwriter, from progressive country pioneer to crooner of standards. And now the iconoclast has become the icon, with Willie achieving American folk hero status. This pot-smoking Zen redneck in pigtails, who sings Gershwin through his nose and plays a guitar that looks like he picked it up at a garage sale, transcends music and has come to personify the individual, the rectangular peg to the round hole of corporatization. Willie’s the one producers called to sing ‘‘America the Beautiful’’ at the moving finale of the televised ‘‘A Tribute to Heroes’’ show after the 9/11 attacks. He’s played for worldwide audiences, as at former president Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2002, and he can have his bacon and eggs at any greasy spoon in the country and feel right at home. Meanwhile, the journalists keep leading with the same questions about what keeps him going at the pace of a much younger man. ‘‘I’ve been trying to take it easy for years, but this is what I love to do,’’

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Willie says on the eve of the big 7-0. ‘‘When I go home to rest, I get a little stir-crazy after a few days.’’ Here’s a man whose office in Luck, the Western town he built near his ‘‘Willie World’’ complex of golf courses, condos, and recording studios on Lake Travis, carries a plaque that reads, ‘‘He who lives by the song, dies by the road.’’ It’s no wonder that ‘‘On the Road Again’’ is the easiest song Willie’s ever written. The producers of the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose were looking for a theme song about vagabond musicians, and their star wrote the first words that popped into his mind: ‘‘The life I love is making music with my friends / I can’t wait to get on the road again.’’ It’s a simple existence made all the more comfortable because Willie is surrounded by people who’ve been with him for decades. Bassist Bee Spears has lived thirty-seven of his fifty-five years in Willie’s band, which also features the barrelhouse piano of Willie’s seventy-two-year-old sister, Bobbie, and Willie’s legendary running buddy, seventy-one-year-old Paul English, on drums. Percussionist Billy English, Paul’s brother, is the new guy, having joined just nineteen years ago. Harmonica player Mickey Raphael and guitarist Jody Payne are also relative newcomers, both joining the ragtag caravan thirty years ago. ‘‘You can’t get out of this band even if you die,’’ Willie says with a laugh. ‘‘I’ve told the guys that we’ll just have ’em stuffed and put back up on that stage.’’ Willie’s circle of fiercely loyal lifers includes roadies (eighty-year-old Ben Dorcy has been with Willie since the early sixties), sound engineers, and managers. Meanwhile, his oldest daughter, Lana, travels with Willie and keeps up the willienelson.com Web site. ‘‘We all act like we can’t wait to get off the road and catch a break from each other,’’ says stage manager Randall ‘‘Poodie’’ Locke, who joined up in 1975. ‘‘But after three or four days, we’re looking for excuses to call each other. Everybody’s wives or girlfriends are going, ‘Uh, Honey, don’t you got any gigs comin’ up?’ ’’ On the road again, they just couldn’t wait to get on the road that takes them to the Lone Star Park horse racing track near Dallas on a crisp evening. Some of the fans come early, looking for Willie’s bus, the one that has ‘‘Honeysuckle Rose’’ and an American Indian figure painted on the side. A group of giddy grandmas stand outside the band’s business bus before the one with the ‘‘Ladies Love Outlaws’’ t-shirt gets up the courage to knock on the door. ‘‘Where’s Willie?’’ she asks the driver, who answers that he won’t arrive until showtime.

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With piercing brown eyes that seem to have the ability to make eye contact with thousands simultaneously and a world-class smile that’s both frisky and comforting, Nelson turns concerts into lovefests and makes fans feel like they grew up next door to him. In the line waiting outside the horse race track, there are older couples, dressed in tight, rounded jeans and multicolored Western shirts, who look like they used to see a prebearded Willie at the old Big G’s dance hall in Round Rock or the Broken Spoke. But there are also tons of college kids in ball caps and straw Resistol hats. Many more just came to play the ponies and don’t even know Willie’s booked to sing after the night’s final race. When a young black man with gold front teeth and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers hat worn sideways approaches the turnstile, the ticket taker jokes, ‘‘Are you here to see Willie Nelson?’’ A few Willie fans giggle as the man shakes his head and says, nah, he’s here to bet on horses. Then, as he passes, he leans back and says, ‘‘But I do like Willie Nelson.’’ Now that Waylon, the Butch Cassidy to Willie’s Sundance Kid, has passed away, it’s up to Nelson to keep the outlaw country bus a-churnin’ down the highway. And with his role at the vortex of Texas singer-songwriting assured, Willie has picked up the younger high school and college crowd that goes batty for the likes of Pat Green and Robert Earl Keen. As with the Grateful Dead, Nelson’s spike in popularity so late in his career comes partly because he and the band promote a free-spirited lifestyle. But where the Dead became synonymous with extended jams and mind-expanding drugs, the Willie way is built around short songs and long drives, with every cowboy having a little Indian in him. Above all, the band’s escapist bent is intensified with instinctive musicianship, a play-it-as-wefeel-it attitude that extends beyond the stage. ‘‘Playing with Willie is tricky business,’’ bassist Spears says of the frontman who never met a beat he couldn’t tease. ‘‘If you try to follow him too close, he’ll lead you down to the river and drown you. You have to just play your part and trust that he’s going to come back and meet you at some point.’’ Willie says the musical kinship between him and sister Bobbie, who ride the bus together, is almost telepathic. ‘‘I’ve played music with my sister almost every night of my life,’’ he says, ‘‘and sometimes she knows what I’m going to play before I do.’’ Raphael says that if someone should die, the members of the Family have decided to carry on in missing man formation, as fighter pilots do after a comrade crashes. ‘‘But if anything happens to Trigger,’’ he says of the acoustic guitar that Willie’s picked a hole through, ‘‘that could be the show.’’

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The Martin classical guitar, which he bought sight unseen for $750 in 1969, is Nelson’s most precious possession. That he lets friends, about forty so far, carve their names into the guitar says as much about Willie Nelson, the unmaterialistic scamp, as the way he plays it with gypsy fingers and a jazzman’s curiosity. ‘‘God bless ’em,’’ singer Marty Robbins once said of country music fans. ‘‘They’ll do anything for you but leave you alone.’’ But no country star has ever handled the demand from fans to touch, to talk to, to have a picture made better than Willie. He spent the first part of his career trying to become successful and the rest proving that success hasn’t changed him a whit. He’s got a bunch of burly guys, including a former Hell’s Angel named l.g., working for him, but Willie doesn’t allow them to lead him through crowds, even when about three thousand people stand between him and the stage, as they did at the Lone Star Park show. When the crowd lets out a roar because they’ve seen Willie in their midst, Mickey Raphael walks up to the window of the band bus, peers out at his boss signing autographs in the sea of hats, and says, ‘‘Looks like we’ve got about forty-five minutes,’’ then goes back to telling a reporter how he came to run away with this circus. ‘‘My first exposure to the group was the cover of that [1971] Willie Nelson and Family record. They were the freakiest-looking country band I’d ever seen. Paul looked like the devil and was wearing a cape; Bee had on some furry diapers. I said, ‘Now, what do these guys sound like?’ ’’ After sitting in with Willie and the Family at a firefighters’ benefit in Waxahachie, Raphael starting playing at all the band’s dates in the Dallas area. ‘‘Willie asked me one night, ‘Hey, Paul, what are we paying that kid?’’’ says English, the infamous raconteur immortalized in Willie’s song ‘‘Me and Paul.’’ The pistol-toting English has handled band biz on the road since 1966, when Willie enticed him to leave his business supplying call girls to Houston businessmen. ‘‘I said we weren’t paying Mickey anything, and Willie said, ‘Then double his salary.’ ’’ Bee Spears, who joined the Family in 1968 when original bassist David Zettner was drafted into the army, talks about his first Christmas out on the road with Willie: ‘‘We tried to make a snowman out of shaving cream, and we drew pictures of the presents we would give each other when we made it big. Willie had us believing that it wouldn’t be ‘if ’ we made it, but ‘when.’ He knew that eventually someone was going to figure him out.’’ Austin understood. In the early seventies, Willie Nelson fled Nashville for his home state and found a kindred musical attitude in this liberal out-

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post where the legendary football coach hosted pickin’ parties and hippies sang Merle Haggard songs. Even though he spends more of his time off the road these days in Maui, where his fourth and current wife, Annie, and their teenage sons, Luke and Micah, live, he remains Austin’s spiritual adviser and greatest musical ambassador. Watch the movies he made here in the late seventies and early eighties, and you’ll see that so many old landmarks are gone, including the Armadillo World Headquarters, where Willie brought the necks and the heads together. Something that has barely changed in the past thirty years is Nelson’s set list. The day he opens with a song other than ‘‘Whiskey River’’ is the day rumors of Alzheimer’s disease start. There’re the four or five guitar strums and Mickey’s snaky harp lines and then the unmistakable nasal twang: ‘‘Whiskey river, take my mind / Don’t let her memory torture me.’’ It’s a holistic hoedown as ‘‘Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)’’ follows, and then come patchwork versions of the early sixties hits ‘‘Crazy,’’ ‘‘Hello Walls,’’ and ‘‘Night Life.’’ Ain’t it funny how much time hasn’t seemed to slip away? There’s a scene in Honeysuckle Rose when Amy Irving asks Willie if he ever gets tired of being everybody’s hero. His silence makes the question rhetorical, but after watching Willie hold court on his bus a few months ago outside Gruene Hall, with person after person telling him how much his music has meant to them and their recently deceased mother, it’s a question worth re-asking. Does Willie ever get tired of being everybody’s hero? ‘‘I think when that line came up in the movie, the reason I didn’t say anything was because I was probably thinking, ‘That’s about the dumbest question I’ve ever been asked,’ ’’ he says with a huge Willie laugh. What a stupid question. Who wouldn’t want to be loved by millions simply for being himself? Who wouldn’t want to be paid handsomely to do the thing he’d do for free? He’s on the road again and again, playing, in the words of Mickey Raphael, ‘‘Carnegie Hall one night and some dump in Odessa the next.’’ And so when Willie hit the big 7-0, it wasn’t at a star-studded affair at a huge Texas amphitheater, complete with fireworks. That would make too much sense. Instead, he and his Family marked the occasion at the Horseshoe Casino in Bossier City, Louisiana. That’s so Willie. On the road, he’s Willie Nelson, an American treasure and hero of the common folk. Now, who wouldn’t want to be that as often as possible?

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STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN Straight from the Heart

t was a thick Austin night in the summer of 1986 and Stevie Ray Vaughan looked bad. Without acknowledging the applause of the sunburned multitudes pressed up against a chain-link fence, Stevie emerged gingerly from a big black limo and used a silver-tipped cane to pick his way to the side of the Austin River Fest stage. His thirty-one years had been multiplied like dog years, and almost suddenly he was old, frail, and out of breath. His skin was gray and one size too big. You didn’t need a doctor to diagnose the obvious: Stevie Ray Vaughan was dying. Exene Cervenka of X has the word ‘‘Temptation’’ tattooed on the back of her hand, so she can see it everytime she reaches. Vaughan had it written all over his body as he took the stage to join his brother Jimmie’s band, the Fabulous Thunderbirds. ZZ Top’s manager Bill Ham said his rock ’n’ roll wet dream is to see Stevie and Jimmie Vaughan in the same band, but given Stevie’s condition, this set-closing jam session had the prospect of turning into a dry nightmare. Stevie’s hands, which had reached for so many bottles and joints and chopped up so much powder in fifteen years of hard-core roadhousing, fumbled with the cord of his electric guitar as if controlled by an apprentice marionetteer. The eyes were slits, the nose almost boneless, and the legs as rubbery as Gumby’s just out of the microwave. Someone in the band counted off—one, two, three, four—a blues shuffle kicked in, and suddenly, almost miraculously, Stevie Vaughan came back to life. The electricity from his white Stratocaster seemed to flow through him. His fingers tap-danced all over the fretboard, finding notes that go right for the knees and bend up the spine. He plays guitar like Keith Moon played drums: nothing in moderation.

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Together on the River Fest stage, the brothers Vaughan were the musical counterpart of a couple of monkeys going berserk in a hardware store, with Stevie airplaning down the aisles unshelving fixtures and gadgetry, while Jimmie sprayed the area with nuts and bolts. T-Bird singer Kim Wilson, fueled by Stevie’s regenesis, leapt into the fray with a meaty harmonica solo. When he finished blowing, he stepped back, looked over at the Vaughans digging in for the pounce, and said, ‘‘ok, whicha you boys wants to go first?’’ It took the promoter’s frantic throat-cutting motions to finally end the jam at 11:59. Wilson walked off muttering that they were just getting warmed up, while the Vaughans tucked their Strats into bed for the night. When Stevie reached the wings, a roadie handed him his cane, then ran interference to the trailer that served as the dressing room. It would be an hour before the black limo backed as close to the trailer door as possible and took Stevie Ray Vaughan home. Four months later, it was an ambulance taking Stevie Ray Vaughan. After a show in Switzerland, Stevie had collapsed. Drifting in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital—they say that this is when your whole life flashes before your eyes. If that was the case with Stevie, he probably saw himself as a little boy in Dallas, listening to the blues and rock ’n’ roll records that Jimmie, three years older, brought home. He saw an eight-yearold kid taking three strings off his Roy Rogers guitar so he could play bass for his brother, already a hotshot at eleven. As the siren stirred adrenaline in kids on the route, the sounds inside Stevie’s head were warm, rhythmic, and basic. He heard the music of T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters while he sat in his old room back in Dallas, trying to bring order to the shapely peninsula of wood and wires that sat in his lap. Stevie probably remembered the time he quit his dishwashing job in disgust at age thirteen and went home and listened to Albert King so loud the speakers distorted. He vowed then and there to be a guitar player, a professional guitar player, and he’s never had another job since. On the verge of death, Stevie Ray Vaughan took a long look back at his life and told himself, ‘‘This has got to come to a screeching halt.’’ ‘‘This’’ was drugs and alcohol. When asked what he was addicted to, Vaughan said, ‘‘Everything.’’ Cocaine and speed to go up, heroin, marijuana, and booze to come down. ‘‘Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been ‘Stevie Vaughan, guitar player.’ That’s all I’ve ever been and I thought that part of being a guitar player was getting higher than a kite every time I played,’’ Stevie said in a 1989 review. ‘‘My number one guitar idol was Jimi Hendrix. I used to dress like him on

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Halloween. I played the same kind of guitar as him and did a lot of his songs. I wanted to be so much like Hendrix that I almost died like he did.’’ Stevie Ray Vaughan didn’t die that night in Switzerland. He canceled the rest of his European tour and checked into a clinic in Marietta, Georgia, that specializes in drug and alcohol dependency. His bassist Tommy Shannon also went through treatment. ‘‘October 13 made three years sober for me and Tommy,’’ Vaughan announced proudly. ‘‘When we went a hundred days, we were so excited, like we’d accomplished the most amazing thing. And now, here we are approaching three years. If you knew how bad we were, you’d know how incredible that is.’’ When Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin in August 1990, he was two months shy of four years without drugs or alcohol. That period marked the happiest of his life. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s last studio album was the first record he made sober. It’s titled In Step because, according to Vaughan, ‘‘I’m finally in step with life, in step with myself, in step with my music.’’ The critics and the public both agreed that it was Vaughan’s best album yet, especially vocally. He still dressed like a color-blind Rhoda Morganstern, and there wasn’t a clinic in the world that could cure him of the Fistful of Dollars hat. But sober, Stevie Ray Vaughan played the guitar better than ever. Bury another myth—you don’t need to be down and out to play the blues. Though Vaughan’s substance abuse was well known among his longtime friends and followers, it never seemed serious because he was always in control when he played guitar. He hadn’t always been great, but you’d have to find someone who knew him as young as ten to testify to that. Unlike other white guitarists like Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mike Bloomfield, who discovered the blues when they went looking for rock’s roots, Stevie Ray Vaughan started listening to the blues right after he outgrew nursery rhymes. Every kid wants to be his older brother, and Stevie had the advantage that his older brother wanted to be T-Bone Walker. At ten, he was way ahead of the game. At thirteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan could rip. ‘‘It was boldly obvious from the beginning that both Vaughans were something special,’’ remembers singer Paul Ray, who moved down to Austin with Jimmie Vaughan and their band, Storm. Austin had a blossoming blues scene, bolstered by frequent appearances by Johnny Winter, and besides, said Jimmie, ‘‘It was just about the only town in Texas where you could have long hair without getting the hell beat out of you.’’ Stevie soon followed. While the elder Vaughan hooked up with the Fabulous T-Birds and a twelve-year scratch to the top, Stevie drifted through

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several bands—the Nitecrawlers, the Cobras, and Triple Threat—before teaming with Lou Ann Barton to form Double Trouble. When Barton was ‘‘discovered’’ by Jerry Wexler and signed to Elektra Records, Vaughan, Shannon, and drummer Chris Layton continued as a trio. Their big break came at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, where their bowled-over audience included Mick Jagger and David Bowie. Jagger flew the band to New York to play a private party for the Rolling Stones. Bowie hired Vaughan to play on his Let’s Dance lp. A tape of the Montreux show made it into the heavy hands of John Hammond Sr., who orchestrated a deal with Epic and served as executive producer on the debut lp, Texas Flood. It turned out to be little more than a week’s work for Hammond. ‘‘We just went in and played,’’ Vaughan remembers, ‘‘and the whole thing only took eight days—two days to do the music, two days for the vocals, two days to mix, and two days to master.’’ Texas Flood’s release was greeted with hosannas in the highest, from everyone from the critics, who declared the emergence of a new guitar hero, to the rabbit-fur-medley-jacket set, who made it one of their favorite crankit-up albums. By the end of his first year as a recording artist, Stevie Ray Vaughan had won a Grammy, a W. C. Handy Award as ‘‘Blues Entertainer of the Year,’’ and a Guitar Player magazine reader’s poll. Vaughan’s second and third albums, Couldn’t Stand the Weather and Soul to Soul, easily went gold, and his searing guitar work was featured on James Brown’s Number 1 hit ‘‘Livin’ in America.’’ In 1985, Vaughan made his production debut, helming Strike Like Lightning, by his boyhood guitar hero Lonnie Mack. Professionally, things were going great, but personally Vaughan was a mess. His father, Big Jim, died, his marriage ended in divorce, his longtime manager, Chesley Milikin, dropped him as a client, and his equipment was stolen at the airport in Albany, New York. The powdery white albatross around his neck weighed a ton. ‘‘I look back on those days and I’m really amazed that I survived,’’ the tan and healthy Vaughan stated during a rare day off from his 1989 world tour. ‘‘It’s only since I’ve been sober that I realize that there’s so much more that life has to offer me than just playing the guitar. Still, there’s no greater high than when we [Double Trouble] get it, that feeling, and go from being a good band to being a great band.’’ John Lennon said that ‘‘the blues is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair. . . . It is the first chair. It is a chair for sitting on, not for looking at. You sit on that music.’’ For the first time in almost twenty years, Stevie Ray Vaughan stood

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straight, in the middle of the stage. When he got tired of standing straight he didn’t look for something to lean on. He just plugged in and fell into that big easy chair. And when he walked off, nobody handed him a silver-tipped cane. It wasn’t real silver, anyway. The guy who sold it to him just told him it was.

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BLAZE FOLEY Death of a Songwriter

he fifteen years since his passing have been kind to Blaze Foley. While he was alive, the singer-songwriter had released only a single and an lp that was never distributed aside from a box full of vinyl albums he would barter for beers and cab rides. In recent years, the ‘‘derelict in duct tape shoes’’ of the 1998 Lucinda Williams song ‘‘Drunken Angel’’ has vaulted to folk hero status. Merle Haggard and Lyle Lovett are among those who have recorded his compositions, plus he’s inspired four tribute albums and is the subject of two upcoming films. His killing at age thirty-nine continues to haunt an Austin music community that has suffered its share of cancer fatalities, drug overdoses, suicides, and car wrecks, but has had little experience coping with the shooting death of one who writes songs. All these years later, his friends and fans still question the jury’s verdict that acquitted Carey January of Foley’s murder by reason of self-defense. Saying he feared for his life, January admitted shooting Foley, a friend of his father, Concho January, with a .22-caliber rifle in the predawn hours of February 1, 1989. When the defense portrayed the six-foot-two, 280-pound Foley as a menacing bully, violently injecting himself into a family dispute, several of Foley’s supporters walked out of the courtroom in disgust. That was not the Blaze Foley they knew. An ice storm blew into Austin the day of Foley’s funeral. At the jampacked service, guitarist Mickey White passed out the lyrics to ‘‘If I Could Only Fly,’’ Foley’s trademark song, and as the ragtag congregation sang those words about wanting to soar above human limitations, the song grew spiritual wings. Without the money for a police escort, the funeral proces-

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sion got smaller with each red light and almost everyone got lost. Cars did doughnuts on the ice, and packs of autos tore down South Austin streets in all directions. Many of the mourners didn’t make it to the burial at Live Oak Cemetery. Someone at the grave site busted out a roll of duct tape, Foley’s favorite fashion accessory, and folks started adorning the casket. Some of his friends made duct tape armbands or placed pieces over their hearts. Kimmie Rhodes started singing an old gospel song when the body was lowered, and the tears nearly froze before they hit the ground. ‘‘The whole day was so chaotic, yet so beautiful,’’ recalls guitarist Gurf Morlix. ‘‘It was exactly the way Blaze would’ve wanted it.’’ They always talk about his eyes, how he could fix a glance on you and make you feel either two feet tall or like a million bucks. Those who knew him well—a number that seems to grow every year—use words like compassionate, honest, and courageous to describe a lumbering giant whose songs could make hard men cry. But his friends also remember Foley as belligerent, abrasive, highly opinionated, and drunk more often than not. There were two Blaze Foleys, and if you didn’t know both of them you didn’t know either. Songwriter Mandy Mercier, whom Foley lived with from 1980 to 1982, knew both Blazes. While Mercier worked temp office jobs to pay the bills, Foley would stay home with a pack of fellow ne’er-do-wells who passed around guitars and bottles of hooch. Folks would ask Mercier and her roommate, Lucinda Williams, who shared a soft spot for self-destructive rogues, what they saw in such men. ‘‘They had something that we wanted,’’ Mercier says. ‘‘Creative conviction. They would explore difficult subjects, but they could walk the walk.’’ There was a hobo camp near the railroad tracks behind Spellman’s, the former folkie haven on West Fifth Street, and Foley would tell Mercier that if she had any guts, she’d quit her job and live there and write songs all day. During the times he was without a girlfriend or a friendly couch, he’d sleep wherever—and whenever—he could. Though he preferred flopping on top of pool tables (or below them during hours of operation), he’d sometimes sleep in Dumpsters on cold nights. ‘‘See that ‘BFI’?’’ he’d say, pointing to the logo of the waste removal company seen on Dumpsters. ‘‘That stands for ‘Blaze Foley’s Inside.’’’ Foley lived on the edge because that’s where the best stories drift off to. ‘‘There’s a scene in the movie Salvador where one of the characters is telling a wartime photographer that the key is to get close enough to the subject to

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get the truth, but not too close or you’ll get killed,’’ says Mercier. ‘‘That’s how Blaze wrote songs, from the front lines of experience.’’ Foley was fearless, all his former associates agree. ‘‘Blaze had no doubts about his immortality. He thought he was bulletproof,’’ says songwriter Carlene ( Jones) Neuenschwander, now living in Colorado. ‘‘I guess that proved to be his undoing.’’ Common sense told Blaze Foley to keep out of a father-and-son relationship that he saw as abusive. After all, Blaze’s friend Tony ‘‘Di Roadie’’ Scarano gave statements to police that they had heard Carey January, a thirty-nineyear-old black male known as J.J., threaten to kill Foley if he didn’t stop coming around the house at 706 W. Mary Street in South Austin. But then, common sense didn’t pull much weight with this wild-eyed maverick, who delighted in newspaper headlines like ‘‘Blaze Destroys Warehouse.’’ He was 100 percent songwriter, and nothing cool rhymes with ‘‘logic.’’ Foley had met sixty-six-year-old Concho January in June 1988. The singer was living two blocks away, on the old man’s route to David’s Food Store, and one afternoon Blaze and half a dozen other songwriters were picking on the porch when Concho stood to listen for a few moments before heading on for a bottle of Thunderbird wine. On the way back, Foley waved the elderly black man inside the gate. After about an hour Carey showed up and started yelling at Concho to get home. ‘‘Blaze didn’t like the way J.J. was talking to the old man,’’ says Neuenschwander, one of the pickers. Foley started dropping in on Concho, and the two became drinking buddies. If Foley could borrow a car, he’d take Concho, who had a broken hip, on errands, including cashing his Social Security check the first of the month. Stories about ‘‘my old pal, Concho’’ started creeping into Foley’s between-song chatter. ‘‘That was just like Blaze to latch on to some poor, old, lonely man who’d been through some rough times,’’ says musician Lost John Casner. The teeth-baring acrimony grew between Foley and Carey January, an ex-con who had spent four years in prison for a 1975 charge of heroin delivery. It escalated into violence on August 9, 1988. Police received a disturbance call at 706 W. Mary Street that afternoon and found Foley and a neighbor sitting on the steps holding ax handles with black electrical tape for grips. Carey was across the street, yelling to the cops that those men beat him with the clubs. Foley admitted hitting Carey across the back and on the head, but said he was just defending Concho from the latest beating at the hands of his son. The police report described Foley as ‘‘very intoxicated.’’

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Foley pleaded nolo contendere to unlawful possession of a weapon and received 180 days’ probation and a court order to attend at least two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week. Friends say that the singer managed to stay sober for a couple weeks at a time but then would fall off the wagon hard, going on drinking binges. Foley seemed to have been on a tear the last night of his life. Early in the evening, he was 86-ed from the Austin Outhouse when he got in the face of a regular who had used an anti-Arab slur while watching the six o’clock news. The next stop was the Hole in the Wall, which had recently lifted a longtime Blaze ban at the behest of Timbuk 3, who were at the height of their ‘‘Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades’’ phase. The duo of Pat MacDonald and Barbara K didn’t forget that Foley was their first Austin friend and supporter. It didn’t take long for Blaze, who always seemed to be ranting about something, to be shown the door at the Hole. He ended up at the South Austin home of fellow hard-living songwriter Jubal Clark, then borrowed a friend’s Suburban, without permission, to drop in on Concho at about five in the morning. The old man had a lady friend over, and the three drank cheap wine until Carey emerged from his bedroom and a single gunshot broke up the party. Foley was shot at about 5:30 a.m. He was pronounced dead at Brackenridge at 8:14 a.m. ‘‘I got home from a gig late one night and there was a phone message from Lucinda [Williams],’’ Morlix recalls. ‘‘She said there was something she had to tell me but that she’d call me back in the morning. I just sat down and cried. I knew it was Blaze. I knew something bad had happened.’’ Defendant Carey January talked about Foley’s eyes when he took the stand in September 1989 to claim that he shot the songwriter out of fear for his life. ‘‘He was coming at me,’’ January testified. ‘‘I could see fire in his eyes. . . . I had seen that look before, when he hit me with the ax handle.’’ When police arrived at 706 W. Mary Street minutes after the shooting, Foley was outside, lying facedown on the ground, clutching a blue notebook. When they asked him what happened, Carey January said, ‘‘I don’t know.’’ Foley, still conscious but bleeding badly, was able to answer. ‘‘He shot me.’’ Who? the officer asked. ‘‘The guy you’re talking to,’’ said Foley. Concho January told police that Carey killed Foley without provocation, as the songwriter was sitting in a bedside chair, showing the old man a book of his drawings. Twelve days after the killing, someone set Concho’s house on fire while he slept. Though the arsonist was never found, the police report noted that Concho was a state’s witness against Carey, who was in jail. But Concho,

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who died in 1994 at age seventy-one, was not intimidated. He testified at the trial that Carey shot Foley without justification. The elder January, whom defense attorneys dismissed as ‘‘an old fool’’ and ‘‘the world’s most reliable drunk,’’ proved to be ineffective. ‘‘You don’t choose your eyewitnesses. That’s the risk of every prosecution,’’ says attorney Kent Anschutz, who still pains over losing the case when he was assistant district attorney. ‘‘But I have to tell you that my heart sank when Concho got up on the stand and couldn’t even point out his son right in front of him.’’ The jury deliberated just over two hours before finding Carey January not guilty of first-degree murder by reason of self-defense. The release party for the essential Live at the Austin Outhouse cassette, recorded a month before Foley died and featuring such signature Blaze tunes as ‘‘Clay Pigeons,’’ ‘‘Small Town Hero,’’ ‘‘If I Could Only Fly,’’ and ‘‘Election Day,’’ was intended to be a benefit for a local organization for the homeless. Instead, proceeds went to cover the balance due on Foley’s funeral costs. It seemed, at the time, that the cassette would be the last anyone heard of Blaze Foley, but friends, including singer-songwriters Rich Minus, Calvin Russell, and Pat Mears, have done much to keep Foley’s songs alive, recording three albums of Blaze covers and one album of odes to the songwriter. Live at the Austin Outhouse, released on cd in 2000, has become a cult favorite, especially in Europe. It doesn’t hurt that the songwriter’s biggest fan is country music’s greatest living legend. ‘‘Merle Haggard’s obsessed,’’ says Mercier, who like several former Foley associates has been summoned to Haggard’s bus in recent months. ‘‘He wanted to know about Blaze’s life experiences. I told him that Blaze had had polio as a child, so one leg was shorter than the other and he’d sorta drag his foot when he walked. Merle was so moved by the image.’’ Haggard wanted to hear all the old Blaze stories, like the time Foley lay down in the middle of Guadalupe Street to prove his love for Mercier and indeed stopped traffic—including the cop car that took him away. ‘‘See how much I love you?’’ he shouted to Mercier as he was led away in handcuffs. Michael David Fuller, who was born in Malvern, Arkansas, and raised in Marfa and San Antonio, performed his first set as ‘‘Blaze Foley’’ in 1977 at an Austin dance club behind the Hole in the Wall that booked singersongwriters during happy hour. ‘‘He was hilarious, and his songs were great,’’ says Morlix, one of six audience members. ‘‘He’d pull stuff out of his bag and give a little show-and-tell presentation between songs.’’

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For the next three years Foley and Morlix were inseparable, moving to Houston and inhaling the fragrant Montrose folk scene, where Shake Russell, John Vandiver, Nanci Griffith, and Townes Van Zandt were regulars. Foley had started writing songs in Georgia in 1975, where he billed himself ‘‘Dep’ty Dawg’’ and tried not to sound too much like his model, John Prine. But he truly came into his own in Houston. ‘‘There were better singers, better songwriters, but no one was more committed to his songs than Blaze,’’ Morlix says. It was inevitable that he and Van Zandt would become hard-drinking runnin’ buddies. ‘‘Blaze idolized Townes—not only his songs, but his lifestyle. He started drinking vodka, Townes’ drink,’’ says Morlix. ‘‘Sometimes it got out of hand.’’ Of Foley, whom he immortalized with 1994’s ‘‘Blaze’s Blues,’’ Van Zandt used to say, ‘‘Blaze has only gone crazy once. Decided to stay.’’ Van Zandt, who passed away the first day of 1997, credited Foley with inspiring ‘‘Marie,’’ his bleak masterpiece. ‘‘Blaze was real interested in the dispossessed,’’ Van Zandt told kut radio’s Larry Monroe in 1991. ‘‘I thought a lot about Blaze when I wrote ‘Marie’ because he had so much to do with turning me on to that problem.’’ Morlix says that whenever Foley raged—and it was often—the subject was almost always some sort of injustice, real or perceived. But sometimes his unwillingness to back down from any confrontation was just plain scary. Once at a Los Angeles club, when Foley was talking to a topless dancer outside on her break, her jealous boyfriend pulled a gun and said to get lost. ‘‘Blaze said, ‘Just go ahead and shoot me,’’’ says Morlix, a stunned witness. ‘‘I’d bet Blaze said the same thing to the guy who shot him in Austin.’’ At the thirty-fifth reunion of the old L. C. Anderson High School class of 1968, one former student brought framed certificates to the Hilton gathering. But, then, perhaps Carey January felt he had a lot more to prove than his classmates, who passed around wallet-sized photos and business cards. ‘‘We were all so happy to see J.J.,’’ says fellow alumnus William Ward. ‘‘Everybody knew about that problem he had with the shooting, so it was so good to know that he had turned his life around.’’ Ward said he spent a long time talking to January about how life is just a series of choices and all you have to do is make the right ones. ‘‘How did you get my number?’’ asks January, now fifty-four. He has lived for ten years in Los Angeles, where he says he is an outreach specialist. He says he’s received several citations, including one from then-governor Gray Davis commending his efforts to get health insurance for the underprivi-

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leged. He strongly declined to comment on any aspect of the Foley murder case. ‘‘It was fifteen years ago,’’ he says. ‘‘I was acquitted. I’ve moved on with my life. I’m not O. J. Simpson. I don’t want any publicity.’’ Sometimes in death you get what you deserved in life. Foley always wanted to be considered a great writer, not just a good one, mentioned alongside his heroes Prine, Haggard, and Van Zandt. All these years after his final entry in the blue notebook he clutched outside 706 W. Mary Street on February 1, 1989, Blaze Foley’s legacy is as rich as he could’ve hoped for. Like the homemade trinkets and little Goodwill toys he would slide into the hands of friends, his songs are the lovingly crafted, well-worn gifts he left behind.

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BUTTHOLE SURFERS Showing Worm Movies

t’s such a blue-veined movie that bands have been playing off the images and content of Apocalypse Now ever since it came out. Visually, PIL’s Flowers of Romance video did it best, and the Clash got a great song out of Robert Duvall’s line ‘‘Charlie don’t surf.’’ It’s been done. So I entertained no delusions of originality when I started having Apocalypse Now thoughts about the Butthole Surfers. I knew it was an obvious idea. But that didn’t make it go away. My apocalyptic visions of the Butthole Surfers started at the Woodshock ’86 festival featuring twenty or so Austin bands and a few from out of town. Framed by jutting cliffs, with wild foliage melting into green ponds a discus throw from the stage, the setting was not as far from Coppola’s Cambodia as you’d expect from Texas. When the psychedelics kicked in, the Butthole Surfers led off with eerie guitar meanderings, which leapt headfirst into four-armed thunderdrops and bullhorned pleading. Gnawing through my unconscious were the fireworks of death reflecting off the soldiers desperately swimming out to Martin Sheen’s boat as he left the last U.S. outpost. Like Apocalypse Now, the Butthole Surfers hit you in a psychic region that their medium usually forsakes for more acceptable locales. ‘‘Do Not Disturb’’ is not only an order placed on hotel room doorknobs. It’s an edict that rules the diversion biz as well. But the movie about Vietnam (but not really) and the hard-core group (if you had to label them) went ahead and disturbed away, and have met with success. The Apocalypse/Butthole analogy also involves similarities in plot. Colonel Kurtz was a brilliant officer with a very promising future. But he changed in radical ways, discarding his previous existence, bucking the chain of command, and leading his loyal charges into Cambodia, where he did things

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his way. Gibby Haynes, the son of kiddie show host Mr. Peppermint, was an A student and basketball star at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas. He graduated with honors from Trinity University of San Antonio and was named accountant of the year his senior year. He took a job with the prestigious accounting firm of Peat, Marwick and Mitchell and was well on his way to the ‘‘house with the white picket fence,’’ which he would customize by painting alternate pickets red in honor of his father. With the Good Life in clear view on the horizon, Gibby Haynes dropped out. He joined up with his Trinity pal Paul Leary, who was just one course shy of his master’s in business, and they made awful music in San Antonio art spaces. They got a bass player and a drummer and called themselves the Ashtray Babyheads, and then the Butthole Surfers. Imagine an investigator hired by Peat, Marwick and Mitchell to find Gibby Haynes, just as the army sent Martin Sheen after Kurtz. See him in the Greyhound on i-35 looking over Gibby’s dossier in disbelief. First he would go through the school record, the budding accounting career, the charity work, with copies of his awards and commendations. Then he would read about what Gibby Haynes has become. The Butthole Surfers. The fascination with human waste. Getting ejected from the Austin Coliseum for spitting on John Lydon. The admission of drug use. Jumping onstage nude at a Sandra Bernhard show in Houston. Having sex onstage in New York with a woman called ‘‘Ta-Da the Shit Lady.’’ The investigator would look at the photo of Gibby in his high school yearbook, down on one knee, basketball cradled, the all-American boy. And then he’d view a recent picture of Gibby wearing a bra and nurse’s smock, with a hundred multicolored clothespins in his long, dirty hair. Could this be the same guy? The last page in the file would contain a transcript taken from the Butthole Surfer video Blind Eye Sees All, in which Gibby traces his family history: Thousands of people that come before me that are descendents of me, all down the line to where there were worms and there were flat worms and Chinese men that were tied to walls would show worm movies out of their penises into the air in apparent disgruntle and dismay and it would be wadded up like a little girl would wad up some tissue after she had blown her nose and looked in it and the horror of seeing little speckled pieces of blood in her snot . . . it was on that rag that she had wadded up and she threw it away knowing that was her life in there and that her life would never be the same because the world was divided up into four parts. There was the Maggus, the Tutor, the Fangkor and the Doria. And the Doria and the Fangkor were at war with the Tutor and the Fartols,

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who I haven’t mentioned until this point because they were the fifth part who were invisible and all powerful and they were beyond the worms and beyond the Chinese men tied to the wall who would show worm movies out of their penises and who had originally been non-existent at all and never knew how to make fireworks or rifles or they never knew anyone from Saskatchewan and they didn’t know how to dial the telephone and they had these Volkswagen buses that they had designed like they were cathedrals of God and they had directed all of us, all of my relatives, the worms and the Chinese man himself, they had travelled hundreds and thousands of miles when they came to the sea they went under the sea and talked to the fish and when the fish travelled in a line there will be a little dot near their rear end and a string will come out and I have made a kite before and I have flown it out of the string that I got from the dots on fishes’ bottom ends and I have flown it so high that I have been able to see the Atrustians, the Bolivians, the Artesians and the Wallhonkers. All the investigator wanted was a mission, and when this one was over he’d never want another. It is of friendly face, short brown hair, and plump body. ‘‘This is not a fat dog,’’ Leary contradicts the visual testimony, ‘‘she’s just got big bones.’’ Four years ago she resided on Death Row at the San Antonio dog pound, with fractional hope of having her sentence commuted. This canine was special, as the future would bear out, but the untended doggie business and nonstop squealing had a way of rushing the inspections right past her subtle charms. A pair of Trinity University buddies didn’t mind the smell. And the noise was actually kinda nice. They took their time and saw something in the mutt who would never save the lives of children, never jump from Ed McMahon’s lap, and never make paw prints in Hollywood cement. On the way home they named her Mark Farner. The Butthole Surfers love their dog. She’s a tail-wagger in a watchdog world. Mark Farner is unaware that she is one of the Five Most Famous Dogs in America. Her masters have shown her the color photo of them holding her above their heads in Spin and have read the passages mentioning her in the countless Hunter Thompson daydreams which pop up in publications that put typesetting in a category with caviar, lynx jackets, and butlers. But media are invisible to dogs. Farner just wants something to chase, something to chew, or someone to run a hand over her veloured finish like a girl back home feels the crewcut of a beau just back from basic training. Dogs just wanna have fun. And the Butthole Surfers know it. That’s who and what.

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They’re fascinated with the wheres, whens, and hows. And if they knew why dogs just wanna have fun, they wouldn’t be the Butthole Surfers. Questions of nature being unanswerable in the complete sense, the Butthole Surfers were perhaps the most popular underground band in the world in 1986. Their recorded product is annoying, radical, distorted, ugly, and unflinching. They sold enough of it that they could live off their royalties if they didn’t keep buying recording equipment. But they’ve always invested the past into the future. Even with such freedom and facilities, their records never matched their live show, which was one of mankind’s strangest gifts. If a Butthole Surfer show was to be described in a sandlot football huddle it would be, ‘‘Go out to Captain Beefheart, cut left to Pere Ubu, wrap them in toilet paper, then zig-zag through the Living Theatre, rip off Howlin’ Wolf, go in the alley with a Mexican guy with an Afro, come out twenty minutes later and go long.’’ They splattered sounds and stance all over the rock concert decorum like Jackson Pollock threw paint on canvas. They don’t know why, but why not? Since resettling in Austin in early ’86 the Scat Pack restricted the airing of their spectacle to the Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio circuit and oneshot gigs in cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, which they flew to. ‘‘Before we moved into this house we spent almost three straight years touring in our van with no place to come home to,’’ Paul said from the front yard, between throws at the tall glass sign naming the drive-in theater that used to be next door. ‘‘It’s kinda nice, you know, living somewhere,’’ he said and then apologized for the scarcity of good throwing rocks. ‘‘There used to be a lot more here.’’ When punk rock spat its way out of graffitied dives in the late seventies, it was uncertain where it would lead. The parade moved forward on the pavement of its intentions, but still marchers dropped out due to boredom, value-shift, or disillusionment. The numbers shrank like a Pakistani T-shirt in hot water. On the other hand, you had Sonic Youth, Big Black, Scratch Acid, Live Skull, and the Butthole Surfers. The 1980s underground sound owed as much to jazz as it did to rock. It came out at a frequency that most people couldn’t hear, but it twitched the ears and souls of those that could. It told you that everything you know is wrong, and everything you feel is right, but you don’t really know what you feel. It didn’t accept Jimi’s death. It wanted you to police yourself, starting inside and working your way out. It took the hole and left the donut. It told you that one minute of feedback is worth a thousand words. It was white people twisting wormy hair and think-

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ing black thoughts. It was the sound of things being put together against their will. It was not a good place to meet chicks. The Butthole Surfers were free. Freedom is destroying the nets that hold the past and making sure the lines to the future are well above your head. Their minds worked as if they’d been sequestered from taboos. If you can think it but can’t say it you’re not free. If it comes out of your body you shouldn’t be afraid to hold it in your hand.

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RAY WYLIE HUBBARD From Rednecks to Rilke

re you afraid to go on?’’ a roadie asked Ray Wylie Hubbard recently, as the soft-spoken singer-songwriter waited in the wings and a crowd of about two thousand chanted the name of somebody else. ‘‘Pat fuckin’ Green! Pat fuckin’ Green!’’ the crowd screamed. ‘‘The last guy who opened for us didn’t even finish a song,’’ the stagehand said. ‘‘They just drowned him out.’’ So here was a fifty-four-year-old poet with an acoustic guitar, ready to sing haunting, blues-affected songs to an unruly crowd of college kids playing cowboy for the night. But he wasn’t the least bit worried. ‘‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’’ Ray Wylie asked the roadie. ‘‘I’m the guy who wrote ‘Up against the Wall, Redneck Mother.’ I’ll play it every other song if I have to.’’ It didn’t come to that. Ray Wylie had to play the quintessential beerchuggin’, hat-wavin’, hell-raisin’ Texas anthem only once (admittedly, the long version). Thanks to steady airplay in recent years, Ray Wylie has a slew of other recognizable songs, such as ‘‘Three Days Straight’’ off his 2001 album, Eternal and Lowdown. As he’s cultivated more serious listeners with such heady releases as 1999’s Crusades of the Restless Knights and 1997’s Dangerous Spirits, Ray Wylie has even managed to get through complete sets without anyone yelling out requests for the song he says he wished he’d never written (though he’s quick to add that he’s never sent back a royalty check). But it must’ve been good to know that the old albatross, made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1973, can be a secret weapon in testy situations. The tune’s famous spelling-out of ‘‘M-O-T-H-E-R’’ can also help us move through the life of a man who started over at age forty-one—getting straight and relearning the guitar and how to be a husband. ‘‘M’’ is for Mount Karma, which is what Ray Wylie and his wife, Judy, call

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their five acres on a hill overlooking Wimberley. When they went looking for a new place three years ago, Judy wanted a pool. Ray Wylie, meanwhile, pined for a log cabin in the country. Someone would have to lose, right? But when a Realtor friend heard the couple’s wish list, he said, ‘‘You’re not going to believe this, but I know of a log house with a pool that’s about to go on the market.’’ ‘‘It looked right out of The Munsters,’’ Ray Wylie recalls. The pool was cracked and filled with muck; weeds had engulfed the logs in green and brown; and the interior, which had been uninhabited for five years, looked ransacked. ‘‘I got out of the car and said, ‘I love it!’’’ The musical ‘‘fixer-upper,’’ whose career was once in shambles, looked past the grit and grime and saw the possibilities. If there’s anything the Hubbards have learned, it’s that things can turn around. Their lives crossed as each was in the early stages of recovery from drugs and alcohol, so they know magic can come from a mess. They met thirteen years ago, not in the basement of a church at noon but in a nightclub after midnight. ‘‘I was touched by the words he was singing,’’ Judy says of that set at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas. When he opened his dressing room door, she was there, and she’s been there ever since. Judy now manages her husband’s career with a nurturing style that has earned her the nickname ‘‘Mother Hubbard’’ from band members. ‘‘O’’ is for oblivion, Ray Wylie’s nightly destination until he finally realized his only choices were to go on the wagon or ride in the hearse. ‘‘I used to take comfort from the loneliness with whiskey / But it tore up my soul and turned against me,’’ he sings in the new ‘‘Didn’t Have a Prayer.’’ It’s a number from the dark end of the street about finding spirituality when you don’t think you deserve it. Like most of the Gurf Morlix–produced album, which rides a sticky Delta groove, it’s a song about days worth remembering because they’re long gone. It also reminds Hubbard of a chance encounter that gave him his first hope that he could rock without the lifestyle that had previously spurred it on. He had given up alcohol and cocaine only a week earlier, and his resolve was starting to get shaky when he ran into Stevie Ray Vaughan in Dallas in November 1987. ‘‘I’d met him only once before, when we were both trashed, but he’d been sober about fourteen months when I ran into him again, so he sat down with me and talked about some of the things he’d been going through. He told me that back when he was partying it felt like he was playing the guitar with gloves on, and getting sober was like taking off the gloves.’’ Ray Wylie had worried that as a teetotaler he’d lose the fire to create,

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but in Vaughan he saw someone who had continued to burn intensely after going straight. The next time he ran into Vaughan, he proudly told Stevie that he’d just made a year sober. ‘‘His face just lit up.’’ ‘‘T’’ is for Texas, always for Texas. ‘‘H’’ is for the humility Ray Wylie showed when he realized that his songwriting wouldn’t improve until he learned how to fingerpick. And so at age forty-three, this honky-tonk veteran, who had already achieved a measure of success as one of Waylon/Willie’s ‘‘and the boys,’’ took his first guitar lesson. ‘‘See, I was hearing these songs in my head, but I couldn’t get my guitar to play ’em,’’ he says. He was a carpenter with only a saw in his toolbox. But even as his music improved, his following, especially in his hometown of Dallas, got smaller. Soon after recording the brilliant Loco Gringos Lament (1994) for San Marcos–based DejaDisc, Ray Wylie’s first label since a couple of Nashville disasters in the late seventies, he and Judy decided to move to Austin. She quit her well-paying executive job at a LincolnMercury dealership, and the couple, with baby Lucas in tow, moved to a tiny house in downtown Wimberley. After five or six months in the Austin area, Ray Wylie got a call that made ‘‘E’’ for ecstatic. ‘‘The mayor [Kirk Watson] called me up and said, ‘Bring your guitar to the City Council meeting tomorrow. It’s Ray Wylie Hubbard Day.’ That was some welcome. In Dallas, I might as well have been invisible.’’ ‘‘R’’ is for Rilke, the writer Rainer Maria Rilke, whose book Letters to a Young Poet had a profound effect on Hubbard during the midlife-crisis intervention he’d done on himself. ‘‘Our fears are like dragons guarding our most precious treasures,’’ he sings in ‘‘The Messenger,’’ quoting Rilke in his crisp, folksy voice. ‘‘Y’all should go out and pick up a copy of Letters to a Young Poet,’’ he said at a 2001 record release party. ‘‘You know, after you buy my cd.’’ Ray Wylie’s a funny guy who once performed a forty-five-minute set at Kerrville without playing a song and got a standing ovation anyway. The knee-slapping humor and heart-tugging songs may seem strange stagefellows, but Ray Wylie says he always likes to put the unlikely together. ‘‘It’s like the album title—Eternal and Lowdown. They seem to have two completely different meanings, but something happens with those words when you put them together. When Gurf heard the demos, he said he wanted to make a record that was elegant and all messed up at the same time, and I went ‘Yeah!’ He got it.’’ Two other disparities that meld harmoniously are the log cabin and the swimming pool, which have been restored to near mint condition on that hill overlooking the town. ‘‘If you saw our place now you’d think we’re richer than we are, but I’ll tell ya, it was a lot of work,’’ Ray says. For the first six

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months the family’s kitchen consisted of an ice chest, a microwave, a card table, and three folding chairs. Bedsheets hung where doors should’ve been. But little by little, one day at a time, all the pieces of their paradise have been put together. His career, meanwhile, has fallen into place, too, with rave reviews and radio play bringing his music to his biggest audiences since the ‘‘outlaw country’’ days. It’s a long, bending, weight-shifting, gravel-grinding drive to get to the top of Mount Karma. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t mean as much to get to where you finally belong.

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TOWNES VAN ZANDT Death on New Year’s Day

ownes Van Zandt, whose rich narrative style influenced a generation of Texas songwriters, died of a heart attack January 1, 1997, at his home near Nashville. His young daughter, Katie Belle, came running in and said, ‘‘Daddy’s having a fight with his heart.’’ The writer of such country hits as ‘‘Pancho and Lefty’’ (Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson) and ‘‘If I Needed You’’ (Emmylou Harris and Don Williams) was fifty-two. It wasn’t the hits, however, but a stark and penetrating body of work that gave Van Zandt the reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter. Such early Van Zandt albums as 1968’s For the Sake of the Song and 1969’s Our Mother the Mountain inspired such Texas songsmiths as Steve Earle, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett, and Lucinda Williams. When those artists joined together for an album of Van Zandt tunes in 2001, the title said it all: Poet. Earle took his worship of Van Zandt public, allowing his assessment that ‘‘Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that’’ to be stickered on the cover of Van Zandt’s 1987 lp At My Window. Van Zandt was a long, desolate stretch of highway. He was Skid Row lined with bums. Singing along to his songs would be like making love while a tv documentary on Hiroshima flickered in the background. Instead, you drank along, as Van Zandt traipsed the gutter between life and death. He wrote of his own experiences—including alcoholism, depression, and the drifting life—in a way that almost made sadness seem like a sacrament. Van Zandt knew that his lot was to be a cult hero. ‘‘I remember him saying to me that he was afraid he was going to be like Hank Williams, and people were only going to know who he was after he

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was dead,’’ Gilmore said. Ironically, Van Zandt died on New Year’s Day, the same date Williams had been pronounced dead forty-four years earlier. New York Times writer Robert Palmer drew out the parallels between Van Zandt and his hero Williams in a June 7, 1987, article. ‘‘Both men live in their music, as if singing and writing and being human were the same thing and as natural as breathing,’’ Palmer wrote. He described the music of both Williams and Van Zandt as ‘‘the direct, untrammeled expression of a man’s soul.’’ A trait common to the two songwriting beacons of different eras was an affinity for alcohol and drugs. Van Zandt’s battle with the bottle was ongoing, as he slipped in and out of sobriety—sometimes during the break between sets. But even as he slurred the cornball jokes that he used as comic relief, Van Zandt was capable of compelling musical performances, with such down-and-out songs as ‘‘Marie,’’ ‘‘Tower Song,’’ and ‘‘Still Lookin’ for You’’ appropriately darkened by Van Zandt’s state. He shared a lot of himself onstage, and when he stepped off, the songwriting community was there to share what it could with him, whether it be a bed or a snort. ‘‘The songs were always there,’’ said Griff Luneberg, manager of the Cactus Cafe, which hosted countless Van Zandt concerts. ‘‘No matter what shape Townes was in, he had the songs, and that’s what people came to hear.’’ Luneberg recalls Van Zandt’s final Austin show, at the Cactus on October 12, 1996, as ‘‘pure magic.’’ Although his career was on an upswing, especially in Europe, Van Zandt’s health had been unstable in recent years. At the time of his death, he was at home in the Nashville suburb of Smyrna recuperating from hip surgery. But his drinking was the cause for most concern. ‘‘I had expected a call about Townes for a few years,’’ Jerry Jeff Walker said. ‘‘Today I got that call. It’s still very sad when it comes.’’ He was born John Townes Van Zandt into a wealthy Fort Worth family on March 7, 1944. Van Zandt asked his parents for a guitar at age ten after seeing Elvis Presley on tv. His father said ok, but there was one condition: the first song Townes learned had to be ‘‘Fraulein.’’ As a teen, diagnosed as a ‘‘schizophrenic-reactionary manic-depressive,’’ Van Zandt moved to darker themes. His private prep school education made him well steeped in classic literature; Van Zandt was especially taken with the sonnets of William Shakespeare. His musical influences, meanwhile, expanded to include Woody Guthrie and Lightnin’ Hopkins. ‘‘There are only two types of music,’’ Van Zandt used to say, ‘‘the blues and ‘zip-a-dee-doo-dah.’’’

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Van Zandt moved to Houston in 1965 to study pre-law at the University of Houston, but as the designated opening act at the Jester Lounge on Westheimer, Van Zandt got bit—no, swallowed whole—by the folk bug. His material was not made for hootenanny sing-alongs, however. He wanted to explore heavier subjects, as evidenced by one of his first compositions, ‘‘Waiting ’Round to Die.’’ Van Zandt was not only the link between Hank Williams and Bruce Springsteen but also the catalyst for a rich musical relationship that still thrives. Jimmie Dale Gilmore said he and Joe Ely had been only casual acquaintances until the day Ely called him up and told him about a hitchhiker he picked up who had a backpack full of his own records. ‘‘Joe called me up and said, ‘You gotta hear this.’ And of course, it was Townes Van Zandt’s record Our Mother the Mountain,’’ Gilmore said. The songs are always there, providing some comfort in the grief, and one in particular defines a life lived like few others. In ‘‘A Song For,’’ the leadoff track of his last studio album, 1994’s No Deeper Blue, Van Zandt wrote his epitaph: ‘‘London to Dublin / Australia to Perth / I gazed at your sky / I tasted your earth / Sung out my heart / For what it was worth / Never again shall I ramble.’’

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DON WALSER Last of the Singing Cowboys

on Walser is all eyes as he lies on a recliner, covered from neck to feet by a Dallas Cowboys blanket, in a room of his modest South Austin house full of framed photos and little gifts given to him over the years by fans. The great country singer, dubbed ‘‘the Pavarotti of the Plains’’ by a Playboy reviewer, can barely raise his arm a few inches to shake hands, and his speech is slow. But his eyes light when his mind is injected with a favorite memory: the standing ovation he received when opening for Johnny Cash at the Erwin Center in 1996, the bouquet of flowers legendary songwriter Cindy Walker sent to his dressing room when he made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, the punks of Emo’s jubilantly thrashing to his oldtime cowboy music. In late November 2003, a sixty-nine-year-old Walser announced his retirement from performing, just as his music was being exposed to prospective new fans with three songs included in the film Secondhand Lions. But as his health—and his live performances—had deteriorated in recent years, it was a decision that, although difficult, was inevitable. ‘‘I just couldn’t do the things I use ta do anymore,’’ Walser says. Around 1995, the 350-pounder started sitting during performances because of chronic pain in his knees. Then came the arthritis that made him unable to play the guitar. Walser was diagnosed with neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system, in 2001. Over time, his athletic tenor didn’t ring with the same clarity; difficult songs he once sang with ease, such as ‘‘Danny Boy’’ and the yodelfest ‘‘Rolling Stone from Texas,’’ had to be dropped from the set list. He had to regularly cancel appearances, including the tenth anniversary of his weekly shows at Jovita’s, because of his health. ‘‘Don’s old joke was that he wanted to die onstage at 102 years old,’’ says his

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longtime fiddle player, Howard Kalish. ‘‘It was obvious that he wasn’t going to make it to 102, but the other thing could’ve very well happened.’’ The crowds began dwindling, and Walser lost his residency gigs, first Threadgill’s, then Jovita’s, and finally the Broken Spoke. ‘‘Don just loves to sing, but it broke my heart to watch him perform when he was ailin’ so badly,’’ says Spoke owner James White, whose club had hosted Walser and his Pure Texas Band for fourteen years. After agonizing for weeks and fielding concerns from disappointed fans, some of whom had come from as far away as Europe and Japan to see Walser, White decided that what would be best for everyone was to scratch his good friend from the schedule. That was the end of a musical career that was put on hold almost thirty years, since the 1961 release of the single ‘‘Rolling Stone from Texas,’’ so Walser could raise a family. The singer, originally from the West Texas town of Lamesa, spent thirty-nine years in the National Guard before embarking on a full-time music career in his late fifties. ‘‘There’s not a trace of phoniness in Don,’’ said Kalish. ‘‘When he said he was pleased to meet you, he truly was.’’ Once, arriving for a show on the East Coast, Walser was stunned to see a line around the block. When the promoter started showing Don to his dressing room, the singer said, ‘‘Nah, I want to meet these people’’ and went down the line shaking hands. One woman wept in disbelief upon meeting her hero, the ambassador of real country music, but Walser put her at ease by wiping away a tear of his own. The Walser story, a feel-good ode about seizing a second chance late in life, became irresistible to the national media, and soon Big Don, dressed like a colorful John Wayne sidekick, was featured on tv, in glossy magazines, and in radio reports. Just as he was about to turn sixty, he signed a major label deal with Sire, the company that discovered Madonna, the Ramones, and Talking Heads. It’s stunning to realize that nobody except a handful of Western swing connoisseurs had ever heard of this magnificent vocalist until 1990. That’s when he started playing Henry’s Bar and Grill on Burnet Road, a painfully short-lived hangout for hipsters and barstool regulars until it was torn down to make way for an Auto Zone store in 1993. The Henry’s scene, which also helped rejuvenate the career of Junior Brown, jump-started a moribund Austin roots collective. ‘‘What I remember most of those early days was the completely blissful looks in the crowd when Don sang,’’ says Kalish. ‘‘In the beginning, the crowds would practically double every week.’’ The way you first saw Walser

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perform was to be dragged, superlatives flying, by someone who’d heard him the previous week. Soon, everyone from kids in Mohawks to senior citizens in beehives was charmed by the rotund yodeler with the Andy Devine laugh and the powerful singing voice that sounded as swept up in the plains as a tornado. Walser’s sound stood for one thing: the preservation of traditional country music. But when the classical Kronos Quartet asked him to sing with them at Bass Concert Hall in April 1997, Don loved the idea. ‘‘I knew it was still going to be country music if I was singing,’’ he says with a laugh, his eyes twinkling. Walser didn’t get rich from his music—even in his late-nineties heyday Walser and the band made anywhere from $300 to $2,500 a gig before expenses—but he had finally fulfilled his childhood fantasy of making records and cultivating a loyal following all over the world. Dare to Dream was the perfect title for his 2001 ‘‘Best of . . .’’ collection.

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ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO Hands of the Son

ook at that suit, man,’’ Alejandro Escovedo says, watching grainy, jerky home movies at the house he rents on Canyon Lake near New Braunfels. ‘‘My dad was a suave son of a bitch.’’ On the screen a six-yearold Alejandro is walking with his father, Pedro, who’s carrying Al’s sister, Cookie. Suddenly, with a big laugh, the man swoops up the boy and holds him to his chest. ‘‘See how strong he was?’’ Alejandro asks his girlfriend, Kim. ‘‘His hands were so big and powerful. He could get on a horse and make that animal do whatever he wanted it to do.’’ When he was an infant, his mother told Alejandro that he was the baby Jesus, which meant, in Al’s young mind, that his father was God. Boys become their fathers, and when Alejandro was just a boy of seventeen he became a father, having a daughter, Marseilla, with his high-school sweetheart. ‘‘My father told me, first of all, to make sure it was my kid,’’ says Al. ‘‘Then he said if it was, he’d give me money for a one-way ticket to anywhere in the world. He wasn’t exactly supportive.’’ While writing the songs that evolved into the play By the Hand of the Father, Alejandro spent a lot of time thinking about his childhood. ‘‘My parents loved music. They loved to dance,’’ he says. ‘‘They’d just throw us kids in the car, drive out to some nightclub, and go inside and party while we slept in the car.’’ It was a different time back then, when pregnant women chain-smoked and infants dozed, unrestrained, in the backseats of cars that hurtled down highways. Men worked hard and drank beer with their friends, and every once in a while they’d give the kids a pat on the head on the way to the fridge. Different times, boy. In the home movie, which has been transferred onto a videocassette la-

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beled ‘‘San Antonio 1950s,’’ Pedro Escovedo is standing with a detached look next to Al on a merry-go-round. ‘‘He’d much rather be off at some bar or playing cards,’’ Alejandro says with a laugh. The camera closes in on the father, whose thick hair is combed back and divided with a part as straight as the hyphen in ‘‘Mexican-American.’’ ‘‘He was one handsome dude, right?’’ ‘‘Oh, yeah,’’ Kim says, putting her hands on his shoulders and kissing his head. ‘‘One handsome dude.’’ Ninety-four-year-old Pedro Escovedo delighted in hearing the album that his migration to America inspired. ‘‘I think it’s the proudest he’s been of me since my baseball-playing days in high school,’’ Alejandro says. During a recent visit to San Diego by Al and his family, the old man rocked back and forth and smiled as he heard a song his son had written in Spanish. In the kitchen, his wife, Evita, told Kim stories of Pedro’s jealousy. She told the one about how, even though she didn’t have a license, she was forced to drive home one night because Pedro had too much to drink. A cop pulled her over because she was weaving. Then, seeing that she was sober, he let her go with a warning. ‘‘All the rest of the way home, Pedro accused her of letting the cop see down her shirt in order to get out of the ticket,’’ Kim says. Another time, the couple had a fight, and Evita took a bus to Los Angeles to see a movie and didn’t return for several hours. When she came back she saw that Pedro had chopped down the tree he’d planted for her years earlier. ‘‘I don’t know why my mom just doesn’t let it go,’’ Alejandro says of the bitter remembrances. By the Hand of the Father, a concert/theater hybrid that takes an unflinching look at the Mexican American experience through the eyes of sons and daughters, began with a more loving tone. About seven years ago, while he was in Los Angeles recording the With These Hands cd, Alejandro had a chance meeting at the studio with his half brother, former Santana percussionist Pete Escovedo. ‘‘I told Pete that I had written some songs about our father and did he want to play on them?’’ Alejandro had a hankering to write a song cycle based on his father’s stories, with the idea that all Pedro’s kids would play them for him as a ninetieth birthday present. Some of the songs, such as ‘‘Hard Road’’ from Al’s days in the True Believers (which featured younger brother Javier and third songwriter Jon Dee Graham) and 1993’s ‘‘Ballad of the Sun and the Moon,’’ had already been written. More would come through collaborations with members of l.a.’s About Productions Latino theater group. The play’s female collaborators wrote angry dialogue about growing up under macho rule, where brooding silence was a favorite form of communication.

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‘‘At first I resisted the negative stuff,’’ says Escovedo. ‘‘I didn’t want to go there. But after a while I started looking back on my own upbringing in a different light. I saw things I never noticed before, like my father’s drinking. I never thought he had a problem or anything, and he quit more than twenty years ago. But when we started writing the play, I remembered certain things, like times that my father just wasn’t himself or fights he’d had with my mom. I had put all that stuff out of my mind.’’ Escovedo says he’s never been more nervous before a performance than when the full play, which makes the musicians actors and vice versa, debuted before a predominantly Hispanic audience in East Los Angeles in June 2000. ‘‘It’s much more intense than playing a concert,’’ he said of the production, which also includes documentary footage as a backdrop. ‘‘Every gesture, every word means something. You feel like you’re under a microscope for ninety minutes.’’ But the challenge has been fulfilling for Escovedo, who’s spent most of his life grappling with his ethnic identity. From his teenage years as the only Hispanic surfer in Huntington Beach, California (‘‘everybody thought I was Hawaiian’’), through his time as a San Francisco punk rocker with the Nuns and his current status as an orchestral troubadour, Escovedo has traveled primarily in Anglo circles. But after he was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 1996, the slap of mortality made him explore who he was and where he came from. He learned to speak Spanish and started reading books about the history of Mexico, which he began pronouncing ‘‘meh-he-ko.’’ In concert, before a collapse in 2003 from the effects of hepatitis C curbed his touring schedule, he told stories of migrant workers and border crossings and Mexican villages where the rebels fought. He translated ‘‘The Rain Won’t Help You When It’s Over,’’ inspired by his father’s tireless work ethic, into Spanish. He also wrote ‘‘Wave,’’ the story of his father coming to America as a twelve-year-old in search of his parents, who were pickers in Luling. The townspeople of Saltillo, Mexico, near Monterrey, where Pedro lived, would sometimes pass the time by waving at trains. ‘‘When my dad was leaving, he looked out the window, and his grandparents, who had been taking care of him, were waving and smiling at the train,’’ Escovedo explains. ‘‘He thought they were waving at him personally, but they didn’t know he was on the train.’’ Escovedo says that although his father was a great storyteller and had a gregarious personality, he rarely exposed his inner self. Pedro almost never called Alejandro, so when the phone rang one day in 1991 and a raspy voice

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was on the line, Al expected bad news. Instead came words of encouragement for a scarf-wearing rock ’n’ roller who’d been thrust back to earth by the suicide of his second wife, Bobbie. ‘‘My dad told me he was real proud of me for raising my kids on my own. He told me that was something he wouldn’t have been able to do. I was forty years old, and that was the first time he’d ever shared those kind of feelings or acknowledged that I was a man, on his level, and not just his son.’’ It’s hard to profile an artist you’re friends with. You’d think the familiarity would make it easy, that you could just pull out anecdotes from memory, flaunt all the access and excess, and end it all with the subject staring off into the unknown with the smoke of a cigarette spiraling upward. But it’s possible to get so far behind the scenes that you lose sight of what others find so intriguing. The tidy summation, a critic’s best friend, conflicts with the full range of actions, both good and bad, that define someone you really know. ‘‘Why don’t you ask some real questions?’’ Escovedo says as we drive to San Antonio to eat at Karam’s, his mother’s favorite restaurant, and to visit the house from which his earliest memories come. ‘‘You know, if you wanted a free lunch you should’ve just said so.’’ A true perfectionist, Escovedo takes the tape recorder from the dashboard and balances it on his lap. With a bow of the head and a slightly raised voice, Al tells funny stories, like the one about the cross-country tour by Rank and File, the l.a. ‘‘cowpunk’’ pioneers for whom Escovedo played guitar, which consisted of seven gigs in seven weeks. That one of those shows was in Austin is why the group relocated here in 1981. As I found out when I started working on this story, I don’t really know much about Alejandro at all. I could tell you the kind of charming scoundrel he is: insecure, smart, funny, efficient, inclusive, more fun to hang out with when he drank. He likes women and loves the Rolling Stones. He always tells people that I called him ‘‘the William Shatner of rock ’n’ roll,’’ but the only comparison I made in print was that he looks like Tiger Woods. I met him in 1984, and through the years we’ve never talked about anything serious, not even Bobbie’s death. We talk about Juan Marichal’s highkicking windup and that great AC/DC show we went to when we met the band afterward and Malcolm Young and Al locked into deep conversation about guitar pickups. I didn’t even know that Alejandro was born in Texas and lived in San Antonio for six years before moving to California, where his father got a job as a plumber. But Escovedo navigates the West Side neighborhood as if guided by mem-

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ory’s map. ‘‘Here it is,’’ he says as we pull up to the house from the home movies. ‘‘We used to keep our rabbits under the house over there,’’ he says, pointing to an opening near the back of the home on Arbor Street. A man is watering the grass in the front yard, and Al tells him, in slow, choppy Spanish, that he used to live there. When Escovedo asks about some of the places he knew as a kid—the candy store, the bakery, the boxing arena where Pedro, a former prizefighter, would take the family on Friday nights—a neighbor selling watermelons out of a trailer comes by and all three talk. Alejandro seems very much in his element. His electric smile defrosts any sort of apprehension that might’ve arisen when a stranger, his gringo girlfriend, and a reporter come looking at your house. Before we leave, Alejandro stares at the house for a long time and runs his hands across the top of the fence. He’s a minor-league superstar, named by No Depression magazine as ‘‘Artist of the Decade’’ for the nineties. But back at this happy place, with movies of a strong, handsome man running through his mind, Alejandro Escovedo is six again. When it comes to fathers and sons, you know, nothing ever really changes.

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STEVE JORDAN The Invisible Genius

hen he walked onstage at the twentieth anniversary of the Tejano Conjunto Festival at San Antonio’s Rosedale Park in May 2002, Steve Jordan was resplendent in a purple jumpsuit with gold buccaneer sleeves. But what stood out most was how frail the sixty-two-year-old accordion legend looked. Like a skeleton clinging to its last layer of skin, Jordan appeared so gaunt that his right eye patch seemed to cover half his face. A stray strand of his jet-black mane stuck to his lips, giving this cholo pirate an even more eerie look as he strapped on a red diatonic button accordion bearing his name. Then came the smile, that ear-to-ear endorsement of the moment. With other entertainers, a grin is a given. But on the mouth of a pioneer prone to bitterness, who rarely plays in public these days, the upturned corners meant something. It’s not often that an enigma comes to life before your eyes, so when ‘‘Estay-bon Hor-don,’’ as he was introduced, took off on a jazzy tangent to start his set, the audience of about two thousand erupted. Conjunto purists have not always been fans of Jordan’s attempts to modernize a style of music that peaked in popularity in the fifties, and he’s not exactly big with the Tejano crowd, which prefers its frontmen to wear cowboy hats and dance around. But on this night the factions of fans blended together to welcome home the notorious troubled genius ‘‘El Parche,’’ the Patch. When he punctuated the perfect night with his trademark girlie yelp, the cowboys in their white straw hats raised their cans of light beer, and the women brushed against the up beat. ‘‘Voy a cantáerles un corrído muy al albla’’ (‘‘I’m going to sing you a great corrido’’), he vocalized on a traditional Mexican folk song that he would

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‘‘Jordanize’’ with cat-quick button runs and a skronking solo closer to bebop than Tex-Mex. ‘‘Esta es la historia de un pachuco muy rocote,’’ he sang in an unharnessed voice. This is the story of one badass pachuco. The way you interview Steve Jordan is to drive to San Antonio and just show up at his door in the house in the backyard of another house on the far West Side. Appointments don’t mean much to the man who’s never owned a watch. He’s been known to take off at the drop of a Hohner on impromptu deep sea fishing and casino gambling vacations off South Padre. But on this day you’re lucky. It’s four in the afternoon and Jordan’s home, but he’s still sleeping. ‘‘He was up all night recording,’’ his nineteen-yearold son, Steve, says. ‘‘Give him another hour or two.’’ A polite and softspoken kid, Steve III (he has an older half brother also named Steve Jordan) gives a tour of the studio that dominates the living room. The only tv is tuned to a surveillance camera outside. The only stereo is a big wooden console number on top of which several Ampex reel-to-reel tapes are stacked. The famous red ‘‘Steve Jordan Tex-Mex Rockordeon’’ is on the floor next to a chair. There are musical instruments everywhere—guitars, drums, saxophones, timbales, and two or three other button accordions. Jordan can play them all with the virtuoso skill another man named Jordan once displayed on the basketball court. ‘‘How do you like my little setup here?’’ asks the man himself, emerging from a bedroom less than half an hour since the knock on his front door. ‘‘You meet my 280 musicians? Right here, man, in my synthesizer. Best musicians I ever jammed with, bro’, cause they all play like me.’’ Here come that exaggerated snicker and the slap on the back. Mr. Jordan’s wearing sunglasses instead of the patch that earned him the nickname ‘‘El Parche.’’ You don’t need to ask a question to get him to take off on any given subject in his hipster growl. ‘‘I hate digital, man,’’ he says, pointing to his ancient reel-to-reel decks. ‘‘Music is not this,’’ he says chopping the air like the vertical coding on cds. ‘‘It’s like this,’’ he says, rolling his hand in circles. Steve Jordan doesn’t do interviews, he holds court. He tells stories, recounts old gigs, and goes off on riffs, jumping from an explanation of why he used to own a hearse (‘‘I didn’t want my first ride in one to be in the back’’) to his assessment of other accordion players (‘‘That dumb cowboy’s pretty good, but he can’t play with me,’’ he says of one). The mention of a recent article in the San Antonio Express-News brings out a trace of the notorious temper. While acknowledging Jordan’s genius, the piece includes allegations of drug use and erratic behavior. ‘‘I’ll take a

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dude outside and whip his ass if he disrespects me,’’ he says. ‘‘Society can’t touch me, man. Never has. I never went to school, never been trained how to act. I’m an animal, bro’.’’ ‘‘I’m not afraid to die,’’ he says, lifting his shirt to show a scar that runs from his navel to just below his breastbone. ‘‘I’ve already been dead, bro’.’’ Moments later, Jordan is back to telling funny stories about the early years on the road. If you’re going to keep up with Steve Jordan, you can’t dwell on anything he says or does. ‘‘I remember the first time I ever heard of acid, lsd. It was 1964, bro’, and the stuff was legal,’’ he says. ‘‘We had just finished playing—it was somewhere in California—and some dude asks the band if we want to do some acid. I said, ‘Sure, I’ll try anything,’ and started rolling up my sleeve. But the dude said, ‘You don’t shoot it, you eat it.’’’ Jordan goes on to describe lsd hallucinations so horrifying that he says he swore off acid forever. ‘‘At one point I asked my bass player, ‘What’s that funny-looking thing? What does it do?’ and he said, ‘That’s your accordion, man.’ That was it for me. When I couldn’t recognize my accordion, that was way too fucked up.’’ He’s been called ‘‘the Jimi Hendrix of the accordion’’ since the late sixties, when he introduced psychedelic phase shifters to an instrument aligned with The Lawrence Welk Show. He’s also been compared to Charlie Parker— in both talent and temperament—but Jordan doesn’t agree. ‘‘Charlie Parker just played jazz. I play jazz, but I also play rock, country, salsa, mariachi, cumbias—you name it.’’ These days, however, Jordan is more like Brian Wilson during his obsessive Smile days. During the past eight years, when he snipped his barfly wings and evolved into a studio parrot, Jordan has recorded more than a hundred new tracks, stuff he says is twenty years ahead of its time. It’s a heavily layered sound, with Jordan running his guitar notes through a pair of Roland synthesizers to create everything from cellos and violins to otherworldly horn sections. The music of Steve Jordan’s mind is full and offbeat. But despite its inherent trippiness, there’s an unmistakable melodic thrust to the new material, which sounds like sixties soul one minute and a loco polka the next. ‘‘I’ve always been way ahead of everybody else, but this stuff is in a whole other galaxy, man.’’ He doesn’t trust a record company to put it out, just as he doesn’t let managers, booking agents, or anybody else in the music industry touch his art. He hasn’t released a new album in twelve years. ‘‘The big man upstairs is teaching me patience,’’ Jordan says. ‘‘That’s something I’ve never had before. Maybe the plan now is for me to lay low and let everybody else catch up a little. But I tell ya, I’m not slowing down, bro’. I still kick ass every day.’’

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Jordan gave up the bottle after he fell during his fifty-third birthday party and broke his arm. When he turned fifty-four, his friends chipped in and surprised him with a two-thousand-dollar synthesizer he’d been pining for. ‘‘They were gonna sign for it and I was going to make the payments,’’ Jordan says, ‘‘but then at the store they had a little meeting and decided against it. I was hurt, man. I had no idea that they had planned to surprise me with it a few days later.’’ He gives five to Efraim Palacios, the head chipper-in who has stopped by to tell Jordan about a possible gig in Saginaw, Michigan, a city with a huge population of homesick Mexican and Texan migrant workers. Palacios, who sells business communication systems during the day and drops in on Jordan at night, is more a responsible friend than manager. ‘‘We created a monster,’’ the preppily dressed Palacios says of the synthesizer that led to Jordan’s single-minded compulsion to record. ‘‘I don’t listen to anybody else,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t listen to the radio. It’s all crap, man.’’ In the background is a Christmas song that Jordan recorded so he’d have something to listen to during the holidays. Release schedules and concert dates, not to mention wives, only confuse the muse. Jordan says he’ll know when the time is right to start putting out this new stuff on his own El Parche label. ‘‘I just want to get this shit on the streets, man. I wanna see everybody flip. Then I can die and head on to the next place.’’ By his own estimation, Steve Jordan is 125 years old. ‘‘When I was a little kid, I couldn’t work in the fields. I couldn’t pick cotton, so I stayed behind in the camp with all the people who were too old to work,’’ he says. ‘‘When I was 7 years old, I was 70 in my mind.’’ He began life in the Rio Grande Valley town of Elsa in 1938 with a fire in his eyes. Moments after he was born, a midwife gave him contaminated eyedrops that caused scarring, and Jordan lost all his sight in his right eye and most of it in the left. He was the runt of fifteen children born to migrant worker parents, but Steve could play every instrument he got his little hands around. His earliest memory is of playing the harmonica as a toddler. He moved on to guitar, bass, and drums. One night in a labor camp outside of Lubbock, seven-year-old Jordan was playing guitar and heard a sweet accordion sound coming from the shack next door. ‘‘I stuck my head out and he stuck his head out and we decided to play together,’’ he says. And that’s how Jordan met a teenage Valerio Longoria, who would go on to join Santiago Jimenez Sr. (Flaco’s dad) and Narciso Martinez in the holy trinity of conjunto acordeonístas. ‘‘I had seen people playing the accordion before, but never so close or so good.’’

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The accordion was invented in Berlin in 1822 as the orchestra for the common people, and when Jordan squeezed one for the first time and heard the richness of sounds, he knew he had found his instrument. In just three weeks he was accomplished enough to play for tips in the cantinas. Asked when he started thinking about making a living as a musician, he says it was as soon as he made his first dollar that night in El Campo fifty-five years ago. ‘‘School didn’t make sense to me,’’ says the first-grade dropout. ‘‘The whole idea is to learn some way to make money, but I already knew how to make money, man.’’ As a teenager in the early fifties, Jordan saw a demand for dance bands, so he pulled four brothers out of the fields and taught each one his musical role. ‘‘That’s how I learned all those instruments,’’ he says. ‘‘When I’d show someone in my band what to play, I was also teaching myself.’’ In 1958 Steve settled in San Jose, California, and married the great singer Virginia Martinez, who would join him on vocals on several regional hits in the traditional ranchera and polka styles. He was faster, flashier, more versatile than the other accordion players right from the start, but Jordan really opened up, both literally and musically, in 1973 after he was knifed by a stranger whose motive is still unknown. ‘‘Getting stabbed really turned me around,’’ he says of the parking lot assault outside a bar in Roswell, New Mexico. ‘‘I realized that it was time to stop fucking around and just get down all the sounds in my head. Don’t hold back, because life is short.’’ You can hear the innovations evolve on the essential Many Sounds of Estéban ‘‘Steve’’ Jordan (Arhoolie), which opens with nine tracks recorded in 1963 with Martinez and ends with an assortment from the seventies. During his 1973 hospitalization and yearlong recuperation, Jordan often passed the time taking his equipment apart and putting it back together. For years he’d been retuning his accordions by filing the reeds inside, but when he studied the inner workings of an echoplex and perfected various effects, he took conjunto music to a new level. The ‘‘invisible genius of Texas accordion music,’’ he was called in a 1992 Option magazine profile by Ben Ratliff, now a jazz critic for the New York Times. The beloved Flaco Jimenez had become the ambassador of conjunto music, but it’s Jordan who keeps progressing, even if it means shaking a few fans with every zig and zag. ‘‘He really blew the doors open to what the accordion could do,’’ says Brave Combo’s Carl Finch, who helped compile The Return of El Parche, a 1988 reissue of seventies Jordan recordings, for Rounder. ‘‘He’s just an allround genius, and on top of that he’s got this bulletproof mystique.’’ But as with many innovators, Jordan hasn’t achieved the success of many of his imitators. His groundbreaking singles for Corpus Christi–based Hacienda Records in the seventies rarely sold more than a thousand copies,

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and nobody can remember the last time he had a radio hit. He’s an international dude stuck in a Chicano world, as he told one critic, an expressionist expected to conform to the limitations of a diatonic instrument designed to play in only three keys. Accordion players and manufacturers all over the world rave about him, however, and Jordan says one of his proudest moments was the hero’s welcome he received when he visited the Hohner plant in West Germany eleven years ago. The company flew Steve over to present him with an accordion customized to his specifications, including almost flat buttons for faster finger action. ‘‘The factory tour was a trip, man, because I always like to see how things are produced. Then I played for all the assembly line workers, and you could see their jaws drop,’’ he says. ‘‘I showed ’em what they were making.’’ There are no wrong notes, only players who don’t know what to do with them, Jordan says. Sometimes he’ll hit a ‘‘wonk’’ when you’re expecting a ‘‘wink,’’ but in his jazz player’s consciousness, it all makes sense. He doesn’t know where it comes from, this inspiration that makes him happy and drives him crazy. ‘‘I don’t wanna wake up until I die,’’ he says. Making music is putting yourself in a trance that tunes out the world, often to the dismay of wives and bill collectors. ‘‘I don’t give a damn about the audience,’’ he continues. ‘‘I could be playing for five people or five thousand—it doesn’t make a difference. I’m still gonna kick ass. And if you ain’t gonna play because there’s nobody there, then get the fuck out of my band.’’ Jordan’s wicked perfectionist streak is such that he once hauled his own pa system to a taping of Austin City Limits. Although he flatly stated that he wouldn’t go on without his own speakers, he finally relented when it was pointed out that the ACL system was set up for television taping and not some Tejano bar. Jordan has also been known to be brutal with club sound engineers. ‘‘I’m sorry, but white guys just can’t mix Mexican music. They always want to put the emphasis on the beat,’’ he says, imitating a bass drum. ‘‘But we like the up beat.’’ Jordan says reports that he can be a fiery bandleader are justified, but there’s no problem with his current band. ‘‘They’re like little pieces of me,’’ he says of seventeen-year-old bassist Richard Jordan and the nineteen-yearold guitarist he calls Steve 3. ‘‘They’ve been playing only eleven months, and they get what I’m saying the first time.’’ The father didn’t really know his sons when they were growing up. There were occasional Christmas visits and a fishing trip here and there, but for the most part he wasn’t an active participant in their upbringing. He didn’t

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get along with their mother, his second, and, he vows, final, wife. Then one day about two years ago, she dropped them off with the near-stranger with the eye patch, saying she couldn’t control them anymore. Suddenly, Jordan’s simple life—record, sleep, eat, record—wasn’t so simple, as he assumed custody. At the time Jordan was without a band, and therefore without an income (he says he’s never received a penny in royalties from the nearly fifty albums he’s released in his career). When a lucrative gig was offered in Houston, Steve said he’d take it. He had three weeks to teach his sons, who were more into sports and Nintendo than music, how to play thirty songs, but they did the show and have barely stopped playing since. ‘‘These boys, they keep me young,’’ the proud father says. ‘‘They never complain. They never want to stop.’’ Steve suddenly stops talking and raises a hand for silence as his version of ‘‘Harlem Nocturne’’ plays in the background. The jazz standard, which Steve spent more than a week producing, starts with a lushly layered orchestra conjuring every shade of the night. ‘‘Can you dig it, man?’’ he asks when his accordion starts into the melancholy melody. ‘‘All that sound from this little brown box,’’ he says, tapping an old Hohner on the floor with his foot. He touches his chest where the buttons would be, swaying his head as if he’s lost in a dream. ‘‘Man, what am I doing here, living in the back of some other dude’s house, with my kids sleeping on the floor?’’ he asks, cutting into the ethereal moment. ‘‘Ask yourself that, bro’. But this is why,’’ he says, gesturing back to the speakers, where his accordion is flitting all around the melody like a bouquet of fireflies. ‘‘This,’’ he says, tapping the air. What a gift it is, the ability to blow your own mind. For Estéban ‘‘Steve’’ Jordan, that’ll have to do for now.

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DOUG SAHM The Genre Conqueror

e gave the Austin music scene its soul, and his death November 18, 1999, broke its heart. Doug Sahm, a singer and guitarist who showed the world the glory of Texas music with the Sir Douglas Quintet in the sixties through his nineties stint in the Tex-Mex supergroup Texas Tornados, died in Taos, New Mexico, at age fifty-eight. The San Antonio native, fluent in every style of Texas music, from blues and conjunto to Cajun, honky-tonk, and psychedelic rock, was found dead in a hotel room, a victim of heart disease. When the news hit, musicians gathered at Antone’s for an impromptu tribute, and radio stations including kgsr-fm and kut-fm played Sahm’s music around the clock, with one song particularly coloring the moment. ‘‘You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul,’’ Sahm sang in ‘‘At the Crossroads.’’ That was his motto until the end. Born Douglas Wayne Sahm on November 6, 1941, he began his musical career as Little Doug, a pint-sized steel guitar prodigy who performed on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and played with Hank Williams at Austin’s Skyline Club just two weeks before Hank’s death in 1953. As a teenager he became hooked on blues, often sneaking into s.a.’s Eastwood Country Club to see the likes of T-Bone Walker, Clarence ‘‘Gatemouth’’ Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, and Bobby ‘‘Blue’’ Bland. He also frequented Latino clubs on the West Side, where most rock bands had vibrant horn sections. Sahm’s fanaticism for gritty, soulful music was matched by his passion for following baseball. During the early rock ’n’ roll explosion, Sahm was on the front line, recording a series of Little Richard–inspired screamers from 1955 to 1960 and

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becoming a local star. He greatly admired another regional rocker, El Bebop Kid, later known as Freddy Fender. It wasn’t until the British Invasion of the sixties that Sahm, masquerading as a British bandleader in the Sir Douglas Quintet, broke onto the national music scene with ‘‘She’s about a Mover,’’ a Top 20 hit in 1965 produced by Houston’s Huey P. Meaux. The song, featuring the pulsing Vox organ of longtime sidekick Augie Meyers emulating conjunto bajo sexto lines, inspired such later hits as ‘‘96 Tears’’ by ? and the Mysterians and even the new wave sounds of Elvis Costello and the Attractions. The English ruse was discovered when the band was interviewed on television’s Hullabaloo and Sahm’s Texas drawl came rolling out. It also raised a flag of suspicion that three of the band members were Hispanic. After getting busted for possession of marijuana at the Corpus Christi airport, Sahm moved the group to San Francisco, where they fell in with the Grateful Dead, fellow Texpatriate Janis Joplin, and like-minded roots rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival. Sir Doug hits in the late sixties included ‘‘Mendocino’’ and ‘‘The Rains Came,’’ and the band found an admirer in Bob Dylan, who wrote ‘‘Wallflower’’ for Sahm. In the early seventies, Sahm rejected the Haight-Ashbury scene and came back to Texas to reestablish himself as a barroom rocker with The Return of Doug Saldaña. One of the songs he covered on the album was ‘‘Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,’’ which opened with a salute to the man who wrote it and originally recorded it in 1960. ‘‘And now a song by the great Freddy Fender,’’ Sahm said, his voice drenched in echo. ‘‘Freddy, this is for you, wherever you are.’’ At the time, Fender was back in San Benito, working as an auto mechanic and going to night school. But when word got back to him that he was becoming a cult figure with the longhairs of Austin, Fender played Soap Creek Saloon in 1974 and decided to give a music career another go. By the next year, after ‘‘Before the Next Teardrop Falls’’ topped both pop and country charts, Fender was the hottest ‘‘new’’ singer in the biz. Sahm also deserves credit for getting a mentally troubled Roky Erickson back in the studio after the former 13th Floor Elevators singer’s release from the state mental institution. ‘‘Red Temple Prayer (Two-Headed Dog)’’ and ‘‘Starry Eyes,’’ the single Sahm produced in the mid-seventies, proved that whatever deranged demons ravaged Erickson’s cerebrum, he remained a tremendously soulful singer and songwriter. When former Austinite Bill Bentley was putting together the 1990 allstar Erickson tribute album, Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye, he saved a

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plum for Sahm, letting him and his sons Shawn and Shandon have ‘‘You’re Gonna Miss Me.’’ Sahm was a man with his feet always in two different places. He loved Austin, but he was a San Antonio boy. He chain-smoked pot but was an avid fan of the ‘‘American Pastime.’’ He loved Hank Williams and Hank Ballard equally. The turnout at his funeral, on the West Side of San Antonio, attested to Sahm’s wide-ranging appeal. The crowd was so large that about a third of the estimated one thousand on hand had to huddle around an overwhelmed loudspeaker outside. But even more impressive than the number of mourners was the way they cut across all lines of age, race, and social standing. Not only was just about every Austin and San Antonio music veteran present, but those who came to pay their respects included bikers, field workers in their best pair of jeans, club owners, music executives, and fans from as far away as Holland and Canada. They wore black cowboy hats and Chicago Cubs caps in homage to the cosmic cowboy whose passion for life was infectious. And when they approached the coffin, after waits as long as an hour and a half, they touched the trademark black hat that Sahm was buried in and slipped in little gifts—guitar picks, joints, poems. Son Shawn broke up the somber occasion with hilarious stories that earned nods of recognition from the audience. ‘‘You could never get ahold of Dad. He got hold of you,’’ Shawn said. Baseball, of course, was a main topic. ‘‘When we were driving around and my father saw the illumination of a baseball field a couple miles away, us kids knew we were gonna be there for a while,’’ he recounted. A multitasker supreme, Sahm loved to coach, scout, and provide play-by-play from the bleachers. After the services at Sunset Funeral Home let out and Sahm’s body was moved to be buried next to his father and mother in a private ceremony, many of those on hand milled around the parking lot and told their own Sahm stories. ‘‘There was no such thing as failure in his life,’’ said Bentley, who started Tornado Records with Sahm a few months before Doug’s passing. ‘‘There would be like two podunk stations playing the Tornados, and Doug would be acting like he had a hit record on his hands. ‘They’re playing us in Poughkeepsie!’ he’d say. ‘If you can win over Poughkeepsie, you can take on the world.’’’ Bentley repeated an opinion shared by many, that a statue to Sahm should be built in Austin, right next to the Stevie Ray Vaughan monument. ‘‘When you look back on the true originators, the real pioneers of Texas music,’’ said writer Joe Nick Patoski, ‘‘there are four main guys: Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, T-Bone Walker, and Doug Sahm.’’

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‘‘It’s like they burned the encyclopedia of Texas music,’’ said Joe ‘‘King’’ Carrasco, whose ‘‘nuevo wavo’’ sound owed a huge debt to the music Sahm and Meyers made with the Sir Douglas Quintet. Being in the presence of Doug Sahm was to be linked to the days when Lightnin’ Hopkins and Freddie King played juke joints, Ernest Tubb’s tour bus hit every honky-tonk in Texas, and Adolph Hofner had the most stomping polka band in the land. Now that Sahm is gone, the recent past seems like ancient history.

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SELENA AND LYDIA MENDOZA The First and Last Queens of Tejano

here were you when you heard the news? I was at work, and someone poked his head in and said that Selena had been shot. A few minutes later, the coworker returned to say the Tejano superstar was dead. I sat there stunned, wondering why and how and who and where. Then I went back to work. Many, many more people didn’t. On March 31, 1995, Hispanic teenagers walked like zombies, and older people wore the look of being hollowed out inside. Construction workers drank their beer in silence, and cars slowly crept in a somber promenade. To most of America, the Selena tragedy was just a fascinating episode on cnn, but in Mexican American communities it hit like an earthquake of the soul. Selena Quintanilla embodied the aspirations of young Tejana, and in the end she showed just how fast dreams can die. The fact that anyone can point at someone else and make them dead is a sad reality of life in a country where guns are as rampant as delusions. Cruelly, Selena’s dreams of being an American sensation, not just a regional star, came true after her death. Dreaming of You, Selena’s posthumous release, debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard album charts. The sales were, no doubt, stimulated by the heightened awareness of Selena following the tragedy. Still, the lp’s main selling point was the soulfully elastic pop voice that had attracted millions of fans in a single region before her death. The buzzwords of the Selena story are hard work and determination, but she also had a tremendous gift as a singer. Vocally, she could bury Madonna and Gloria Estefan, the two singers with whom she was most often compared. In terms of worship and deification, Selena can also be compared to the original Madonna, the Virgin Mother, frozen in time as a representation of all that is good and pure. She died perfect.

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Besides similarities in talent, Selena’s story more closely resembles the first part of Michael Jackson’s life. Like Jackson, she started singing in her family band—Los Dinos—before her age hit double digits. Both artists were driven to perfection by ex-musician fathers who projected their own hopes of national recognition through their prize offspring. From the very beginning, as a nine-year-old prodigy, Selena aimed to go where no other Tejano star had gone: the Billboard pop charts, mtv, the Tonight Show, a side career in the movies. Ambition is the sauce that flavors the truly great ones, and Selena’s sounds were marinated for the big time. As Selena blossomed into a young lady, she started dressing sexily and attracted girls who wanted to be like her and boys who wanted to be with her. In her late teens she was already dubbed ‘‘La Reina de la Onda Tejana,’’ the queen of Tejano music. By its very structure, Tejano is a blend of two cultures, and Selena was a bridge between them. Such tunes as ‘‘Techno Cumbia,’’ with its Michael Jackson–like trills, and the reggae-heavy ‘‘Bidi Bidi Bom Bom’’ present a seamless blend of convex styles. Dreaming of You also contains a duet with world music frequent flier David Byrne on ‘‘God’s Child,’’ with Selena handling the Spanish parts with fire and grace. Like Elvis Presley, whose legend has overshadowed his skill, Selena could sing it all, from Latin soul to mariachi to Valley pop to lounge act schmaltz. The countless quickie bios tell us that Selena loved to shop at Wal-Mart, even after she was rich and famous. Her favorite restaurant was Pizza Hut. Like most Tejanas, her first language was English. She was very much a product of her surroundings. The indigenousness extends to the music of Selena y Los Dinos, who got their act together in the Gulf Coast party town of Corpus Christi. Sound travels over water like a marble rolls across glass, so such styles as reggae from Jamaica, tropical from Miami, cumbia from South America, and good ol’ New Orleans funk slid into Corpus like they were just over the border from Texas. Selena and her bandleader brother A. B. Quintanilla absorbed it all and reinvented it. The problem with role models is that they’re playing roles, but Selena just naturally, effortlessly represented the positive side of the Hispanic community: the tight family, the religious convictions, the teen dances and soccer games, and the birthday parties in the carports of little swimming-poolcolored houses. Even on stage wearing a black bra and tights, Selena was the kind of performer who exuded wholesomeness. Superstars don’t come from New York or Hollywood. They come from places like Gary, Indiana; Aberdeen, Washington; Tupelo, Mississippi; and Corpus Christi. They are the boys and girls with big dreams and the luck to win the talent lottery.

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Selena was so far above the rest of the genre, in terms of both ability and popularity, that it was almost like she was the campfire and the other Tejano acts were faraway stars in the country sky. It almost seems like part of a divine plan, this tragic loss; if thinking so relieves some of the pain, then so be it. That the queen of Tejano would die such an unlikely death, murdered by her deranged, embezzling fan club president, brings near-religious implications. When Jesus was nailed to a cross, he took on human qualities—pain and suffering—to save us, we’ve been told over and over. Selena’s death beats home a similar point. This superstar really was one with her fans, and when she died little pieces of her stayed inside each one of them. Before Selena, there was Lydia Mendoza, the first star of Mexican American music, who sang for those who had no voice, who migrated north from Mexico for a better life and found poverty and racism. She was ‘‘La Alondra de la Frontera,’’ the Meadowlark of the Valley, singing in a raw, dignified quiver that touched the common folk. Where many Mexican Americans of the time were keen on fitting in in the Anglo world, Mendoza kept hundreds of Mexican folk songs alive, passing the tradition to younger generations, just as her mother Leonor had done with her. Like the Quintanillas, the Mendozas had a family band, and the eldest daughter was the standout. She sang with her sisters and parents, but Lydia made the greatest impact alone on stage, with a twelve-string guitar. Her varied repertoire included tangos, boleros, rancheras, and corridos; her lyrical themes were heavy on heartbreak and deceit. She became a star in Spanish-speaking communities in both North and South America with her first single, 1934’s ‘‘Mal Hombre’’ (‘‘Evil Man’’). Through the years, she recorded almost 1,200 more songs, many of which she could instantly recall to fulfill a request, but her debut remained her signature song. Born in Houston in 1916, Mendoza spent many of her early years in Monterrey, Mexico, where her family returned soon after she was born. The guitar had been passed down from grandmother to mother to Lydia. When Lydia was twelve, the Mendoza family moved to the States for good. Father Francisco pushed for his family quartet, rounded out by wife Leonor on guitar, Lydia on mandolin, and her sister Panchita playing the triangle, to make a bid for a musical career. While living in Victoria, Francisco saw an ad in San Antonio’s Spanish-language newspaper seeking Hispanic acts to record for Okeh Records. The Quartete Carta Blanca, named

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after Francisco’s favorite brand of beer back in Mexico, passed the audition and recorded twenty tracks, though none were hits. In the summer of 1929, the Mendozas signed on to pick beets in Michigan, but found they could make more money playing music for homesick Hispanics at the only Mexican restaurant in Pontiac. Francisco got a job at the Ford plant in Dearborn, but was laid off during the Depression and moved his family back to San Antonio in 1932. With few jobs available, the family played for tips at the Plaza del Zacate (Haymarket Plaza) and were instantly popular. Where other performers roamed, the Mendoza family stayed in one place; the crowds came to them. One night a local dj for the kcor radio station heard Lydia sing with the family and offered her a nightly slot on his Vox Latina show. But since the radio appearances didn’t pay, and the family was living day to day, Lydia’s mother refused to let her take the job until the station found a sponsor to pay Lydia $3.50 a week. The radio show established Mendoza as a top regional singer. The 1933 repeal of Prohibition, meanwhile, created work for musicians to play cantinas. The next year, Mendoza became a national recording star, when ‘‘Mal Hombre’’ rang from jukeboxes. Her first single, recorded with three other tracks in a San Antonio hotel one afternoon, remains her biggest hit. The smash did not make her wealthy, however. She received just fifteen dollars a side for those early recordings. The label claimed she had signed the rights away for the cash advance; considering that she was unable to read the contract, which was in English, she probably did. The road was where the money was, and the Mendoza family did variedad shows, mixing music with skits, from Texas to California. Lydia’s solo segment was the nightly highlight. When the family performed in Los Angeles for the first time at a sold-out Mason Theater in December 1937, a review gushed over Lydia’s ‘‘historic’’ set, without mentioning the others. Although she was becoming a major star in Latino communities, Lydia and her family faced racism on the road which was not unlike that experienced by black entertainers of the time. ‘‘No dogs or Mexicans,’’ a sign read in the window of a restaurant in West Texas. The 1950s and ’60s were marked by a boom in Norteño music, which would later be called Tejano. Drawing the biggest crowds, Mendoza was the unrivaled queen of the circuit. In later years, she reaped the rewards of musical royalty. The teenager who sang for nickels in San Antonio’s Plaza del Zacate in the 1930s to help feed her family grew into the icon who was awarded the National Medal of

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Arts by President Bill Clinton at the White House in 1999. It’s the highest honor the government can give to a performer. But her greatest awards came from her musical interaction with the hardworking people whose stories she sang. On her first tour of South America, in 1982, she was shocked at the fervent reception. ‘‘It was incredible,’’ she recalled in A Family Autobiography (Arte Público Press), an oral history. ‘‘I didn’t realize that they still remembered that music. The people were crying when they looked at me.’’ After a show at Medellín, Colombia, many joined in a public prayer for her to return to the region. In her autobiography Mendoza remarked on how often she’s approached by people who ask her why she sings with such feeling. ‘‘They ask me if I have passed through what I’m singing about in some part of my hard life,’’ she said. ‘‘Well, thank God, no. . . . I have had happiness. But when I am singing a song, it seems like I live in that moment.’’ At the time of this writing, Mendoza was eighty-eight, rounding out her life in a Houston nursing home. When she does pass away, there will not be shock and disbelief, but warm remembrances. Lydia Mendoza has lived a long and productive life. May she go in peace. On the other hand, there remains an uneasy feeling about the death of Selena, murdered by her deluded lackey. Her life ended so senselessly, beauty losing out to hideousness, that her music is forever ringed in sadness. Most hurtful of all, though, is that we’ll never know just how far Selena would’ve gone on talent alone.

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WAYLON JENNINGS An Outlaw at Rest

aylon Jennings had it all. Movie-star looks. A warm, forceful voice. A gift for writing frill-less songs that roused the soul. But Jennings possessed one quality that rose above all the others. When he announced his arrival as a country music star with 1968’s ‘‘Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,’’ he sounded like no one who had come before him. That’s only happened three or four times in the history of country music. In an era when label bosses kept their acts in the middle of the road, Jennings swerved from side to side and told them to eat his dust. That black hat wasn’t just for decoration, Hoss. Waylon was the first country hitmaker to use his touring band in the studio, the first to record an album of songs by an unknown writer. In accomplishing these feats with 1973’s Honky Tonk Heroes, ten-elevenths of which was written by Billy Joe Shaver, Jennings was a true ‘‘Nashville Rebel,’’ the raging soul of outlaw country music. Like Elvis Presley, he could bring vocal grace to any style of music. He made almost every song he covered better than the original. But Waylon’s true kindred spirit was Hank Williams, whose head-butts against the Nashville wall were recalled in Jennings’s own experiences with the establishment in ‘‘Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.’’ Those born in Texas are instilled with the belief that they are a little bit bigger and smarter, and a whole lot tougher, than non-Texans. ‘‘But the really tough part,’’ Jennings said in a tv interview, ‘‘is when you go out in the world and find out that you ain’t.’’ His swagger, underlined by his trademark pulsing bass lines and accented by a devilish grin, could not mask the air of vulnerability he brought to his songs like ‘‘Storms Never Last,’’ written by his beloved wife Jessi Colter.

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Jennings died peacefully on February 13, 2002, at his home in Arizona, after a long battle with diabetes-related health problems. He was sixty-four. But Waylon packed a whole lot of living and a mess of great musicmaking into those years. He recorded sixty albums and had sixteen Number 1 country singles in a career that spanned five decades and began when he played bass for Buddy Holly. In an oft-told footnote, Jennings was scheduled to fly on the light plane that crashed and killed Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. ‘‘The Big Bopper’’ Richardson in 1959. Jennings gave up his seat on the plane to Richardson, who was ill and wanted to fly rather than travel by bus. Through tragedy he’s forever linked to Buddy, but it was the triumphs that have painted Waylon and Willie Nelson as kindred spirits. Duets such as ‘‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,’’ ‘‘GoodHearted Woman,’’ and ‘‘Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)’’ crossed over to rock fans and evoked a restless spirit embraced later by Travis Tritt, Steve Earle, and any rockers who let the radio linger on a country station when an old classic came on. A one-name superstar, Waylon was a creation all his own. ‘‘There’s always one more way to do things,’’ he’d say, after several early frustrating years of listening to producers. ‘‘That’s your own way. Everybody deserves the chance to do things their way at least once.’’ Jennings made the most of that chance and never went back to the way things used to be done. The first Nashville artist to receive complete creative control, he handed in his albums with terse instructions to release them as is; the Music Row chiefs couldn’t argue with the results. Nineteen seventy-four’s This Time and 1975’s Dreaming My Dreams are wall-to-wall masterpieces that sold well. Always surrounded by Hell’s Angels as bodyguards, Jennings cut an imposing presence. He played up his brash persona with such album titles as Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Ladies Love Outlaws. Although Jennings scoffed at the maverick image as a marketing tool—one that inadvertently led to the 1977 drug bust described in ‘‘Don’t Y’all Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand’’—he had to admit that it fit. ‘‘You start messing with my music, I get mean. As long as you are honest and up front with me, I will be the same with you.’’ His resonant, authoritative voice was used to narrate the popular tv show The Dukes of Hazzard. Hearing Waylon’s theme song ‘‘Good Ol’ Boys’’ was the highlight of the show each week. But success could not tame the rebel fire. Jennings often refused to attend music awards shows on the grounds that performers should not compete against each other. He skipped his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001, and during the sixties he declined to appear on the

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Grand Ole Opry because a full set of drums was forbidden. That rule was eventually dropped. ‘‘He knew exactly what he wanted,’’ said Austinite Floyd Domino, who played piano in Jennings’s band from 1982 to 1986. ‘‘Whatever you played, he’d tell you to play it an octave lower. He always wanted the emphasis on the down beat.’’ Like most great musicians, Jennings heard a sound in his head, and he wasn’t going to let anyone change it. ‘‘I’ve always felt that blues, rock ’n’ roll, and country were just a beat apart,’’ Jennings once said. And it was Jennings who brought them all together with a distinctive stomp. ‘‘Some people have their music,’’ he said in 1984. ‘‘My music has me.’’ Born in Littlefield, Jennings became a radio disc jockey at Lubbock’s klll at fourteen and formed his own band. He and Holly were teenage friends, and when Buddy decided to start his own label with proceeds from such hits as ‘‘That’ll Be the Day’’ and ‘‘Peggy Sue,’’ Jennings was his first signee. Though Waylon’s version of ‘‘Jole Blon’’ didn’t bust out of West Texas, he was hooked on making records. And with Holly, the first successful rock ’n’ roller to write, produce, and play on his own records, he found a mentor for the ages. ‘‘Mainly what I learned from Buddy was an attitude,’’ Jennings said. ‘‘He taught me that music shouldn’t have any barriers to it.’’ By the early 1960s Jennings was packing J.D.’s nightclub in Phoenix six nights a week, mixing country with rockabilly and blues. In 1963 he was signed by Herb Alpert’s A&M Records, but after creative misunderstandings (‘‘They were thinking Al Martino,’’ Jennings explained, ‘‘and I was thinking Flatt and Scruggs’’), Jennings got out of his contract and signed with Chet Atkins at RCA. Nashville. Once in Nashville, he and Johnny Cash became friends, roommates, and pill-poppin’ pals. During his 1970s glory years, Jennings switched to powdered fuel and acquired an addiction to cocaine that cost him about $1,500 a day. But with such Number 1 smashes as ‘‘I’ve Always Been Crazy’’ and ‘‘Amanda,’’ Jennings could afford the endless bumps. After finally getting drug-free, Jennings found success in the mideighties with the Highwaymen, country’s version of the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup consisting of Jennings, Nelson, Cash, and Kris Kristofferson. During a club tour of 1993, when Jennings told as many stories as he sang songs, he recalled being impressed with Willie’s ability to memorize new songs on a Highwaymen tour. ‘‘I’d say, ‘I just can’t learn any more songs,’ but Willie would say, ‘I’ll do one more.’ Willie had ten more songs in the show than the rest of us,’’

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Jennings recalled. ‘‘Then the first night of the tour I look over and Willie’s got all the lyrics right in front of him on a music stand. I coulda strangled him.’’ Although so closely associated, the two Texas icons didn’t always get along. In fact, Jennings said his song ‘‘Bob Wills Is Still the King’’ was written more as a dig at Nelson, in retaliation for booking Waylon into a couple of disastrous gigs, than a celebration of Bob Wills. ‘‘No matter who’s in Austin / Bob Wills is still the king,’’ the song goes. Where Willie is a trusting soul, Waylon was always suspicious, always worried that someone was going to take advantage of him. If not for an affinity for music, Waylon and Willie probably would’ve never had anything to do with each other. But there’s no denying the magic, the mystique, those two created together with their fluency in big sky freedom.

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THE CHUCK WAGON GANG Higher Power through Harmony

n November 1936, the Chuck Wagon Gang, a family quartet from Lubbock, was summoned to the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio by Vocalion/ Brunswick’s Dallas district sales manager, Don Law, to record for the first time. But before D. P. ‘‘Dad’’ Carter and his children Anna, Rose, and Jim huddled around a single mike in the $2.50-a-night hotel room, they had to wait for another performer to finish his session. ‘‘I’m gon’ get up in the mornin’ / I believe I’ll dust my broom,’’ the young bluesman from the Mississippi Delta growled, his relentless guitar plunks echoing down the hallway like the ghost of rock ’n’ roll future. Robert Johnson’s recording debut, which yielded such influential classics as ‘‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,’’ ‘‘Sweet Home Chicago,’’ and ‘‘Cross Road Blues,’’ is the most legendary session ever set in Texas. With sixteen tracks, recorded over three days, Johnson turned the key that ignited so much that came later, especially ’60s blues rock from the Rolling Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and many more. That the Chuck Wagon Gang had also recorded in the same room on one of those days is now just an interesting footnote. The other Carter family did not make much impact with the Western ballads, folk songs, and sacred numbers they recorded at the Gunter. But the quartet went on to create a body of work that stands at the top of the Southern gospel field. The Gang’s format was simple: four distinctive voices—two male, two female—creating richly textured harmonies over an acoustic guitar. Wasn’t much to it; just a vocal dynamic that no one’s been able to match. The Carters were just tickled to be making records in 1936, a year after Dad Carter went to kfyo in Lubbock, hat in hands, to ask for a radio show for his quartet, which drew nightly praise from neighbors who gravitated

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to the Carters’ front porch every evening. The family, which included nine children, was dirt poor, laboring in the cotton fields, and when Anna (then called ‘‘Effie’’) came down with pneumonia there was no money to pay a doctor. The Carters turned to music for extra cash, and after they were hired by the station for $12.50 a week, Anna got her medical treatment. Originally called the Carter Quartet, the group became the Chuck Wagon Gang the next year when they moved to Fort Worth to replace a group by the same name on wbap. The fifteen-minute daily program was sponsored by Bewley’s Best Flour, which sent a cooking crew to give biscuitmaking demos when the Gang played shows. In the beginning, the material was partly defined by the name. In that two-day San Antonio session, fourteen of the twenty-two tracks were secular tunes, many with a Western theme, while only eight were spiritual numbers. But beginning in April 1940, the Gang recorded only gospel numbers. It wasn’t so much that Dad and his wife, Carrie, were Bible-thumpers, but the religious songs always got the best response from crowds, and in those days you didn’t straddle the fence between secular and sacred. That first all-gospel session, recorded at the Burris Mills Studio in dfw suburb of Saginaw, is the basis of Higher: The 1940 Dallas Session (Sony), an absolutely stunning twelve-track reissue that starts off the day like coffee for the soul. With Jim’s high bass playing off Anna’s low alto, while soprano Rose airs it out and Dad’s understated tenor ties it all together, the quartet locks in even as it soars, trusting each other vocally as blood relatives do best. The cwg was the Dallas-based Stamps-Baxter Music Company’s best friend, making geniuses out of such 1930s writers as Albert E. Brumley, Marion Easterling, Luther Presley, and J. R. Baxter Jr. After people heard the Gang’s recordings of such Stamps-Baxter writers, the demand for their songbooks from music teachers, choir leaders, and other musicians increased dramatically. There were a couple of reasons why it took me so long to discover this amazing group, whose music I hadn’t heard until recently. First, there was that ill-fitting name, which conjured a group of cutups in dusty chaps and floppy Stetsons, ringing cowbells and singing about the ol’ Chisholm Trail. Also, with a few exceptions, I’m not a big fan of the Southern gospel genre, preferring the Pentecostal fire to Presbyterian finesse, Swan Silvertones to the Blackwood Brothers. But the Chuck Wagon Gang erases any misconception that white gospel singers can’t be possessed by the holy spirit. Who knows if Robert Johnson stuck around to hear that father and three of his children sing their way out of their Grapes of Wrath existence? In less

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than two years Johnson would be dead, reportedly poisoned by a jealous husband. The Carters, meanwhile, went farther along, recording and touring for several decades; in fact, there’s still a group called the Chuck Wagon Gang, which features Anna’s granddaughter Shay Truax and Ronnie Page, who joined in 1962. The group, which re-creates the wbap show from the late ’30s in its set, released its latest lp, Live in Branson, in late 2004. The original members are all gone. Dad died in 1963, Jim in 1971, and Rose in 1997. Anna Carter Davis, who was married to former Louisiana governor and ‘‘You Are My Sunshine’’ singer Jimmie Davis, passed away in 2004 in Fort Worth at age eighty-seven. The Chuck Wagon Gang didn’t change the world of music; they were simply the best at something that appeals to a limited audience. Most impressively, their voices elevated the words ‘‘chuck wagon’’ to heavenly status.

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BOBBY FULLER Rock ’n’ Roll Mystery

t wasn’t like the career-conscious Bobby Fuller to blow off an important band meeting, but when the singer didn’t show up at the office of manager and Mustang label owner Bob Keane at 9:30 a.m. on July 18, 1966, the other 75 percent of the Bobby Fuller Four weren’t too alarmed. After all, the meeting was early, and Fuller had drunk several beers the night before and had been seen by road manager Rick Stone leaving the apartment he’d shared with his mother and bassist brother Randy at about 2:30 a.m. Bobby had been on something of a rampage in recent days, arguing with Keane over musical direction, having a fistfight with brother Randy after a disastrous gig in San Francisco, and he was considering breaking up the band. He had even hired a photographer to take solo publicity photos of him. What’s more, the El Paso native was hanging out with a drug dabbler named Melody, and he had started experimenting with lsd, according to Stone. Publicly, Fuller denied taking psychedelics, which had not yet been made illegal, but in the June 7, 1966, edition of Record Beat he said, ‘‘I think all the reporters should go on writing about lsd and its effects, and let people decide for themselves whether or not they should take it. One thing that I know is that you are completely aware of what you’re doing, but it’s intensified into unreality.’’ Twenty-three-year-old Robert Gaston Fuller was at a crossroads in his life and his career, and manager Keane called a meeting to try to keep the band from disintegrating. When Bobby didn’t show up in the morning, the meeting was rescheduled for 3:30 p.m., but when the singer still didn’t turn up, Randy Fuller, guitarist Jim Reese, and drummer Dalton Powell knew something was wrong. So did his mother Lorraine, who came downstairs that afternoon to see if her

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Oldsmobile, the car Bobby drove, was in the parking garage. She ran into Ty Grimes, one of Bobby’s old pals from El Paso, and they discovered the Oldsmobile in the basement parking structure. Inside, sprawled across the front seat, dead, was a badly beaten Bobby Fuller. He was soaked with gasoline and was clutching the hose from a gas can. Stone, who happened upon the scene soon after, described Bobby’s appearance for the Rockin’ ’50s collector’s magazine: ‘‘There was a large, silver dollar–size abrasion burn on his left elbow. His face was terribly distraught with a painful expression and was swollen, turning reddish-blue-purple. He had some blood on his chin and mouth area. His hair appeared as if gasoline had been poured on it.’’ To the Hollywood cops, who were dispatched to check out the body found in the Oldsmobile at 1776 Sycamore Street, Bobby Fuller must’ve been just another rock ’n’ roll punk. Or maybe they took offense at the rebel pose of his current smash hit ‘‘I Fought the Law.’’ At any rate, when the officers were told that the deceased was the up-and-coming rocker, who had caused near-pandemonium at such clubs as P.J.’s, It’s Boss, and La Cave Pigalle (or ‘‘the Pig’’), their reaction went converse to normal celebrity treatment. One cop found a gas can in the backseat and threw it in a trash bin before it could be examined, according to published reports. The car was neither impounded nor dusted. There was virtually no search for witnesses, and foul play was quickly ruled out in this death by ‘‘asphyxia–inhalation of gasoline.’’ Police officials called it a probable suicide without ever explaining the bruises and cuts on the body. Keane reacted by stating, ‘‘I feel without a doubt that Bobby Fuller did not die of his own intention’’ and hired a private investigator. The detective quit, however, after being shot at by unknown people. Who killed Bobby Fuller? The consensus among buffs of the case is this: Fuller was beaten by goons hired by a rival club owner who was also the jealous boyfriend of Melody. This ‘‘lesson’’ got out of hand, with the thugs even pouring gasoline on Fuller and threatening to set him ablaze if he ever got out of line again. The men then threw Bobby in the front seat of the car, where he passed out and spent hours inhaling gas fumes in the closed car. Fuller always maintained that his relationship with Melody (who has been id-ed as ‘‘Melanie’’ in some reports), was platonic, but perhaps the club owner had reason to believe otherwise. Melody has been described by guitarist Reese as a part-time hooker, and Stone related how he would sometimes accompany Fuller to her house on ‘‘acid runs.’’ The woman disappeared soon after Fuller’s death and was never questioned by police. Rather than burrow through the clutter of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest mur-

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der mystery, it’s more fitting, this many years later, to find the truth in the ringing guitar chords of ‘‘I Fought the Law,’’ perhaps the most raucous hit single of 1965. ‘‘Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law and the law won’’ is the classic opening of a song that has been covered, but never equaled, by everyone from the Clash to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The Bobby Fuller Four version was a cover itself, of an obscure post– Buddy Holly Crickets tune written by Holly’s replacement Sonny Curtis (who would later pen The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song). Fuller originally recorded ‘‘I Fought the Law’’ in his home studio in El Paso, and released it on his own label in 1964, when it became a regional hit in West Texas. The singer-guitarist found his own stamp with razor-sharp vocals that jutted out from the big echo of guitars. While many bands at the time were inspired by the Beatles, the Bobby Fuller Four went right to the original source and took what they loved from Holly. The Beatles used Holly’s influence as a springboard to other styles, but the bf4 kept the West Texas in their sound. When asked, in a 1965 interview, how their music compared to that of the Beatles, Randy Fuller said, ‘‘They’ve come close, but they’re not from West Texas.’’ Yeah, the Fullers were cocky, but their Texas pride bucked up when a band from Liverpool made the whole world stand and listen to a style of music the Texas boys had practically been born playing. Whereas Bobby Fuller wanted the band’s repertoire to remain a ‘‘teen canteen’’ mix of surf music, garage rock, and hard-strumming Plains pop, Keane kept trying to get the boys to update their sound in order to compete with the more melodic British Invasion bands. Having made his name in the business by signing gospel superstar Sam Cooke to a pop label and shepherding the career of Ritchie Valens, Keane was a sponge for the latest Top 40 trends (not to mention one helluva jinx, as Cooke and Valens, like Fuller, also died young). ‘‘Let Her Dance,’’ which was a reworking of a song the Fuller brothers wrote together in El Paso, was a West Texas take on the Phil Spector sound. Then, when Motown started making some big noise on the charts in 1966, Keane hired future love maestro (and Galveston native) Barry White to fluff up the Fuller Four a little on ‘‘The Magic Touch’’ and ‘‘My True Love.’’ Fuller knew exactly what he wanted as far as his music was concerned, and he fought the headstrong Keane for creative control. After all, Fuller had run his own teen club, the Rendezvous in El Paso, when he was just twenty. He had also enjoyed regional success with his first single, ‘‘Guess We’ll Fall in Love,’’ for the New Mexico–based Yucca label in 1962. After building a recording studio in his parents’ El Paso basement in 1963, Fuller recorded

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singles with his band and other groups for his own labels—Exeter and Eastwood. Bobby had already tasted success on his own terms, and he didn’t like to be told what to do. But as a young Texan in a strange land where a wink and a handshake could change lives, he went along with Keane’s advice. Fuller made it known, however, that he could do it better, and he was just waiting for the right time to make his move. And then, suddenly, Fuller’s vision for the future was doused. Many extraordinary people are felled before they have a chance to reach their potential. Many leave the world without artistic proof that they ever existed. But Bobby Fuller left his mark with a sound and a song that will eternally epitomize defiant Texas guitars.

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THE NEW SINCERITY Austin in the Eighties (originally published by Spin in 1986)

or most people who’ve even bothered to consider it, Austin music is Stevie Ray Vaughan, pbs’s Austin City Limits, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Willie Nelson, Joe ‘‘King’’ Carrasco, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Joe Ely. But then most people think New York City is only Manhattan. If Thomas Wolfe were an Austinite now, he might write ‘‘only the dead know Poison 13.’’ Austin’s ‘‘other’’ musical boroughs may not attract huddles with Sly Stallone and Sam Shepard, as Stevie Ray has, and they’ll never coheadline with Frank Sinatra in Vegas, like Willie, but in the hot-and-cold world of day-to-day life they supply the best reasons to venture out into what literary homeboy O. Henry designated ‘‘the live music capital of the world.’’ Wait, that came later. O. Henry dubbed Austin ‘‘the city with the violet crown.’’ Unfortunately, no one except O. Henry has ever seen that violet crown. He must’ve had some good shit. Another thing nobody’s ever seen is Willie Nelson. We see his property—all sighted Austinites do—but never his own folksy self, except onstage. It must be hard for Willie to go out in public even in his hometown. He can’t put on a disguise; he already seems to be wearing one. The rest of us eat, drink, sleep, and look for kicks in the Little Town with the Big Guest List, walking around in circles as if playing a big game of musical chairs. We know we’re ok so long as the music doesn’t stop. Living in Austin and not enjoying music is like being a Klansman who sells large portable radios for a living. Music is everywhere. Original music, cover bands, acoustic, electric, grass-roots, or Republican. Folks sing out loud while walking the streets. Hear unfamiliar music in a cab? It’s most likely the driver’s demo.

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Blues is still happening and country is still kicking, though now the scene’s a mere shadow of the late-seventies monster it was when Austin was headquarters of the ‘‘progressive country movement,’’ a term that suggests Chick Corea in a cowboy hat. Also skateboarding downhill of late is the hard-core crowd, which lost considerable steam with the closings of first Raul’s and then Club Foot. The subsequent breakup of the beloved Big Boys really gave the sheep in wolves’ clothing something to whine about. You’ll still find top-named Third World music at Liberty Lunch, trendy dancing at the many gay discos, and an incredibly popular Sixth Street of fern bars, glitzy clubs, and piano bars that entertain the gentry like a funkless Bourbon Street. Amid this incredible overlay of music we have yet to note what is so quaintly referred to as ‘‘the scene.’’ The most noteworthy new development in Austin music is what former Skunk Jesse Sublett has dubbed ‘‘the New Sincerity.’’ Seeded by such influences as the Byrds, former Austin residents Rank and File, R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, the Velvet Underground, and hometown hero Roky Erickson, and incubated at the Beach Cabaret with its open booking ‘‘policy,’’ this scene has the jaded, over-musicked townies and college students once again excited about going out. They return home only when the last glistening drop of activity has been squeezed from the night— speed is the drug of choice, as it is in most happening scenes—and music is merely the sound track to the action, which contains equal parts promiscuity, incest, alcohol, gossip, spirit, pettiness, conceit, and after-gig parties. Veronica loves True Believers, Wild Seeds, and Doctors’ Mob; likes Dharma Bums and Glass Eye; hates Zeitgeist. Lesa loves Zeitgeist and Dharma Bums, likes Wild Seeds and Texas Instruments, thinks True Believers are soso. Patrice loves True Believers, Zeitgeist, and Glass Eye and likes everyone else except Poison 13. Lorelei loves Stevie Ray Vaughan and thinks the scene her three roommates are into is ‘‘much to-do about nothing.’’ Veronica, Lesa, and Patrice hate Lorelei. Home is a big, white, four-bedroom house on Rio Grande Street. Veronica and Lesa found it in the classifieds and rented it for its hardwood floors, fireplace, high ceilings, and big yard. Lesa knew Patrice, who was ready to move from her parents’ house after too many lectures after too many nights ended at five a.m. Veronica found Lorelei scanning the ‘‘Roommates Wanted’’ board on campus and told her the deal: $187.50 a month, plus one-quarter of the utilities. She moved in the next day. That was four months ago, before the house was nicknamed ‘‘the Hilton.’’ Lesa and Veronica knew a couple of guys from R.E.M.—the smart

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money’s on ‘‘in the biblical sense’’—and when ‘‘the only band that mutters’’ was scheduled to play the City Coliseum, the girls decided to throw a postconcert party. The word spread through the hangarlike 3,800-seat concert venue like the map opening credits of Bonanza. ‘‘Party at the Hilton. R.E.M.’s supposed to show.’’ Despite a great set, the band was barely brought back out by a smattering of applause. Frequently, what appears to be an atypically laidback Austin audience simply consists of restless scenesters waiting for the show to conclude and the party to commence. Even an encore sing-along, which Austin usually takes to like a Kennedy to politics, fell flat. R.E.M. finally closed with a version of ‘‘Wild Thing,’’ which must have beat out ‘‘Louie, Louie’’ in a coin flip, and traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way to Rio Grande Street. Music is fine, but a party? Now that’s something to celebrate. Nobody brings anything to parties in Austin. If someone invites you to a barbecue, you might bring a twelve-pack of Busch (or Budweiser, if you want to make a good impression), but at the big, no-invitation-needed, after-gig parties, everyone immediately heads for the keg and remains within a tenfoot radius until it foams empty. It seemed that people from every faction, from every band, from every perch on the generous fringe were at ‘‘the Hilton’’ after R.E.M.’s show. But what else is new? The girls were in a great mood, except Lorelei, who watched the crowd get ugly when she followed Scratch Acid on the turntable with Joe ‘‘King’’ Carrasco. Lorelei retreated to her room, where she smoked a solo joint and played as much Joe ‘‘King’’ as she wanted, which turned out to be a song and a half. She heard voices in the hallway calling to ‘‘Dino’’ and suddenly perked up. Finally. The only guy she wanted to sleep with from this whole ‘‘crazy punk scene’’ had arrived. She licked her lips in the mirror, gave a curiously est-like smile, and rejoined the party. Lorelei was drawn to her first Dino Lee show after hearing her roommates talk about how gross he was. They described the strap-on dildo he called General Lee, the leather zipper mask he wore to sing love songs such as ‘‘Everybody Get Some (But Don’t Get Any on Ya),’’ his fat female backup singers, and the way he made girls in the audience eat raw meat. Lorelei talked Spoons into taking her to the next Dino show. Spoons looked like a biker and fancied himself a modern Viking, but he’d never really make it. He drove a Toyota and looked both ways and dropped his voice a decibel when he called blacks ‘‘niggers.’’ He loved Lorelei because she looked like Debra Winger playing a biker chick, and she made him feel like Hell’s Angel material when they were

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together. The Dino show was at the Doll House, a ‘‘titty bar’’ that makes it a suitable venue for ‘‘the King of White Trash.’’ After a wait that would make a pow fidget, the six-foot-six-inch ‘‘Grandmaster Trash’’ materialized through a smoke screen with four strippers holding his leopard-print cape. To call Dino Lee ‘‘tacky’’ is to call David Berkowitz ‘‘moody.’’ Tacky is wearing a suit Lucy might’ve seen in her worst Ricky Ricardo nightmare, but what do you call a guy who garnishes it with a Skeletor mask and a grass skirt? To dress as Adolf Hitler is tacky, but when one masquerades as Der Führer in a bathrobe at a show celebrating one’s candidacy for mayor, that’s pushing things to the limit. Dino Lee is the Chuck Yeager of bad taste. While Lorelei wandered off to discuss lava lamps, velvet paintings, Elvis’s Vegas years, and methods of birth control with Dino Lee, Patrice’s room had become the scene of a hootenanny. Brian, a friend from Houston who wasn’t in a band but played like he should be, was coaxing blessed accompaniment out of an old Martin, joining five others in songs by Hank Williams, Violent Femmes, and the Mamas and the Papas, and improv blues numbers, which aren’t too tough because they’re slow and you get to use the first line twice. Nancy, with eyes transfixed on Brian’s knees, which peeked out from jeans that shoulda had Joey Ramone’s name on the label, remarked, ‘‘At least this beats Daniel Johnston.’’ Brian aborted the song in mid-strum. Lonesome Dave shot her a look that maimed. Patrice laughed, ‘‘God. Daniel Johnston. Doesn’t that poor guy know we’re all making fun of him?’’ Dave promised he wouldn’t get into this argument again. You can’t debate musical taste, but the all-knowingness in Patrice’s voice made him say, ‘‘I’m not making fun of him. I think he’s a great songwriter.’’ The quiet-until-now girl next to Nancy spoke up. ‘‘That’s not talent,’’ she said. ‘‘That’s a freak show.’’ Girls just don’t understand Daniel Johnston. You almost have to be one of the last guys in p.e. to get hair on your balls to really appreciate his broken songs. He plays dork music and has acquired a covey of followers who appreciate his teetering Neil Young/Mr. Rogers voice and nervous demeanor. He walks on- and offstage briskly and usually plays only three or four songs that are normally greeted with wild applause—some genuine, some sarcastic, like cheering for the biggest spaz on the B-team when he finally scores a basket. Daniel doesn’t do encores under any circumstances; if you don’t believe it, ask the fellow backstage at the Beach who held open the window while Daniel crawled through it rather than face a crowd yelling for more. Such adulation is a far cry from selling corndogs for a touring carnival, which brought Johnston to the Austin area from his home state of West Virginia in 1985. Appreciate him or not, he’s still the only person to perform on

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mtv (as part of The Cutting Edge’s recent Austin special) while still working at McDonald’s. Much of his minimum wage goes to making copies of his cassettes, Hi, How Are You and Keep Punching Joe, which he hands out like business cards, refusing to take money for them. In a town where everyone works hard to stand out, Daniel Johnston does it effortlessly. He’s uncalculatedly Warhol-flat in a place where virtuosos are a nickel a half dozen. While Austin’s favorite controversy—Daniel Johnston, genius or gerbil? —raged on in the designated folksinging nook, members of Doctors’ Mob had snuck their new album, Headache Machine, onto the record player in the main room. When you go over to the group’s house, they play their record. As the Mob drummed their knees and strummed their pockets in time to the record they’d heard a thousand times, one fellow musician remarked, ‘‘God wasn’t that pleased with himself when he created the world.’’ ‘‘He had six days, we only had three,’’ was the typical Mob response. A good band of the Replacements/Hüsker Dü ‘‘play-’em-all-and-let-thesoundman-sort-’em-out’’ philosophy, the Mob endear themselves to the scene through their unapologetic affinity for bad seventies bands like Kiss and Ted Nugent, and by having created a new language based on such moronic teen flicks as Hot Dog: The Movie and Porky’s Revenge. They’ve made ‘‘I think he’s trying to back-door you, man’’ Austin’s ‘‘Where’s the beef?’’ irs Records’ recent foray into the Little Town with the Big Empty Dotted Line to film The Cutting Edge gave the Mob a chance to brush up on their Los Angelese. Posing as an A&R type at the postfilming party at the Beach, Mob singer Steve Collier went up to Brian Beattie of Glass Eye and said with mock sincerity, ‘‘I like what you guys are trying to do.’’ Guests were circulating, getting drunk, and having a good time when a whisper with an exclamation point soared across the room: ‘‘They’re here!’’ Suddenly the flier near the front door, trumpeting a two-week-old gig that nobody went to, became of interest to six or seven people. Michael Stipe of r.e.m. was outside, looking around as well-wishers reminded him of gigs they were at five years ago, and he couldn’t remember where r.e.m. was the day before. Stipe was in the living room with a beer, letting Lesa feel his grown-out ex-Kojak cut, when Steve Collier approached and handed him the Doctors’ Mob album. ‘‘We’re big fans of yours and we’d really be honored if you’d take this,’’ Collier said while bystanders waited for the joke; but there was none. Collier was sincere. Not wanting to carry the album around with him but not wanting to hurt Collier’s feelings either, Stipe thanked him for it and said, ‘‘Why don’t you put it on?’’ The groan was heard on the front lawn.

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Derelicts. Winos. Hobos. Bums. They call them ‘‘dragworms’’ in Austin because they hang out on ‘‘the Drag,’’ Guadalupe Street, which separates the University of Texas from the real world. One of them walked into Salads and Subs wearing the official dragworm armband, a strip of tape around the arm at the elbow, which showed he had money on him but was about a quart low on plasma. He ordered a #7 sandwich—turkey and cheese—and since this was his only meal of the day and nobody liked him no matter how he acted, he was real demanding. ‘‘Is that all the meat you’re gonna give me? He gave me a lot more yesterday. Put mayonnaise on both sides. More cheese.’’ A real pain in the ass. But Allan Cox remained polite. He was getting off in a few minutes and didn’t want to end his workday in some hassle with a dragworm. At six o’clock Cox took off his apron and thanked the manager for letting him leave a couple hours early. Bob didn’t mind; he was kind of tickled to have a rock star working for him. ‘‘You looked good on tv, Allan. It must’ve been the lights,’’ he joked about the Dharma Bums’ recent appearance on The Cutting Edge. Allan just smiled and left to run a few errands before getting ready for the show he had that night with the True Believers. ‘‘They let anyone on tv these says,’’ said the dragworm with his mouth full. Not wanting to pull up to a crowd, Lesa parked her car a hundred yards from the entrance to the Continental Club. As she walked to the entrance, she hoped no one would come up to her and talk about a new project. Everybody in town is working on a project—a record or a video or an art show or an article or a goddamn poetry reading or something—it was all great, but Lesa didn’t always like to hear about it. She had no projects to talk about. She was a geology major who loved her family and would give everything she had, which is quite a lot even if you don’t count what’s in storage, to be able to write or draw or play music. She took good pictures with her Nikon every now and then, but didn’t claim to be a photographer. She already had her place on the fringe: she threw good parties. There were a lot of scrubbed and decorated new faces at the True Believers/Dharma Bums show, which happens to the scene twice a year when a new semester starts at ut. Only a couple of girls were wearing the Madonna bow, though several others tried to hide the summerlong dent in their hair with teasing and side parts. After the show, Patrice leaned against the bar talking to Alejandro Escovedo, the former Nun and Rank-and-Filer who heads True Believers. Veronica wondered what Al would think if he knew Kodak paper bearing his toothy, dimpled, and married smile was bound to Patrice’s chest with an ad-

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hesive of sweat. Patrice had such a crush on Alejandro. All the other girls gawked at his brother Javier, whose long, black, wavy hair, soft looks, and uniform black-leather vest over long-sleeved white shirt was computer-date material for girls who outgrew David Lee Roth last week. But Patrice only looked at Javier when he intersected her vision of Alejandro. Patrice, Veronica, and Lesa sat on the couch at somebody’s house later that night. Much later. The bands had already come and gone from this party. It was 6:30 a.m., the party was winding up, and the girls were winding down from the lines of speed they’d done in Johnny’s car. The only other leftovers were four guys who were, thank God, engrossed in Bullwinkle videotapes. None were prospects. ‘‘It was full tonight,’’ Veronica said as she threw back another throatful of gin. ‘‘Love those True Believers. I wonder if I still think Zeitgeist is better?’’ ‘‘I thought Dharma Bums were hot tonight,’’ Patrice said emptily. ‘‘I love that horn section. It reminds me of the horns on the Rolling Stones album that ‘Bitch’ is on.’’ She was beat. ‘‘Jon Dee Graham told me—actually he didn’t tell me, he told Ed Ward, but I was in the same conversation—that from the Skunks to the Lift to True Believers he’s always been in ‘the best band in town,’ and he said that it means absolutely nothing.’’ ‘‘Who the hell is the Lift?’’ Veronica asked. ‘‘The scene just doesn’t seem real,’’ Patrice said. ‘‘mtv is real,’’ Lesa interjected. ‘‘It isn’t. That’s what I mean. Daniel Johnston couldn’t even watch himself on mtv. He had to clean the deep fryers. Money is real, but nobody’s making it except trendy discos like Club Iguana and Stevie Ray Vaughan,’’ Patrice said. ‘‘And Willie Nelson. He’s making money,’’ Veronica said, getting up with a slight sway. ‘‘Sometimes I wonder,’’ Patrice said, also getting up, ‘‘whether our scene is really great, and the bands are really special, or if we’re just lonely people trying to create continuous company.’’ Veronica looked at her and started to reply, then stopped and fished in her pocket. ‘‘You drive,’’ she said and gave Patrice her car keys.

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THE TEXAS TOP 40 Michael Corcoran’s List of the Best Texas Recordings Ever

1. ‘‘I Fought the Law’’ by the Bobby Fuller Four (1966). Written by Sonny Curtis (who would later pen The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme) and originally recorded by the post–Buddy Holly Crickets, the definitive version was by these guitar-rockers from El Paso. 2. ‘‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’’ by 13th Floor Elevators (1966). Psychedelia is born as the region rocks to a new soul shouter named Roky Erickson. 3. ‘‘That’ll Be the Day’’ by Buddy Holly (1957). Perhaps the most influential single in the history of rock ’n’ roll, Holly’s first smash hit provided the model for the gtr-gtr-bs-drms four-piece that would rule pop music for decades. 4. ‘‘Honky Tonk Heroes’’ by Waylon Jennings (1973). This revved-up version of the Billy Joe Shaver song proved Waylon to be the Elvis Presley of country music, a forceful vocalist who made every song he touched his own. 5. ‘‘Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)’’ by Blind Willie Johnson (1927). The moaning instrumental Ry Cooder calls ‘‘the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.’’ 6. ‘‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’’ by George Jones (1980). An epic of emotion from the Beaumont hillbilly who became country’s best-ever singer. 7. ‘‘Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me’’ by Geto Boys (1991). Inner-city blues made these Houston rappers wanna holler. Pouring their paranoia over a slinky Isaac Hayes sample, the G.B.s took gangsta rap to a headier space.

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8. ‘‘Only the Lonely’’ by Roy Orbison (1960). This West Texan master of operatic pop set the stage for his brooding persona with this majestic hit. 9. ‘‘Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain’’ by Willie Nelson (1975). An early look at Willie’s interpretive genius; a sign of Stardust to come. 10. ‘‘Woolly Bully’’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (1965). The rollicking Tex-Mex party anthem continues to fill dance floors. 11. ‘‘Midnight Special’’ by Leadbelly (1936). A traditional prison daydream ode about a train that, if its light shone on you, would free you, updated when the man born Huddie Ledbetter was doing time in Sugar Land. 12. ‘‘Tighten Up’’ by Archie Bell and the Drells (1968). One of the first records to recognize that sometimes a groove is all you need. 13. ‘‘Woman Be Wise’’ by Sippie Wallace (1925). The model for Bonnie Raitt’s sassiness came from this gutbucket blues number about keeping good love to yourself. 14. ‘‘La Grange’’ by ZZ Top (1973). A classic-rock eternal that never fails to bring out the air guitars. 15. ‘‘Ellis Unit One’’ by Steve Earle (1995). Springsteen got the title track to Dead Man Walking, but Earle buried him with this dark exploration of life in a prison town. 16. ‘‘El Paso’’ by Marty Robbins (1959). Between Robbins’s sturdy vocals and Grady Martin’s exotic guitar, you can almost feel the spirit of border town love. 17. ‘‘She’s about a Mover’’ by the Sir Douglas Quintet (1965). Producer Huey P. Meaux dressed them like Brits, but there was no mistaking where this chunk o’ fun came from. 18. ‘‘Walkin’ the Floor over You’’ by Ernest Tubb (1941). The ultimate honky-tonk song and the first country hit to feature electric guitar. 19. ‘‘Harper Valley P.T.A.’’ by Jeannie C. Riley (1968). This song of small town hypocrisy, written by Tom T. Hall, became the hit of the year by this singer from Anson, Texas.

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20. ‘‘Before the Next Teardrop Falls’’ by Freddy Fender (1974). Born Baldemar Huerta, ex-convict Fender made his pop breakthrough with this Number 1 smash. 21. ‘‘Walk Around’’ by the Soul Stirrers (1939). The blueprint for doo-wop and soul was laid out in this recording by the gospel quartet from Trinity. 22. ‘‘Long Black Veil’’ by Lefty Frizzell (1959). This tragic story of loyalty and love wins the coin toss with ‘‘If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.’’ 23. ‘‘Matchbox Blues’’ by Blind Lemon Jefferson (1927). Just as he moved from Mexia to Dallas and then to Chicago, this sightless singer is credited with taking blues from the fields to the barrelhouses to the urban centers. 24. ‘‘Mal Hombre’’ by Lydia Mendoza (1938). This single hit big with Hispanics all over the United States and Mexico and helped usher in the Tejano subgenre. 25. ‘‘Dance Franny Dance’’ by Floyd Dakil Combo (1964). A Texas bar band standard. Substitute ‘‘Linda Lu’’ by Ray Sharpe, ‘‘Treat Her Right’’ by Roy Head, or ‘‘Thunderbird’’ by the Nitecaps, if you prefer. 26. ‘‘New San Antonio Rose’’ by Bob Wills (1944). A distillation of all that is pure Western swing. 27. ‘‘Get on Board Little Chillun’’ by Ella Mae Morse (1945). Not ‘‘Cow Cow Boogie,’’ the first-ever gold record for Capitol? What about the original version of ‘‘House of Blue Lights’’? Nah, this one swings harder, making full use of this Mansfield native’s elastic vocals. 28. ‘‘Pancho and Lefty’’ by Townes Van Zandt (1971). Dozens of great Townes songs are represented here by his most famous. 29. ‘‘I Got Loaded’’ by Peppermint Harris (1951). Many first heard this song when Los Lobos covered it, but this funky celebration of binge drinking was written and first performed by this Houston blues singer. 30. ‘‘Piece of My Heart’’ by Janis Joplin (1968). Never before has vulnerability sounded so powerful.

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31. ‘‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’’ by Barbara Lynn (1962). Another Meaux discovery, this left-handed guitarist from Beaumont straddled the border between Texas and Louisiana with this Top Tenner. 32. ‘‘Driftin’ Blues’’ by Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers (1945). This smooth blues hit, written and sung by Blazer Charles Brown, was a primary influence on Ray Charles’s early style. 33. ‘‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’’ by Kris Kristofferson (1972). Stark, honest storytelling and a voice that seizes the details. 34. ‘‘Dallas’’ by Joe Ely (1972). ‘‘Have you ever seen Dallas from a dc-9 at night?’’ is a great opening line (by Jimmie Gilmore), and Ely keeps up the intrigue with his heel-grinding delivery. 35. ‘‘Wild Side of Life’’ by Hank Thompson (1959). A hit from the Wacoborn honky-tonker so massive it registered an answer song, Kitty Wells’s ‘‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.’’ 36. ‘‘Going Down’’ by Freddie King (1971). King had ripped better on other tracks—‘‘Hideaway,’’ ‘‘Have You Ever Loved a Woman,’’ ‘‘Remington Ride,’’ ‘‘In the Open,’’ etc.—but this one gets the nod for the stamina to survive so many bad barroom versions. Nice piano by Leon Russell, too. 37. ‘‘Streets of Laredo’’ by Gene Autry (1936). An incredibly deep song and the version that made it famous. (Note: Autry is also responsible for the best Texas Christmas song. He cowrote ‘‘Here Comes Santa Claus.’’) 38. ‘‘Truck Driver Blues’’ by Ted Daffan (1939). This steel guitarist from the Houston area had a bigger hit with ‘‘Born to Lose,’’ but this number, which introduced the truck drivin’ song to country radio, had greater implications. 39. ‘‘Jole Blon’’ by Harry Choates (1947). The Cajun national anthem was given its definitive version by a wild-eyed fiddler from Port Arthur. 40. ‘‘Since I Met You Baby’’ by Ivory Joe Hunter (1956). A blues ballad that meets rock ’n’ roll head on and doesn’t flinch.

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THE DEAD CLUBS OF THE LIVE MUSIC CAPITAL

t’s somewhere between the time they get their electricity turned on and when they get their Texas driver’s license that newcomers to Austin are exposed to that big Austin tradition: hearing about all the great clubs in town that they’ll never get to go to. It is not unusual, in fact, for our nouveau citizens to know that Raul’s was Austin’s first punk club even before they know the name of a good Chinese restaurant. Austin loves its clubs like Dennis Rodman digs his tattoos. But there is no sense of permanence, as there is with the impressionist sun around Rodman’s navel, where great clubs are concerned. You wonder why, if such joints as Soap Creek, the Armadillo World Headquarters, Raul’s, and Club Foot were so great, did they go out of business? But many a beloved saloon has crumbled under the march of time, or been sent crashing by the whipping wind shifts of ‘‘progress.’’ Then there are the government entities, greedy landlords, and just plain old burnout to contend with. The storied live Austin music scene began in 1933 (the year Prohibition was repealed), when country yodeler Kenneth Threadgill received the first beer license in Travis County. Threadgill’s combination gas station/restaurant/nightclub was a special place that blurred class distinctions in the name of great music for almost forty years. Janis Joplin got her musical start there. So did many others. By the time the original Threadgill’s closed in 1972 (to reopen many years later), a new sort of musical melting pot was happening at an old National Guard armory near Town Lake. The seventies have been a much-maligned musical decade, a time of shag haircuts and disco, but in Austin those were the glory days of live music because of the freewheeling Armadillo World Headquarters, which hosted

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everyone from Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, and Fats Domino to ballet troupes. Owner Eddie Wilson called the structure that housed the venue ‘‘the coldest, ugliest building in town,’’ but because of the indeflatable spirit of people working together, the ’Dillo had a big soul within its bare bones. As the reputation of this funky Austin concert hall spread and acts went out of their way to play there, the Armadillo became that rare case where the crowds sometimes drew the acts, instead of the other way around. Jim Franklin, one of the club’s cofounders, summed up the awhq as ‘‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with an address,’’ but that address is no more. The one-story brick and corrugated metal structure, where hippies and rednecks sang Willie Nelson songs together, was torn down in 1981. Workers at One Texas Center now park their cars where Jimmy Cliff once sang ‘‘The Harder They Come’’ for an audience that had never heard live reggae music before. The final night of this most legendary of all Austin clubs was December 31, 1980, and it all ended with a cast of hundreds singing ‘‘Goodnight Irene’’ from the too-high stage at about four a.m. The last line of the ’Dillo’s swan song goes ‘‘I’ll see you in my dreams,’’ a fitting summary for all great clubs that are no longer with us. The reason they call them ‘‘haunts’’ is because it’s hard to get a favorite club out of your mind, especially if it was a frequent stop on the coming-ofage express. Gleeful nightlife vignettes come around like ghosts, appearing and vaporizing through a charmed haze. The Armadillo is far from being the only illustrious nightspot that has returned to dust. In recent years, Austin has also lost Liberty Lunch to a charmless computer company headquarters and Steamboat and the Electric Lounge to rising rents. More often than not, beloved clubs are replaced by their spiritual opposites, which makes their passing even more cruel. Here are addresses of more legendary live music clubs and what currently sits at the location: Paradise Lost Skyline Club (11306 N. Lamar Boulevard) is now a CVS Drugs location. Charlie’s Playhouse (1206 E. Eleventh Street) is now a vacant lot. Club Foot (110 E. Fourth Street) is now where Frost Tower sits. Emmajoe’s (3023 Guadalupe Street) is now Chango’s Taqueria. Henry’s Bar and Grill (6317 Burnet Road) is now an Auto Zone. Castle Creek, the Chequered Flag (1415 Lavaca Street) is currently the home of the Texas Osteopathic Medical Association.

The Dead Clubs of the Live Music Capital

Raul’s (2610 Guadalupe Street) is now Texas Showdown. Soap Creek (3200 Bee Cave Road) is now condos. Vulcan Gas Co. (316 Congress Avenue) is now an office building. The Rome Inn (2900 Rio Grande Street) is now a Texas French Bread. The Short Horn (5500 N. Lamar Boulevard) is now a McDonald’s. The Split Rail (217 S. Lamar Boulevard) is now a Wendy’s. The Jade Room (1501 San Jacinto Boulevard) is a parking lot. Threadgill’s (6416 N. Lamar Boulevard) is still Threadgill’s.

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TWENTY-FIVE ESSENTIAL TEXAS MUSIC CDS

The Herald Recordings—Lightnin’ Hopkins (collectables) The king of boogie blues and a topical songwriter who wrote of war, prison, natural disasters, poverty, and even the space race, Hopkins was a true original. This cd, from the early fifties, is cited above all the others for a hard, driving sound that presaged rock ’n’ roll. The Chirping Crickets—Buddy Holly and the Crickets (decca) Released in late 1957, this was the influential Lubbock group’s debut lp, and it’s a clunker-free mix of hits (‘‘Oh Boy,’’ ‘‘That’ll Be the Day,’’ ‘‘Maybe Baby’’) and shoulda-been-hits (‘‘Lonesome Tears,’’ ‘‘Tell Me How’’). The Many Sounds of Steve Jordan (arhoolie) You can trace El Parche’s journey, in chronological sequence, from early sixties conjunto duets with then-wife Virginia Martinez to the squeezebox stratosphere on cuts like the jazzy Johnny Mercer cover ‘‘Midnight Blues.’’ Texas Music, Vol. 2: Western Swing & Honky Tonk (rhino) This one covers all the bases, from Bob Wills and Milton Brown, the inventors of Western swing, to the likes of Lefty Frizzell and Hank Thompson, to the modern-day acolytes Asleep at the Wheel and Alvin Crow. Shine on Me—Soul Stirrers (specialty) R. H. Harris and Paul Foster duke it out on twin leads, but then Harris captures the spotlight on the title track, a work of shimmering beauty.

Twenty-five Essential Texas Music CDs

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The Best of George Jones (rhino) The best pure singer in the country music field matures right before your ears. I Am Born to Preach the Gospel—Washington Phillips (yazoo) This music is almost childlike in its simplicity, and yet it’s so raw and primitive that songs like ‘‘I Had a Good Father and Mother’’ and ‘‘What Are They Doing in Heaven Today’’ hit deeply. No other music sounds like this. Blues Masters: The Very Best of T-Bone Walker (rhino) There are more exhaustive collections (The Complete Capitol/Black and White Recordings is a wonderful three-disc set), but this single cd captures the essence of the first great electric blues guitarist. The Best of Lefty Frizzell (rhino) Even on a state-of-the-art music system, these songs sound like they’re coming out of the jukebox at a roadhouse on the border between wet and dry counties. ‘‘If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time,’’ that slice of honky-tonk heaven, kicks it all off. Hideaway: The Best of Freddie King (rhino) Freddie’s guitar stings. It slices. It grooves. It soothes. It plays blues, country, rock, jazz. It does more than any appliance hawked on tv at three a.m., and it’s all here. The Capitol Collectors Series—Ella Mae Morse (capitol) ‘‘Cow Cow Boogie’’ established not only this black-sounding white singer, but a new record label called Capitol. This is postwar West Coast swing led by an elastic voice that snapped all over the beat. ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits (warner bros.) The most Texan of all rock bands, the Top understands how to mix technology with mythology. If it wasn’t about a whorehouse, ‘‘La Grange’’ could be the Texas Anthem. Tramp on Your Street—Shaver (zoo) Billy Joe Shaver and his guitarist son Eddy put it all together on this electrified 1993 set that delivers the best version of the oft-covered ‘‘Georgia on a Fast Train,’’ as well as the father-and-son cowritten ‘‘Live Forever.’’

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Texas Music, Vol. 3: Garage Bands & Psychedelia (rhino) From Roy Head’s ‘‘Treat Her Right,’’ through Johnny Winter’s exploratory blues epic ‘‘Fast Life Rider,’’ this compiles the wild, raunchy, brain-fried sixties in Texas. Among the Lone Star nuggets here: ‘‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’’ by the 13th Floor Elevators, ‘‘Thunderbird’’ by the Nitecaps, and the early regional version of ‘‘She’s about a Mover.’’ Warning: there’s also a lot of crap here, like ‘‘A Public Execution’’ by Mouse and the Traps. King of the Country Blues—Blind Lemon Jefferson (yazoo) The first great country blues star, Jefferson created much of the blues language that is still popular with such songs as ‘‘Black Snake Moan,’’ ‘‘Matchbox Blues,’’ and ‘‘Easy Rider Blues.’’ He packed a whole lot of music into his thirty-two years on Earth. Dreaming My Dreams—Waylon Jennings (rca) The great country singer and bandleader at his moodiest. And angriest, as evidenced by the classic ‘‘Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?’’ Higher: 1940 Dallas Session—Chuck Wagon Gang (sony) God was definitely on this family quartet’s side in its first all-gospel session. Recording a dozen keepers on April 23, 1940, at the Burris Mills Studio in the Dallas/Fort Worth suburb of Saginaw, the Gang blessed songs from Stamps-Baxter songbooks of the 1930s with unbridled heavenly harmonies soaring over and swooping under a lone acoustic guitar. The group would take a seven-year hiatus after World War II broke out; this session finds them in prime form. The Best of the Bobby Fuller Four (rhino) The term ‘‘ringing guitars’’ has been overused by critics, but there’s no better way to describe the core of this underrated outfit. There was much more to this group, which could’ve been the Texas version of Creedence Clearwater Revival if not for a tragic turn, than ‘‘I Fought the Law.’’ Complete Recorded Works 1926–1929—Arizona Dranes (document) Splendidly spiritual piano playing, often accompanied by Pentecostalflavored mandolin, and a voice that couldn’t control itself. This is scary stuff. Tejano Roots—various artists (arhoolie) A great primer for the conjunto-curious, this is a cost-effective way to sample the sounds of Lydia Mendoza, Isidro Lopez, Narciso Martinez, and many other great Tex-Mex pioneers.

Twenty-five Essential Texas Music CDs

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Red-Headed Stranger—Willie Nelson (columbia) This is a concept album not only in its story of sin and salvation, but in its overall sound. It’s a musical meditation. The concept is that if you listen to this album from beginning to end, you’ll find a measure of peace. The Original Peacock Recordings—Clarence ‘‘Gatemouth’’ Brown (rounder) These are the tracks, from the 1950s, that convinced Houston heavy Don Robey to go into the recording business. Brown is second only to T-Bone Walker in the pantheon of Texas blues guitarists, but ‘‘Gatemouth’’ was also proficient on country fiddle and big band jazz. At My Window—Townes Van Zandt (sugar hill) Townes purists prefer his stripped-down early albums, but this full-band effort from 1987 is a mesmerizing romp, with such standouts as ‘‘Snowin’ on Raton’’ and ‘‘Ain’t Leavin’ Your Love.’’ For the Lonely: 18 Greatest Hits—Roy Orbison (virgin) Pop music’s greatest male voice, this West Texan could sing the clouds away or make them darker. The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (sony/legacy) A voice that sounded like he’d gargled with battery acid ensures that this Marlin bottleneck wizard will remain obscure. But with wife Willie B. Harris smoothing the gravel and Johnson’s amazing guitar playing, this is some of the most otherworldly music you’ll ever hear.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his is my first book and it came together much easier than it probably should have. The ride would’ve been bumpier if not for the work of various newspaper editors who were the first to read these pieces. My editors at the Austin American-Statesman, including Jeff Salamon, Tim Lott, Anne Smith, Ed Crowell, and Maria Henson, not only allowed me the time to, for instance, track down the real Washington Phillips instead of profiling Jessica Simpson, but also gave guidance in the role of first readers. Their bosses Rich Oppel and Fred Zipp have also been exceptionally encouraging. Other editors who worked on early drafts of these chapters included Louis Black of the Austin Chronicle, Spin’s John Leland, and Lisa Broadwater of the Dallas Morning News. My good friends Robert Wilonsky and Casey Monahan were always there to hear about the great new dead guy I’d become obsessed with, and Monahan’s Texas Music Office database provided an incredible resource that cut the amount of research time by hundreds of hours. Photographers Burton Wilson, Ken Hoge, Pat Blashill, Todd V. Wolfson, Larry Kolvoord, Sung Park, and Will Van Overbeek were gracious in their support of this project. Others who provided artwork, with primary concern for helping to promote underrated musicians, included the Michael Ochs Archive, Doug Hanners, Clay Shorkey of the Texas Music Museum, Doris Foreman Neely, Tracy Pitcox, Jim Grabowske, Terri Hinte of Fantasy Records, Jurgen Koop, Richard Nevins of Yazoo Records, Mandy Mercier, the Country Music Hall Of Fame, and Arhoolie Records. I didn’t have an agent and didn’t need one, thanks to Allison Faust of the University of Texas Press, who answered my initial e-mailed inquiry and shepherded this project through all the steps without the slightest stumble. Manuscript editor Jan McInroy, copy editor Paul Spragens, and designer Lisa Tremaine were pros to work with.

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All Over the Map

Very special thanks go to Kate Hellenbrand, my very first editor, back in Honolulu, who saw potential in me as a writer and, more significantly, introduced me to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and Michael Malone, who’s a great tattoo artist and an even greater free thinker. Malone would rather work around the clock on a project than make excuses on why it didn’t make a deadline—an example that has served me as a writer better than four years of college would have.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Note: This index focuses on Lone Star musicians, those with ties to Texas, and their business associates. It does not contain every name in the book. Sorry, but you’ll have to find all the gratuitous references to Prince, William Shatner, Ted Nugent, and Chick Corea on your own. AC/DC, 116 Ace, Johnny, 20 Allison, Margaret, 50 Anschutz, Kent, 95 Antone, Clifford, 17 Armstrong, Louis, xi, 35 Arnold, Eddy, 74 Atkins, Chet, 140 Autry, Gene, 76, 160 Ballard, Hank, 129 Barber, Keith, 4 Bare, Bobby, 64 Barton, Lou Ann, xii, 89 Basie, Count, 37, 56 Bass, Ralph, 38 Bateman, Jim, 20 Baxter, Gordon, 8 Baxter, J. R., 143 Beauchamp, George, 37 Bell, Archie (and the Drells), 27–29, 158 Benson, Ray (and Asleep at the Wheel), 77, 164 Bentley, Bill, 128, 129 Berry, Chuck, 34, 35, 44, 87

Big Moe, 23 Black, Clint, 57 Bland, Bobby ‘‘Blue,’’ 20, 127 Bloomfield, Mike, 88 Bowie, David, 89 Boyer, Horace Clarence, 3 Brown, Andrew, 7 Brown, Bobby, 18–20 Brown, Charles, xi, 37, 160 Brown, Clarence ‘‘Gatemouth,’’ 17–22, 35, 127, 167 Brown, ‘‘Fiddlin’ Tom,’’ 19 Brown, James ‘‘Widemouth,’’ 19 Brown, Junior, xii, 46, 47 Brown, Milton (and His Musical Brownies), xi, 31, 164 Brown, Ruth, 19 Brown, Wilson, 19 Brumley, Albert E., 143 Bruner, Cliff, 31 Bruton, Stephen, 63 Burnett, T-Bone, ix Burrow, Junior, 6 Bushwick Bill, 25 Butthole Surfers, xi, xii, 98–102 Byrd, Billy, 46

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Calloway, Cab, 19, 36 Campbell, Bill, 51 Carr, Leroy, 36 Carrasco, Joe ‘‘King,’’ 130, 150, 152 Carter, D. P. ‘‘Dad’’ (and the Chuck Wagon Gang), 142–144 Cash, Johnny, 110, 140 Casner, Lost John, 93 Channel, Bruce, 57 Charles, Ray, xi, 31, 78 Charters, Samuel, 72 Choates, Harry, 6–9, 160 Christian, Charlie, x, 36, 38 Chuck D, 36 Clapton, Eric, 14, 22, 34, 51, 67, 68, 70, 88 Clark, Jubal, 94 Clark, Roy, 21 Cliff, Jimmy, 162 Clinton, Bill, 135 Clinton, George, 42, 43 Cobb, Arnett, xi Cochran, Eddie, 55 Coffey, Kevin, 7 Cohen, Andy, 11 Cole, Nat ‘‘King,’’ 40 Coleman, Ornette, ix Collins, Albert, 35 Colter, Jessi, 138 Cooder, Ry, 10, 11, 68, 73, 157 Cooke, Sam, xiii, 2, 5 Copeland, Johnny, 35 Crain, Silas Roy, 4, 5 Crayton, Pee Wee, 35, 37, 127 Crosby, Bing, 30, 75 Crosby, Larry, 75–76 Crouch, Andrae, 49 Crouch, Samuel, 49 Crow, Alvin, 164 Curry, Donald ‘‘The D.O.C.,’’ 25 Curtis, Sonny, 147 Daffan, Ted, 30, 160 Dalhart, Vernon, x Davis, Reverend Gary, 70 Davis, Jimmie, 31, 144 Davis, Robert Earl ‘‘DJ Screw,’’ 23–26

All Over the Map

Dawson, Pinky, 57 Dawson, Ronnie, xiii, 55–58 Dexter, Al, 76 Dharma Bums, 151, 155 Doctors’ Mob, 151, 154 Dollar, Johnny, 57 Domino, Fats, 49, 162 Domino, Floyd, 140 Dorcy, Ben, 80 Dorsey, Jimmy, 40–41 Dorsey, Thomas A., x, 48 Dranes, Arizona Juanita, x, 14, 48–50, 166 Durham, Eddie, ix, 36 Duvall, Robert, 65 Dylan, Bob, xi, 67, 72, 197 Earle, Steve, ix, 107, 158 Eiland, F. L., 75 Ellington, Duke, 3 Ely, Joe, 109, 150, 160 English, Billy, 80 English, Paul, 80, 82 Erickson, Roky (and 13th Floor Elevators), xi, 128, 157, 166 Escovedo, Alejandro (and True Believers), 113–117, 151, 154–156 Escovedo, Javier, 114 Escovedo, Pete, 114 Evans, Dale, 76 Fabulous Thunderbirds, xii, 86, 150 Fender, Freddy, 128, 158 Ferguson, Keith, xii Finch, Carl, 124 Fletcher, Freddy, 64 Floyd Dakil Combo, 159 Fogerty, John (and Creedence Clearwater Revival), 44, 128 Foley, Blaze, 91–97 Foster, Fred, 74–75, 77 Foster, Paul, 4 Franklin, Aretha, 2 Franklin, Jim, 162 Frazier, Skipper Lee, 27 Freeman, Bobby, 42 Freeman, Denny, 51

Index

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Frizzell, Lefty, ix, xi, xiii, 62, 74, 159, 164, 165 Fuller, Bobby (and the Bobby Fuller Four), 145–148, 157, 166

Hubbard, Judy, 103–104 Hubbard, Ray Wylie, 103–106 Huff, Leon, 29 Hunter, Ivory Joe, 37, 160

Gamble, Kenny, 29 Geto Boys, xiii, 25–26, 157 Gibbons, Billy (and ZZ Top), 35, 57, 86, 158, 165 Gilmore, Jimmie Dale, 107–109, 160 Gimble, Johnny, 32, 77 Glaser, Tompall, 61 Glass Eye, 151, 154 Goodman, Benny, 38–39 Grabowske, Jimmy, 6–9 Graham, Jon Dee, 114, 156 Graham, Larry, 42, 44 Green, Pat, 81, 103 Gregory, Hugh, 37 Griffith, Nanci, 96, 107 Grimes, Ty, 146 Guitar Slim, 18 Guthrie, Woody, 108 Guy, Buddy, 18, 35

Jagger, Mick, 89 Jesse James and His Boys, 6, 8 James, Steve, 68 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, x, 36, 159, 166 Jennings, Waylon, 62–63, 138–141, 157, 166 Jimenez, Flaco, 123 Jimenez, Santiago, Sr., 123 Johnson, Angeline, 72 Johnson, Blind Willie, x, xi, 14, 50, 67–73, 157, 167 Johnson, Evelyn, 20 Johnson, Lady Bird, 6 Johnson, Robert, 68–70, 142–143 Johnston, Daniel, 153 Jones, George, 2, 78, 157, 165 Joplin, Janis, ix, 127, 159, 161 Joplin, Scott, x Jordan, Louis, 19 Jordan, Steve (Estéban), 120–126, 164

Haggard, Merle, 83, 91, 95 Ham, Bill, 57, 86 Hammond, John, Sr., 89 Hampton, Lionel, 19 Harris, Emmylou, 66, 107 Harris, Rebert H. (and the Soul Stirrers), xiii, xiv, 2–5, 159, 164 Harris, Willie B., 68–69, 71–72 Haynes, Gibby, xii, 99–101 Heat, Reverend Horton, 56 Heilbut, Anthony, 2–3 Hendrix, Jimi, 18, 35, 88, 122, 142 Henry, O., 150 Hofner, Adolph, 31, 130 Hofner, Emil, 31 Holiday, Billie, 2 Holly, Buddy (and the Crickets), x, xi, 31, 46, 139–140, 147, 157, 164 Hopkins, Sam ‘‘Lightnin’,’’ ix, 18, 87, 108, 130, 164 Horton, Johnny, 8 House, Son, 68

Kalish, Howard, 111 Keane, Bob, 145–147 Keen, Robert Earl, 81, 107 Kelly, Sam Faye, 68, 69, 71 Kershaw, Doug, 7 King, B. B., 35–36 King, Freddie, 34–36, 51–54, 130, 160, 165 Knife in the Water, 10, 14 Knox, Buddy, 31 Koumis, Barney, 55 Krasilovsky, William, 69 Kristofferson, Kris, 64, 140, 160 Kronos Quartet, 112 LaVere, Steve, 68 Law, Don, 142 Layton, Chris, 89 Leadbelly, xi, 158 Leary, Paul, xii, 99–101 Lee, Dino, xii, 152–153

174

Lewis, Jerry Lee, xi, 49, 56 Lil’ Flip, 24 Lil–O, 24 Little Joe y La Familia, xii Little Milton, 36 Little Richard, 127 Locke, Randall ‘‘Poodie,’’ 80 Lomax, John, 71 Longoria, Valerio, 123 Lopez, Trini, 56 Los Super Seven, 18 Lovett, Lyle, 91, 107 Luneberg, Griff, 108 Lynn, Barbara, ix, 159 Mack, Lonnie, 89 Malone, Bill C., 30 Martin, Roberta, 48 Martinez, Narciso, 123, 166 Martinez, Virginia, 124, 164 Mason, Charles, 49–50 Mayo, O. W., 76 McClinton, Delbert, 57 McCormick, Mack, 70, 72 McTell, Blind Willie, 71–72 Mears, Pat, 95 Meaux, Huey P., ix, 128, 158 Medlock, James, 4 Mendoza, Lydia, 133–135, 159, 166 Mercer, Johnny, 40–41, 164 Mercier, Mandy, 92–93 Meyer, Nancy, 70 Meyers, Augie, 128 Milikin, Chesley, 89 Minus, Rich, 95 Monroe, Larry, 96 Moore, Johnny (and His Three Blazers), 160 Moore, Oscar, 37 Moore, Scotty, 34 Morlix, Gurf, 92, 96, 104–105 Morrison, Van, 162 Morse, Ella Mae, xi, 39–41, 159, 196 Morthland, John, 47 Morton, Jelly Roll, x Mullican, Aubrey ‘‘Moon,’’ 31

All Over the Map

Nason, Lefty, 8 Nelson, Bobbie, 81 Nelson, Willie, xiii, 18, 30, 62, 66, 79–83, 139–141, 150, 156–157, 162, 167 Neuenschwander, Carlene (Jones), 93 Newman, David ‘‘Fathead,’’ xi Nolen, Jimmy, 35 O’Brien, Rich, 74, 77 O’Connell, Helen, 41 Offenders, xii Oliver, Paul, 11 Orbison, Roy, ix, 32, 74, 157, 167 Palmer, Robert (New York Times), 108 Parker, Charlie, x, 122 Parker, Junior, 20 Patoski, Joe Nick, 129 Payne, Jody, 80 Payne, Leon, ix Phillips, Washington, x, 10–16, 165 Pierce, Webb, 74 Pilgrim Travelers, 4 Presley, Elvis, xi, 34, 39, 75, 108, 138 Price, Ray, xiii Prine, John, 96 Quintanilla, A. B., 132 Quintanilla, Selena, xi, 131–135 Raphael, Mickey, 80, 82–83 Ratliff, Ben, 124 Rausch, Leon, 74, 77 Ray, Paul, 88 Reeves, Jim, 74, 76 R.E.M., 27, 151–154 Remington, Herb, 53 Reyes, Rose, 77 Rhodes, Jack, ix Rhodes, Kimmie, 92 Rhodes, Leon, 46 Richards, Keith, 88 Richardson, J. P. ‘‘The Big Bopper,’’ 139 Ritter, Tex, 3, 76 Robbins, Marty, 82, 158 Robertson, Eck, ix Robey, Don, 17, 19–20

Index

175

Robillard, Duke, 38 Rodgers, Carrie, 46 Rodgers, Jimmie, 46 Romanowski, Ken, 49 Rubin, Rick, 25 Russell, Calvin, 95 Russell, Leon, 51 Russell, Shake, 96

Thompson, Hunter, 100 Thompson, Sonny, 53 Thornton, Big Mama, 20 Threadgill, Kenneth, 161 Timbuk 3, 93 Tillman, Floyd, xiii, 30–32 Tubb, Ernest, x, 45–47, 56, 77, 130, 158 Turner, Kylo, 4

Sagan, Carl, 67 Sahm, Doug, (and Sir Douglas Quintet), xi, 127–130, 158 Scarano, Tony ‘‘Di Roadie,’’ 93 Scarface, 25 Scratch Acid, 152 Selph, Leon, 30 Sexton, Charlie, xii Sexton, Will, xii Seymour, William J., 50 Shannon, Tommy, 88 Shaver, Billy Joe, xi, 60–66, 138, 165 Shaver, Eddy, 60–66, 165 Sinatra, Frank, 2, 79, 150 Slack, Freddie, 37, 41 Slim Thug, 24 Smith, Anna Nicole, 75 Smith, Bessie, 71 Smith, Harry, 72 Smith, Henry ‘‘Buster,’’ x Soileau, Leo, 7 Spears, Bee, 80–82 Spector, Phil, 44, 147 Spivey, Victoria, xi Springsteen, Bruce, 109, 162 Stewart, Sylvester (Sly and the Family Stone), 42–44 Stuart, Marty, 46 Sublett, Jesse, 151

Valens, Ritchie, 139, 147 Vandiver, John, 96 van Rijn, Guido, 13 Van Zandt, Townes, xiii, 63, 96, 107– 109, 159, 167 Vaughan, Jimmie, 34–38, 51, 53, 86, 88 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, xi, xiii, 35, 37, 51, 53, 67, 86–90, 104, 150–151 Vincent, Gene, 55, 57 Vinson, Eddie ‘‘Cleanhead,’’ xi

Taylor, Hound Dog, 54 Teagarden, Jack, xi Texas Instruments, 151 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 14, 50 Thomas, George W., x Thomas, Henry ‘‘Ragtime Texas,’’ xi Thomas, Hersal, x Thompson, Hank, 160, 164

Wakely, Jimmy, 32 Walker, Cindy, ix, 74–78, 110 Walker, Frank, 10, 71 Walker, Jerry Jeff, 103, 108, 150 Walker, Oree, 75–78 Walker, T-Bone, x, 18, 20, 34–39, 46, 51, 67, 70, 87, 127, 129, 165 Wallace, Sippie, x, 158 Wallichs, Glenn, 40 Walser, Don, 110–112 Ward, Ed, 156 Washington, Marco, 36 Waters, Muddy, 18, 35, 168, 187 Watson, Johnny ‘‘Guitar,’’ 37 Watts, Michael ‘‘5000,’’ 23 Wertheimer, Steve, 58 Wexler, Jerry, 89 White, Barry, 147 White, Jack, 67 White, James, 111 White, Mickey, 91 Whiting, Margaret, 32 Wild Seeds, 151 Williams, Dan, 72 Williams, Don, 107 Williams, Hank, 8, 62, 107, 109, 127 Williams, Lucinda, 91–92, 94, 107

176

Williams, Marion, 50 Willie D., 25 Willis, Bill, 52–53 Wills, Bob, xi, 8, 17, 31, 74–76, 129, 141, 159, 164 Wilson, Brian, 122 Wilson, Eddie, 52, 162 Wilson, Kim, 87 Winter, Johnny, 35, 88, 166 Wolf, Howlin’, 101

All Over the Map

Wood, Roger, 20 Wray, Link, 35 Wynn, Big Jim, 37 Wynne, Angus, 43 Young, Neil, 57, 153 Zeitgeist (Reivers), 151, 156 Zettner, David, 82 Z-Ro, 24