ALL OVER THE MAP: TRUE HEROES OF TEXAS MUSIC
No 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.
The wide open spaces of rural Texas are reminiscent of what the best Lone Star songwriters, from Townes Van Zandt and Cindy Walker to Steve Earle, Jack Rhodes, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell and many more 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 the songs and sounds it has created.
Texans were the first to record a country tune (Amarillo’s Eck Robertson in 1922), the first to play electric guitar on record (Eddie Durham of San Marcos in 1935), the first to explore “free jazz,” as Fort Worth alto sax player Ornette Coleman’s idiocyncratic experimentations were dubbed in the late ‘50s.
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 100 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 to have hits- 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; it’s first great electric jazz guitarist was Dallas native Charlie Christian.
T-Bone Walker invented the language of electric blues guitar.
In the gospel field, a trinity of Texans – Blind Willie Johnson, Washington Phillips and Arizona Dranes – were putting religious lyrics to blues progressions even before “the father of gospel” Thomas A. Dorsey first mixed spiritual lyrics with a secular rhythm on 1928’s “If You See My Savior.”
Both boogie woogie piano, originally known as the “fast Texas” style, and psychedelic rock originated in the Lone Star State. George W. and Hersal Thomas, the brothers of Houston-raised 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 wasn’t lured from Dallas to Kansas City in 1925 to join the Blue Devils? You may have heard of Smith’s protege Charlie Parker. And while New Orleans piano player Jelly Roll Morton is sometimes credited as “the father of jazz,” there’s no denying that Scott Joplin of Texarkana provided the template with his syncopated ragtime compositions in the late 19th 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 walzes, polkas, honky tonk, funk, hip-hop, Tejano and jazz. The Czech and German settlers, who started coming up from Galveston Bay in the 1850’s, built community centers which became primarily dancehalls, more than a dozen of which still exist. When the bands played their native polkas, neighborhood Mexican kids listened in and made their own variation of accordion music (keeping the Bohemian beat), which they called conjunto. This Hybrid State is where not only did Hispanics played German music, but blacks played country, farm boys played big band jazz and everyone played the blues.
Beyonce
Of course, Texas is not the only state which can boast incredible musical heroes. Mississippi had the Delta blues and Elvis Presley– and everything else is just gravy. Louisiana’s incredible musical heritage includes everyone from Louis Armstrong to Jerry Lee Lewis to Buddy Guy. Even Minnesota could warrant it’s own book of true heroes, with chapters on such unique 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 or Prince, there are Texans like Charles Brown of Baytown and Sly Stone of Denton and his cousin Larry Graham of Beaumont, who showed them the way.
And with Houston native Beyonce Knowles the Queen of Pop, the Lone Star continues to shine brightly in the musical galaxy.
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I tagged on that Beyonce sentence to make it current, but the rest of that was the intro to my 2005 book All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music (UT Press), which I’m in the process of renovating. I’m rewriting the whole thing, plugging in new information, and adding a dozen chapters: Barbara Lynn, Johnny Gimble, Clifford Antone, Ray Price, Tom Wilson, Sonny Curtis, Nick Curran, Bobby Ramirez, King Curtis, Calvin Russell, Bobby Keys and Bobbie Nelson. Even with all that- 40 chapters in all- it’s not enough to cover every deserving Texas musician.
How can a book chronicling “True Heroes Of Texas Music” not include chapters on Buddy Holly, Bob Wills, Roky Erickson or Lefty Frizzell?
Where’s Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, the songster from Big Sandy whose “Bulldoze Blues” was the basis for Canned Heat’s smash “Goin’ Up the Country”? Where’s nascent blues diva Victoria Spivey or San Antonio sax great Clifford Scott?
And where are the jazz artists- Jack Teagarden of Vernon, Dallas’ David “Fathead” Newman, Fort Worth’s Kenny Dupree, Harry James of Beaumont or Illinois Jacquet, 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.
SRV
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.
In revisiting these newspaper and magazine articles and rewriting them into book-worthy chapters, I started thinking about just how much my interests have shifted since my days as a caustic gossip columnist for the Austin Chronicle in 1985. Back then a big day was getting off a few zingers, but nowadays, my favorite part of the job is driving to small Texas towns and knocking on doors in rundown neighborhoods looking for people who knew this long gone blind gospel singer or that old streetcorner songster.
You just get bit by the bug, is how it happens. For me, the obsessed rock ‘n’ roll sleuth took hold while researching a story on Rebert Harris, the original lead singer for the Soul Stirrers. It was 1999 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 and emails, to anyone resembling a gospel music authority, did not yield a contact to Mr. Harris, who was 83 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 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.
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I’ve given all of April to finishing the revised version of All Over the Map, whose rights UT Press has kindly given back to me after 10 years. I don’t have a publisher yet, but I’m going to finish it anyway and hope for the best. Maybe I’ll do a “Korkstarter” or something once I’m ready for the printer. I’ll let you know. But for now I’m locking the bunker door.