Texas Music Source
Our guide to eighty years of Texas Music
(Page 2 of 6)
THE EARLY YEARS: 1900-1930
The series begins at the turn of the century, when the first Texans emerged as songwriters on the national stage, recorded on player pianos, and stood as performers in front of primitive recording horns. Texarkana’s Scott Joplin helped create the ragtime style that ruled popular music in the early years of this century. In the twenties, a few Texans became best-selling, trend-setting recording artists. Vernon Dalhart and Eck Robertson were among the creators of country music, recording years before the more famous Carter family. Black blues singers Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sippie Wallace recorded some of the earliest “race” records and established an influential Texas blues tradition. In the twenties and thirties Narciso Martinez and Lydia Mendoza created a distinctively Tejano sound that lives on today. And finally, Bob Wills emerged as the king of Western swing. By the early thirties, nearly all of the dinstinctively Texas genres we know today, from Tejano conjunto to Western swing, were well established.
Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
Birthplace: Linden, TX
Genre: Ragtime
Influenced: Irving Berlin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Taj Mahal
Other Sites: The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation
“Maple Leaf Rag,” published in 1899, was the first million-selling piece of sheet music ever, certainly the first written by a Texan. The catchy tune’s creator, Scott Joplin, became “the king of ragtime” in the first years of the new century, turning out dozens of sophisticated rags and even a couple of operas and a ballet, all in the ragtime idiom.
Joplin was born in 1868 near Linden in northeast Texas, but grew up in Texarkana. The son of former slaves, Joplin learned to play the banjo by the age of seven. His mother worked as a maid in the household of a Texarkana attorney, and young Scott loved to improvise on the family’s piano. Around 1880 Joplin began taking free music lessons from a German immigrant who was a tutor to lumberman R.W. Rodgers’ children. By the end of that decade Joplin had left Texarkana and worked his way to St. Louis as an itinerant pianist, playing the newly popular “ragged time” music in saloons and brothels along the way. After entertaining the visitors to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, home base for his Texas Medley Quartette, where he entered the local “College for Negroes” and studied piano and theory.
On a visit to Kansas City Joplin showed some of the pieces he had written to a publisher, who in 1899 brought out the “Maple Leaf Rag,” (named after the Maple Leaf Club, where Joplin entertained back in Sedalia). That sheet music, which sold an astonishing 1 million copies, launched Joplin’s national career. Many other great rags followed, including “The Entertainer,” “Elite Syncopations,” “The Easy Winners,” “The Chrysanthemum,” and “Magnetic Rag,” before the ragtime craze was replaced by other forms of Tin Pan Alley pop. Between 1899 and 1916 Joplin also recorded many of his tunes on rolls for the reproducing pianos that were a mainstay of wealthier middle class parlors.
But Joplin was ambitious for his large-scale ragtime-influenced classical compositions, a ballet and two operas. Unable to find financial backing, Joplin paid for a full production of his opera Treemonisha, which flopped. Friends said that Joplin’s death in 1917, officially due to advanced syphilis contracted in his wild youth, was brought on in part by the public’s rejection of what he considered his best work. The titles of his great rags are familiar now because Joplin’s music was rediscovered in the 1970s by such pianists as Joshua Rifkin and popularized on the soundtrack of The Sting, the classic film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a pair of con men. In the mid-seventies Houston Grand Opera also revived Joplin’s masterpiece, Treemonisha, in a spectacular production that was recorded and widely distributed. Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for that opera in 1976, and is credited with the first grand opera created by an African American. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Eck Robertson (1887-1975)
Birthplace: Delaney, Arkansas
Genre: country
Influenced: all later country fiddlers, also Bob Wills and New Lost City Ramblers
Country fiddlers have always been plentiful in Texas, but the acknowledged early master was Amarillo’s Eck Robertson, who had the self-confidence to persuade a hard-nosed New York Victor Records exec to record him in 1922. His versions of the classic “Sallie Goodin,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Arkansas Traveler” were not only the first Country tunes recorded, but they also set the standard for decades to come.
Born in Delaney, Arkansas, in 1887, Alexander Campbell Robertson came to Amarillo, Texas, with his parents at the age of three. The persistent story that he skinned a family cat to make his first fiddle is probably apocryphal, but he did somehow manage to get expert on the guitar, banjo, and fiddle by the time he left home at the age of 16 to tour with a medicine show in Indian Territory before Oklahoma became a state. With the advent of silent films Robertson played at theaters dressed in Western getup and became known as the Cowboy Fiddler. In June, 1922, after an engagement at an Old Confederate Soldiers reunion in Virginia, Robertson persuaded fellow fiddler and former Confederate soldier Henry Gilliland, 76, to drive to New York City and record, although neither had been invited. Dressed in their reunion finery, Robertson as a cowboy and Gilliland as a soldier in gray, they persuaded the studio to record them practically on the spot.
When Victor released the recording of “Sallie Goodin” and “Arkansas Traveler” in September, 1922, it represented the first commercial Country recording ever. The following spring Robertson promoted his recording on WBAP in Fort Worth, which was also a first. Soon “hillbilly” bands were playing on radio stations from Chicago to Nashville.
Robertson’s remoteness from the recording capitals of the industry prevented him from making any further recordings until 1929, by which time the industry was reeling from the stock market crash. Although his local fame was great—he bested the young Bob Wills in many an Old Fiddlers contest—Robertson never built a national career on his “firsts.” His moment of glory in his waning years was an appearance in 1964 at UCLA. He died in 1975 in Borger, Texas. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Vernon Dalhart (1883-1948
Genre: Country Western
Influenced: all later country singers, Carl Sprague, Gene Autry
Vernon Dalhart’s 1924 recording for Victor of “The Prisoner’s Song” showed the young recording industry that Country music could be a commercial success beyond anything then imagined, eventually selling 25 million copies during the singer’s lifetime.
Born Marion Try Slaughter II on April 6, 1883, Vernon Dalhart took his country-western pseudonym from the towns of Vernon in north Texas and Dalhart in the Panhandle. Unlike many wannabes, Dalhart, who is now recognized as “the first singing cowboy,” was actually raised on the family ranch in Marion County. In the late 1890s, after his father was stabbed to death by a drunken brother-in-law, Dalhart worked summers as a cowboy in the Texas Panhandle, where he picked up many of the campfire songs and ballads that later appeared on his recordings.
Dalhart began singing publicly at the age of 12, but his road to country music was circuitous. Just before the turn of the century he and his mother moved from Jefferson to cosmopolitan Dallas, where his singing talent led him to the Dallas Conservatory of Music. Soon he was a paid soloist at the First Baptist Church. His music teachers, having imparted all the training they could, sent him off to New York City to pursue more professional instruction in 1910. Dalhart sang at churches and funeral homes for extra cash, as he pursued a career in opera. Beginning in 1912, he achieved his goal, gaining a bit part in Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West and later a leading role in Madame Butterfly.
But the new medium of the Edison cylinder discs also intrigued him, and in 1916 he made his first recording for Columbia, which led to an audition with Thomas A. Edison himself. For Edison Diamond Disc and later, for Victor, Dalhart recorded light classical and many other songs under dozens of pseudonyms and in various ethnic styles, including songs in Southern negro dialect.
But sales were slowing by 1924 when he decided to try out some “hillbilly” songs under the new pseudonym of Vernon Dalhart. His Victor recording of “The Prisoner’s Song,” a “B-side” recording paired with “The Wreck of the Old ‘97,” turned out to be his biggest hit, and Country music’s first million seller. Between 1924 and 1928 Vernon Dalhart was America’s best-selling recording artist, singing such classic songs as “Golden Slippers,” “My Blue Ridge Mountain Home,” and the defininitive national best seller of 1927, “Home on the Range.”
His success inspired others to try country and cowboy music, including another Texan, Carl T. Sprague, who in 1925 recorded ten songs for Victor. His version of “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” a song about the vicissitudes of working a herd of longhorns, sold some 90,000 copies (but see note below). Sprague earned the title “The Original Singing Cowboy,” and is credited with the igniting a national interest in cowboy songs.
The onset of the Great Depression brought an end to many budding recording careers, and Sprague faded from public attention until the 1960s. Vernon Dalhart lost much of the fortune he had earned in the stock market collapse of 1929, and record sales plummeted as well. Although Dalhart kept trying, often with clever topical songs, a comparable blockbuster eluded him. Under more than 100 pseudonyms he recorded nearly 1,000 songs before his death from a heart attack in 1948. All but forgotten for decades, Dalhart was honored at last by the Country Music Hall of Fame, which elected him a member in 1981.
Dennis Williams of Bryan, Texas sent us this comment. (8/1/02)
A 1965 RCA Victor Vintage reissue of “Authentic Cowboys and Their Western Folksongs” (LPV 522) includes sales figure of more than 900,000 copies for “When The Work’s All Done This Fall” in the album notes by western music collector and historian, Fred Hoeptner. Also, the figure appears in the following: White, John I. “Git Along, Little Dogies” (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975) pp. 85, 191
Both the footnotes in White’s work cite the RCA Victor release of 1965 but I include them because getting that incredible figure past an editor twice in the same book should, and I emphasize should, increase the possibility that the number is accurate. White also uses this figure in the liner notes for Bear Family’s “Carl T. Sprague: Classic Cowboy Songs” (BCD 15456).
Jack Palmer of Battle Creek, Michigan sent us this comment. (10/27/99)
I don’t like to be picky, but I have researched Vernon Dalhart’s life for over 20 years and am writing a biography now. Your article on Dalhart is not bad but there are two serious errors.
1). Dalhart began using the Vernon Dalhart name instead of his real name, Marion Try Slaughter II, in 1911 when he first appeared on stage in “Girl of the Golden West.” It was not adopted for recording purposes, although other pseudonyms were.
2). His recording career was not slowing down at the time he recorded Wreck Of The Old 97 but was actually growing, albeit slowly. The Wreck and The Prisoner’s Song just accelerated his career. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929)
Birthplace: Coutchman, Texas
Genre: Blues
Influenced: Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”), Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, and every other white bluesman
Blind Lemon Jefferson made the earliest recordings of any Texas country blues singer. Between 1925 and 1929, when he died on the streets of Chicago in a snow storm, Jefferson made nearly 80 classic recordings for Paramount Records, each of which was said to have sold at least 100,000 copies, a legacy that influenced every Texas bluesman that followed him and even a young folk singer in the 1960s who called himself Bob Dylan.
Born blind in 1897 near Wortham, Lemon Jefferson’s only possible hope of making a living was as a musician, a course followed by several others, including Texas’s own Blind Willie Johnson. At the age of 15 he began singing and playing guitar on the streets of Wortham and Mexia, scraping together a meager livelihood at church picnics and country dances. By the age of twenty Jefferson had moved to Dallas, singing in the cafes, saloons and brothels of Deep Ellum. His talent was appreciated, and by 1918 he had made enough money to buy a car, hire a chauffeur, and take his act on the road to other big cities of the South and Midwest. In Deep Ellum he teamed up for a while with another great bluesman named Huddie Ledbetter, who was to become famous when he was rediscovered in the fifties as “Leadbelly.” The Red Light districts fostered the creation of such earthy blues classics as “Black Snake Moan” and “Mean Jumper Blues,” but Jefferson was also capable of such deep-felt spirituals as “See That My Grave is Kept Clean,” a tune revived by Bob Dylan on his first album in 1961.
In 1925 several northern record companies saw a market for “race” records and sent scouts into the South to discover new talent. Paramount Records found the 250-pound Jefferson in Dallas and lured him to Chicago, where he turned out song after song, almost all with his original lyrics. Some of his spirituals were also released under the pseudonym Deacon L.J. Bates. In 1929 Jefferson was found frozen in a snowbank, the victim of an apparent heart attack. He is buried in the old Negro cemetary at Wortham, where his grave is marked by a Texas historical monument dedicated in 1967. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Sippie Wallace (1898-1986)
Birthplace: Houston, Texas
Genre: Blues
Influenced: many later female blues singers, including Bonnie Raitt and Marcia Ball
The great Blues singer Sippie Wallace was at the top of the black record industry and a star with a national reputation soon after recording her first songs in 1923. Earthy and sensual, she spoke honestly about love, sex, and its sorrows in such classics as “Woman Be Wise” and “Mighty Tight Woman.” But the death of a brother and her husband led her to fall back on gospel music as a solace. After decades of obscurity, Sippie Wallace came to the public’s attention again in the seventies through the appreciation and help of Bonnie Raitt.
Born Beulah Thomas in 1898 to a deacon of Houston’s Shiloh Baptist Church and his wife, Sippie began her musical career singing gospel and improvising on the church organ. But Sippie also loved the tent shows that came through town, and soon was asked to join in a chorus line. By 1916 she had traveled from Houston to Dallas, was a seasoned performer, and had graduated to singing solo ballads, fronting a band in Deep Ellum.
An older brother, George W. Thomas, was a successful pianist, songwriter, and publisher of new music in New Orleans, so later that year Sippie joined him there. It was the height of ragtime and the beginning of the jazz era, and Sippie perfected her craft performing alongside the future legends—Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver. With the help and encouragement of her brother George, she moved to Chicago in 1923 and got an audition with Okeh Records. Her first effort, “Up the Country Blues,” was an instant success, followed by a string of others. In Chicago Sippie was joined by another musical brother, the jazz piano prodigy Hersal Thomas, who accompanied her on recordings before he was 15. Soon he was cutting his own solo recordings, including the well-known “Suitcase Blues.” His death at 16 from food poisoning was the first of a series of personal tragedies which led to Sippie returning for a time to the gospel music of her childhood.
Although Sippie Wallace recorded as a blues singer again in the late forties and went on tour to Europe in the sixties entertaining American servicemen, she rode back to the heights of her earlier acclaim on the crest of Bonnie Raitt’s popularity in the 1970s and 1980s; Raitt had recorded two Sippie Wallace songs on her first album, befriended her, then took the septagenarian on tour. In 1983 Wallace’s last album, entitled Sippie, was nominated for a Grammy. She died on her eighty-seventh birthday in Detroit, Michigan, November 1, 1986. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Narciso Martinez (1911-1992)
Birthplace: Reynosa, Tamaulipas
Genre: Conjunto
Influenced: all later conjunto performers, Bruno Villareal to Flaco Jimenez
Band Affiliations: duo with Almeida (bajo sexto); accompanist with Carmen y Laura and Lydia Mendoza
Narciso Martinez established a tradition of conjunto that endures to this day, playing a distinctive style of accordion accompanied by the bajo sexto twelve-string guitar. Although his first recordings date to the mid-thirties, his playing influenced scores of other musicians throughout Texas and the Southwest in a career that spanned six decades.
Narciso Martinez, the son of migrant farm laborers, was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, in 1911, but his parents moved across the border the same year. The Mexican orquestas of the Valley of his childhood consisted of violin, flute, bass, and guitar, but wandering solo musicians also entertained on the accordion. In 1928 Martinez took up the accordion and began playing at dances to support the family he had just started with his wife, Edwina. About the same time his wanderings brought him into contact with the local German and Czech accordion traditions and Martinez absorbed some of their techniques and specialty dances, such as the schottische and the redowa. In 1935 he acquired a new two-row button accordion and a partner, bajo sexto player Santiago Almeida. He also began to play in a new style, concentrating on the melody and leaving the bass line to the bajo sexto.
The team’s first great success was a record for the Bluebird label, “La Chicharronera,” which has remained a standard of the conjunto repertory. Before World War II Martinez had recorded scores of songs, including “La Parrita” and “Los Coyotes.” After the interruption of the war, Martinez resumed recording in 1946 with Ideal, the first Tejano recording company. He accompanied many of the label’s singers, including Carmen y Laura, sisters who were to become the most popular Tejano singers of their day. He became known as “El Huracan del Valle” (the Hurricane of the Valley), a reference to his swift playing. But his audience of poor Mexican Americans could not support him just through the sale of records, so Martinez also served as a caretaker at the Brownsville Zoo. He toured on the dancehall circuit until the mid-1960s throughout the Southwest and as far away as Chicago before retiring from the road.
In 1976 the documentary film Chulas Fronteras gave him proper credit for his pioneering role, in 1982 he was inducted into the Conjunto Music Hall of Fane, and in 1985 a scholarly history of Conjunto style brought him critical attention. Arhoolie Records’ 1989 rerelease of some of his music elicited a Grammy nomination. In the meantime, Martinez retired from the Brownsville Zoo in 1977, and enjoyed a new and larger audience in semi-retirement until his death in June, 1992. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Lydia Mendoza (1916-2007)
Birthplace: Houston, Texas
Genre: Tejano
Influenced: all later Tejano singers, including Selena
In 1928, at the age of 12, Lydia Mendoza made her recording debut in a San Antonio hotel room-studio set up by Okeh Records to record La Familia Mendoza (aka Cuarteto Carta Blanca), a powerhouse of traditional Mexican-American recording artists whose music has been enjoyed throughout the Southwest and deep into Mexico. Lydia’s signature song, “Mal Hombre,” has become an enduring classic on both sides of the border.
Lydia’s mother, Leonora Mendoza, was the musical head of the family. Leonora played guitar and taught the other family members to sing and play violin, mandolin, and percussion. When not entertaining, however, the family had to support itself by working as migrant laborers. The 1928 recordings brought a family windfall of $140, which enabled them to move to Detroit, their home base for several years of entertaining migrant workers and fellow Mexican Americans who had moved north during the Mexican Revolution.
Returning to Texas in the early thirties to play in San Antonio’s Plaza de Zacate, the family again were invited to record in 1934. This time, after the family recorded six songs, Lydia had the chance to record solo, accompanying herself on the guitar. One of the six songs cut was “Mal Hombre,” which became a hit throughout the Spanish-speaking parts of the U.S. As a result of that sucess, between 1934 and 1940 Lydia recorded just under 200 songs for the Bluebird label. Leonora organized a family variety show with Lydia as the featured solo singer and her sisters Juanita and Maria appearing as Las Hermanas Mendoza. La Familia Mendoza toured the Southwest and as far afield as Chicago in the years preceding World War II, but rationing during the war years brought a temporary halt to the family tours.
The touring and recording resumed after the war until the death of Leonora in 1952. During the fifties, Lydia Mendoza recorded for Falcon, Ideal, and Victor, acquiring the nickname “La Alondra de la Frontera,” the Lark of the Border.” Also popular in Mexico, she has sung publicly until quite recently, when illness has prevented her. Lydia Mendoza is truly a living legend of Tejano music. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
Bob Wills (1905-1975)
Birthplace: Limestone County near Kosse, Texas
Genre: Western Swing
Influenced: Leon Rausch, Leon McAuliffe, Johnny Gimble, commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel
Band Affiliations: The Light Crust Doughboys, The Texas Playboys
The Texas Playboys, under the leadership of Bob Wills, emerged as the most successful of a groundswell of young musicians who created Western Swing. The new sound was a patchwork of harmonizing elements borrowed from country string bands, jazz combos, German polka bands, blues singers, and ragtime, all pressed into service as a cohesive style of dance music. Before it was called Western Swing, some called it hillbilly jazz or simply country dance music, but it was the unique mix of cultures in Texas that made that sound possible.
Born in 1905 into a family of frontier fiddlers, James Robert Wills spent his early years on a farm in Limestone County, near Kosse. When he was eight, the family moved further west to the Texas plains. The son of an accomplished fiddler, Bob played his first dance at the age of 10. According to his biographer, Dr. Charles Townsend, he was influenced by the black blues singers he heard among his fellow workers in the cotton fields to play “fiddle music with the heat of blues and the swing of jazz.”
In 1929 Wills moved from his hometown of Turkey to Fort Worth, where he joined a traveling medicine show as a blackface minstrel. That work brought him into contact with the first member of his future band, guitarist Herman Arnspiger. The duo, calling themselves the Wills Fiddle Band, played north Texas dances and performed on their own radio show. In 1930 they merged with the brothers Milton and Durwood Brown to form the Aladdin Laddies, a transitional band that led them to station KFJZ in Fort Worth and the general manager of Burrus Mill, W. Lee O’Daniel. O’Daniel renamed the group the Light Crust Doughboys after the program’s sponsor, Light Crust flour, and the program was a success throughout the state, wherever it was heard. Other talented musicians joined the group, including singer and yodeler Leon Huff, steel guitar player Leon McAuliffe, and Bob’s brother Johnnie Lee Wills.
Within a couple of years Wills had moved on and formed a new group that he called the Texas Playboys. Eventually Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys found a home at Tulsa’s KVOO radio station and stayed for nine years, entertaining a vast swatch of the Southwest and gaining a national following through their 1940 recording of “New San Antonio Rose.” Among their classic songs that seem embedded in every Texans’ consciousness are “Faded Love,” “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” and “Panhandle Rag.” The last recording session for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1973 produced the Grammy award-winning For the Last Time: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the crowning achievement of Wills’s long career. He died in 1975 and is buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Bob Wills’ band members dispersed over the years, creating their own bands in the Western Swing mode. Among the greatest were Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies, which had great success before Brown’s death in 1936, and the enduring legacies of band leaders Leon McAuliffe and Leon Rausch, and the long career of fiddler Johnny Gimble. by Chester Rosson (April 1997)
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