Texas Music Source
Our guide to eighty years of Texas Music
(Page 4 of 6)
ROCK AND JAZZ: 1945-1960
World War II had an enormous cultural effect on Texas. Thousands of Texans served in the military and many more thousands came to Texas to train. When it was over, the music reflected the changes that the massive exchanges of information had wrought. T-Bone Walker was ready with his new kind of electric blues developed just before the war with which he had entertained the troops on his tours of army bases. He had settled in Southern California, and the rhythm and blues scene he fostered attracted other musicians from Texas, including Ivory Joe Hunter, who wrote hits that moved into mainstream American music, subtly changing perceptions of R&B. Meanwhile, the Memphis explosion of rock and roll ignited the imagination of young musicians in the Texas Panhandle, foremost among them Buddy Holly of Lubbock. Of course, not everyone took to rock and roll. In the post-war years Texas was also a strong contributor to the country music scene in Nashville. Hank Thompson and Floyd Tillman were the honky-tonking Texans who defined the genre in the late forties and fifties. Toward the end of the fifties Ornette Coleman set the jazz world on its ear with his raucous free jazz sound. In the very different world of classic music, Van Cliburn was an international success after winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Among Hispanics in Texas, the post-World War II popularity of Orquesta-leader Beto Villa’s la onda tejana established a vibrant new form of latino music.
T-Bone Walker (1910-1975)
Birthplace: Linden
Genre: Electric Blues
Influenced: B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, Johnny Winter, and many others
In his ground-breaking book on Texas musicians, Texas Rhythm, Texas Rhyme, Willoughby Williams says flat out: “T-Bone Walker was the most important and influential musician in the history of rhythm and blues, and perhaps in the history of all its derivative styles, including rock ‘n’ roll.” He credits Walker with combining advanced technique on electric guitar with the standard blues combo of tenor sax, string bass and piano to produce the accepted format for R&B. Walker’s electrifying performance style also provided a model for the high-energy rock ‘n’ roll stage style that emerged in the fifties and forever changed American pop music.
Aaron Thibeaux Walker was born to play the blues. His mother, a guitarist herself, took him with her to Dallas, where young T-Bone was hired to lead Blind Lemon Jefferson through the streets to his gigs at the saloons and shady brothels of Oak Cliff. It was iterally at Jefferson’s knee that Walker learned to play guitar. About the age of 15 he left home with Dr. Breeding’s B Tonic Medicine Show as a dancer and guitarist, then toured the South with blues legend Ida Cox. As early as 1929 he cut his first record, “Wichita Falls Blues” (as Oak Cliff T-Bone), and in 1930 won a talent contest and went on tour with the flamboyant band leader Cab Calloway.
As the Great Depression deepened in the thirties, Walker found work with the big bands of the era, including the Texas band of Milt Larkin. But in 1935 he moved to Los Angeles, and his career blossomed as he tap-danced and played his way to fame at Club Alabam and the Little Harlem. Around this time he met Charlie Christian, whose solos on the electric guitar had brought the instrument new respect in the jazz scene. By 1936 he too was playing electric guitar, and began the transformation from blues to rhythm and blues. In 1940 he recorded the classic “T-Bone Blues” with the Cotton Club Orchestra in New York City, toured U.S. Army bases, and played Joe Louis’s Rhumboogie Club in Chicago, to which he would return year after year.
But T-Bone’s greatest success followed World War II, when he fronted his own band and began recording on the Black and White label. Many of his recordings reached the Hit Parade and have become classics, including “I’m Gonna Find My Baby” and “Call It Stormy Monday.” During the fifties his successful career continued at a slower pace. He recorded several hits on the Imperial and Atlantic labels and toured extensively, despite health problems caused by chronic ulcers. Throughout the sixties he was appreciated by young white audiences at blues, jazz, and other festivals both in the U.S. and abroad, and as late as 1970 won a Grammy for his album Good Feelin.
In 1974 Walker suffered a severe stroke which completely incapacitated him. He died March 16, 1975. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Ivory Joe Hunter (1911-1974)
Birthplace: Kirbyville
Genre: Rhythm and Blues
Influenced: Helped establish the wide appeal of R&B in the fifties
Ivory Joe Hunter first made a name for himself playing blues on radio programs in Texas, but he found fame and fortune on the West Coast as a rhythm and blues vocalist, founder of the important Ivory and Pacific record labels, and a songwriter for both R&B and country genres. Several of his hits were also recorded by white artists who noticed the appeal R&B had for white teenagers at the time. Irritated with being cast as an R&B singer in the sixties, Hunter proved himself just as capable in the country field, especially as a songwriter.
Ivory Joe Hunter’s roots in East Texas were in the blues, but his natural inclination during the thirties was toward the music of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. He sang with bands in the southeast Texas area and on the radio throughout the thirties, accompanying himself on the piano.
But in 1942 he moved to the West Coast and fell under the influence of the West Coast R&B scene that coalesced around T-Bone Walker. In 1945 he recorded his first song on his own record company, Ivory, acompanied by Johnny Moore’s group Three Blazers and Charles Brown on piano. But R&B was just one of his interests, even in this period, for he also wrote the country hit “Jealous Heart.” R&B continued to be his most appealing style, however, and in 1949 he signed with MGM and developed a ballad style of R&B that proved irresistible to the record-buyers. In 1950 Hunter had an R&B number 1 hit in “I Almost Lost My Mind.” (It was soon covered by Pat Boone, who made it an even bigger hit on the pop charts.) His “I Need You So” from this period was later a hit for Elvis Presley.
In the fifties, Ivory Joe toured extensively with a large band. His recording success continued with such standards as “Since I Met You Baby,” (covered again by Boone), and “Empty Arms.” But in the sixties he turned more and more toward country. His last album was titled “I’ve Always Been Country.” by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Hank Thompson (1925-2007)
Birthplace: Waco
Genre: Country Western
Influenced: scores of singers, including George Strait, Clint Black, Garth Brooks
The quintessential Texas country singer in the late forties and early fifties, Hank Thompson created the sound—and much of the attitude—that makes each new song by George Strait, Clint Black, and Garth Brooks so resonant. Thompson’s style is a deft fusion of the most appealing Texas country traditions—western swing and honky tonk—an excellent fusion of Western swing danceability and honky tonk lyric and delivery.
Henry William Thompson was a lucky boy. When he was growing up in Waco he got to listen to a huge variety of music from the large collection of a friendly neighbor. All the great country singers were at his disposal—Vernon Dalhart, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Carter Family. On his tenth birthday he received a guitar, and set to learning what it was all about.
In 1942, while still in high school, he was knowledgeable enough, and musically talented enough, to have his own radio show on WACO-radio, “Hank the Hired Hand.” While serving in the navy during World War II as an engineer, he entertained his shipmates with songs. He was inspired to begin writing his own songs when he ran out of material.
Upon his return to Waco in 1946 he formed the Brazos Valley Boys, which became a local favorite. Tex Ritter heard the group and recommended Thompson to his record company, Capitol, in 1947. The resulting song “I’ve Got a Humpty Dumpty Heart” rose to number 2 on the country charts, auspiciously launching a national recording career. Between 1948 and 1974 Thompson had 29 Top Ten hits.
The songs that Thompson is most remembered for, however, were recorded from 1951 and into the early sixties, beginning with “The Wild Side of Life,” which was at the top of country charts for 15 weeks. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” is another classic. Thompson was also a trendsetter in costuming, dressing his bandmembers—among whom were Merle Travis and fiddlers Keith Coleman and Curly Lewis—in Nudie designer suits. His firsts include the first country stereo album (1958) and the first country artist to record a live album (1961).
Thompson continued to perform and record throughout the seventies and eighties, reviving his 1959 hit “A Six Pack to Go” in a duet with George Strait. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Buddy Holly (1936-1959)
Birthplace: Lubbock
Genre: Rock and Roll
Influenced: Innumerable rock artists form the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello
Additional Link: The Buddy Holly Memorabilia Web Page
Like a meteor that tracks across the night sky, Buddy Holly’s career was short and spectacular. His first rock ‘n’ roll recording was released in May 1957, and his life ended tragically in an airplane crash in early 1959, but in those few months Buddy Holly caught the attention of generations of rock ‘n’rollers. Technically, he pioneered in several ways: by writing his own material; by double-tracking his recordings in the studio; and by popularizing the standard rock lineup of two guitars, bass, and drums. But his appeal lies elsewhere, in the joy and drive of his songs.
Born Charles Hardin Holley, Buddy Holly was the youngest of four children, all of whom were encouraged to develop their musical talents. Buddy took up the acoustic guitar and taught himself how to play, following brief attempts to learn the piano and steel guitar from a teacher. While still in junior high school Buddy formed the nucleus of a band with a fellow student, playing western music and what was called “bop” at the time. Then in the fall of 1953 he and Montgomery got together with bassist Larry Welborn to play on Lubbock radio station KDAV.
The trio persevered through high school and made a few demos, which they sent off to Decca Records. In 1956 Decca offered Holly a contract as a country soloist, but his two releases made nary a ripple, and Decca terminated the contract. Holly and his friends returned to Lubbock but continued to open for touring bands at the Lubbock Youth Center.
One of those acts was Elvis Presley, who Holly later credited with moving the band toward rock ‘n’ roll. What Holly saw and heard that night must have struck him as something he had been wanting to do all along.
In February 1957 Holly and his band drove to Clovis, New Mexico, to make the demo recordings that would launch their rock ‘n’ roll fame. “That’ll Be the Day” caught the attention of New York-based Coral/Brunswick and the newly renamed Buddy Holly and the Crickets soon had a contract. “That’ll Be the Day” rose to number 3 by the end of the year. Others hits followed quickly, including “Peggy Sue,” “Oh, Boy!” “Maybe, Baby,” and “Rave On.” The Crickets undertook a whirlwind schedule of tours to Australia, Florida, and Great Britain, and television appearances on such shows as American Bandstand and the Ed Sullivan Show..
In the summer of 1958 Holly did something hopelessly romantic: he proposed on his first date; Maria Elena Santiago of New York City accepted, and they were married in August. After a tour Holly announced in October that he was leaving for New York. The manager objected, and Holly reluctantly parted with the Crickets, who the manager had persuaded to stay under his management.
Due to financial difficulties that arose in the following disputes, Holly was obliged to go on the fatal February 1959 Winter Dance Party tour on which he died in a small plane crash that also killed singers Ritchie Valens, J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson and the pilot. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Floyd Tillman (1914-2003)
Birthplace: Ryan, Oklahoma, moved to Post, Texas at age of 3 months
Genre: Country Western
Influenced: Major contributor to the honky-tonk style, influenced many singers, including Lefty Frizzell and Willie Nelson
The youngest of eleven children born to a sharecrop-farming family, Floyd Tillman can’t call himself a native Texan—he arrived in Post, Texas, at the age of three months. But his musical life is Texas through and through. Tillman learned to play the banjo and mandolin growing up in Post, but turned to the guitar in his teens. In 1933, just 18 years old, Tillman joined the San Antonio-based classic German-Czech swing band of Adolf Hofner, one of the most beloved Texas dance bands of the time. The restless teenager soon left for Houston, however, where he found a job with the successful dance band of Mack Clark and tried his hand at songwriting. “It Makes No Difference Now” was deemed “too hillbilly” by the Houston sophisticates (though it was later a major hit for both Gene Autry and Bing Crosby). Tillman’s musical inclinations led him to audition as lead singer for the Blue Ridge Playboys, led by fiddler Leon Selph. Pappy Selph’s band had among its members some of the originators of the Texas honky-tonk style, including steel guitarist Ted Daffan (whose song credits include “Worried Mind,” “I’m a Fool for You,” and the perennial classic “Born to Lose”), and pianist Moon Mullican, who was later billed as “the king of the hillbilly piano players.”
Tillman served in the Army Air Corps during World War II then returned to front his own band in the Houston area after his discharge. But in 1944 he managed to work in a number 1 hit, “They Took the Stars Out of Heaven.” The post-war years proved to be the most successful of Tillman’s career as the songs he wrote became hits, not just for himself but for many others. “I Love You So Much It Hurts,” with its achingly slow waltz rhythm, is a honky-tonk dancing classic, as is his 1949 shocker “Slippin’ Around,” said to be the first country song to speak openly of adultery. “Slippin Around” was a million-seller for Tillman, but it was an even bigger hit for pop singers Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely. Over the years other country artists have covered it with great success, starting with Ernest Tubb and Texas Jim Robertson in 1950 to Mack Abernathy in 1988.
Although his last country hit was in 1960 (“It Just Tears Me Up,”) Tillman has done much memorable work over the years. His 1982 album Floyd Tilmann and Friends featured appearances by such past collaborators and admirers as Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, who have been influenced by his style, and as late as 1993 he played for a TNN special on The Texas Connection, which showed his skills to be undiminished by time. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Ornette Coleman (1930-)
Birthplace: Fort Worth
Genre: Jazz
Influenced: Almost single-handedly created the Free Jazz movement.
At the end of the fifties the most controversial of jazz figures emerged from obscurity on the New York jazz scene. He was Ornette Coleman, a largely self-taught alto sax player from Fort Worth. He began playing in New York City clubs and releasing recordings that critics and musicians either praised extravagantly or just as adamantly condemned. He called his new music “free jazz,” and it relied on group improvisation of an intensity and complexity not heard before. To some influential critics, such as Gunther Schuller, Coleman’s music was the shape of things to come in jazz; to others it was cacophony. But whatever critics say, Coleman’s approach spawned a generation of free jazz improvisers that formed the avant-garde of jazz in the U.S. and in Europe for decades.
Coleman’s musical odyssey began in Fort Worth, where he took up the saxophone at the age of fourteen, playing in the I.M. Terrell High School band. Among the members of the Terrell High band were serveral musicians who would gain reputations in jazz, including Charles Moffett, Prince Lasha, and John Carter. About 1947, according to his friend and fellow band memeber Dewey Redman, he was kicked out of the band for introducing a bebop improvisation into a performance of The Washington Post March by Sousa.
This event proved prophetic as Coleman moved into his professional life after high school, rejected time and again for expressing his vision too freely. According to critic and biographer John Litweiler, Coleman made a spontaneous discovery while playing a standard tune with the Red Connors band in 1948: “…how to improvise without following the patterns of chord changes.” That discovery cost him his job. On a gig in Baton Rouge with the Clarence Samuels band, members of the audience were so incensed with his solos that they took him outside and beat him unconscious.
After a stint in New Orleans, where Coleman began to develop his theory of “harmolodics,” (his unique technique of melodic improvisation), he returned to Fort Worth and formed his first short-lived band with high school classmate Charels Moffett. When that effort folded, Coleman joined the R&B band of Pee Wee Crayton, which stranded him in Los Angeles.
Although attempts to fit into the LA jazz scene largely failed on this first encounter, Coleman made contacts that eventually paid off. He also used the extra time he had as an elevator operator to study books on harmonic theory.
Coleman’s first album, Something Else!!!! released on Contemporary, brought immediate recognition that a strange new talent had arrived, but it was not a commercial success. A second album Tomorrow is the Question! attempted to correct that problem, but is considered by most critics less successful artistically than the the next few albums, beginning with The Shape of Jazz to Come from Atlantic. The Atlantic albums excited the jazz world like nothing since.
Ornette Coleman’s prolific outpouring continued through the seventies, eighties, and nineties. He has continued to experiment with new formats, new sidemen, and has ventured into collaborations with classical musicians. In the eighties he made major contributions to his discography, including Song X, with Pat Metheny, and In All Languages, with his group Prime Time, while working with Fort Worth’s Caravan of Dreams jazz club. All Languages, with his group Prime Time, while working with Fort Worth’s Caravan of Dreams jazz club. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Van Cliburn (1934-)
Birthplace: Shreveport, LA
Genre: Classical piano
Other Sites: The Van Cliburn Foundation
At the 1958 First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Russia and the World found out what Van Cliburn’s teachers and fellow students at the Juilliard School had known all along: Van was ochen kharasho (very good). His Moscow triumph, both as the artist who won First Prize and as an audience favorite, continued when he returned to a hero’s welcome in the United States. Nothing quite like it had occurred in the small world of classical music before. His arrival in New York City was more like that accorded a certain British rock band in the sixties, and his triumphal tour continued from city to city. Van Cliburn’s recording that year of the winning piece, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, set a standard that has yet to be surpassed; the most popular classical piano recording ever, it has never been out of print.
Cliburn has always stressed the fact that he is a Texan. His father had a job in Shreveport at the time; and, as it says in his 1993 authorized biography by critic Howard Reich, “By the time Van turned six, the family had moved back where it belonged, to . . . Kilgore.”
So, how does one become an international-calibre pianist in Kilgore? By having the most amazingly gifted mom as a teacher. Rildia Bee Cliburn was not only a third-generation Texan, but a third-generation pianist who had studied in New York with a famous teacher who had studied with Franz Liszt, the super-star pianist-composer of the 19th century. And she was the only teacher Van Cliburn needed until he went off at the age of 18 to Juilliard, where he became the favorite student of the greatest piano teacher of her time, the Russian-born maestra Josefina Lhevinne.
Everyone described Van Cliburn as having a natural talent, but the hours of practice he put in were phenomenal. His fellow students at Juilliard told tales of his practicing until three in the morning. The results were impressive—between 1952 and 1958 he won all but one competition he entered, including the G.B. Dealey Award from the Dallas Symphony, the Kosciusko Foundation Chopin Scholarship, and the prestigious Leventritt, all before the age of twenty. At twenty he had played with the New York Philharmonic and the symphonies of most major cities (thanks to the Leventritt award). He also graduated with top honors from Juilliard.
Reviews were universally excellent, and Cliburn’s career seem launched, until a series of accidents and impending military duty side-tracked him in 1957. When his name came up for the draft, Cliburn cancelled all engagements (the Army eventually excused Van from service because of his chronic nosebleeds). Later, both parents were hospitalized (Rildia Bee with a broken vertebra and his father with complications from an auto-bus collision) and Cliburn went back to Kilgore to take care of them.
But the Tchaikovsky Competition jump-started Cliburn’s career again in 1958, causing an outpouring of American nationalistic pride and musical admiration that none of his previous wins had prepared him for. Moscow made Van Cliburn a celebrity, just as Liszt had been in the previous century. There was a tickertape parade in New York City, following a concert at Carnegie Hall that fully validated the Moscow win in the eyes of all who heard it.
Cliburn’s concerts over the next few years were spectacularly well-received, as were his further recordings of repertory ranging from Mozart and Chopin’s virtuoso solo music to a concerto by American composer Edward McDowell, as well as the standard Beethoven and Brahms. But the heart of his repertory has always been Russian, with the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos. All his recordings were artistic and commercial successes. Along the way he leant his name to Fort Worth’s quadrennial Van Cliburn Competition, which has caused the whole world to sit up and listen to scores of young pianists.
Van Cliburn retired from the concert stage in 1978, after a twenty-four year career that took him to all the great concert stages. His retirement was planned over a four year period after his father’s death in 1974 to have some time to himself and for his beloved aging mother. (They shared a Fort Worth mansion until her death in 1994.)
A White House concert in 1987 for the Gorbachevs and the Reagans led to speculation that Cliburn might return to the stage. That was finally accomplished in 1989 and has continued with concerts at measured intervals ever since, with recent concerts playing to sold out houses. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
Beto Villa (1915-1986)
Birthplace: Falfurrias
Genre: Orquesta
Influenced: All future development of the Texas Orquesta style, including the orchestras of Isidro Lopez, Balde Gonzalez, Chris Sandoval, and their successors
During the thirties and forties the Hispanic population of South Texas began to share in the relative economic stability brought about by local oil and gas discoveries and the dramatic increases in agricultural production in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Among the upwardly mobile shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, musical tastes began to change as well. Surrounded by radio airplay of the big band sound of the Anglo culture, similar recordings with a latin flavor from Mexico and Cuba, and the local German and Czech dance bands’ polkas and waltzes, they were primed for the rise of the orquesta tejano, a big band that could play Texas latino music in a grander way than the three-musician conjuntos that had traditionally provided the entertainment for Mexican American dances (bailes) and quinceanero parties. Beto Villa was the first to organize just such an orquesta and popularize what would come to be known as la onda tejano.
Born into a prosperous and musical family (his father Don Alberto Villa was a tailor and part-time musician who was known around Falfurrias as el Maestro), Beto Villa as a boy of ten received a saxophone and some special instructions from his father: “Cuando toques, toca con gusto.” Apparently, the advice was taken to heart, for two years later he was playing in school bands and by 1932 had joined a group called the Sonny Boys, which specialized in high school dances. The music didn’t bring in enough money to support his family, however, so Villa worked as a butcher in a meat market.
Villa had to wait until the end of World War II to invent the kind of music that he wanted to play. In 1946 he approached the Alice, Texas, founders of the new Hispanic music label, Ideal, to propose a new kind of music that would combine elements of the Texas conjunto sound known as ranchero—which country people loved—with elements of the jaiton (hightone) orchestra music that appealed to city folk. Although skeptical, the entrepreneurs (Armando Marroquin and Paco Betancourt) finally agreed when Villa brought with him a more professional group of musicians than he had assembled at the time.
In the fall of 1947 the Beto Villa Orquesta recorded its first release, “Las Delicias” and “Porque te Ries.” Both were instant successes, and Ideal demanded that they record more immediately. Among the classics of Tejano music that followed was the “Rosita Vals.”
By 1949 Villa had upgraded his orchestra again with more and better players—all twelve had to be able to read music—and he took this excellent touring band across the Southwestern U.S. Due to his recordings for Ideal and the radio exposure they brought, Villa became famous not only in South Texas, but wherever Hispanic music was appreciated. Many of the standard repertory pieces of Tejano big bands originated with the Villa Orquesta, including the polkas “Monterrey” and “Victoria.” In 1954 Villa recorded with RCA, the first Tejano orquesta to achieve that national distinction.
Villa dominated the orquesta scene in Texas into the late fifties, gradually extending the range of music played to include the more exotic mambos and sambas of Latin America. It is significant that he remarked in his last years that his “musical peak” was in the sixties, when Perez Prado asked him to tour with his big band.
Ill health forced Villa into early retirement, but by the time of his death in 1986, he had long been recognized as “the father of Tejano Orquesta.” Many of his most typical recordings are still available on re-releases from Arhoolie Productions. by Chester Rosson (June 1997)
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