My Favorite Shoes 
The Best of the Texas Century—Culture
(Page 3 of 3)
Dance of the Century
It’ll fill a dance floor faster than you can say howdy-do. From the rousing fiddle intro to the dancers’ vocal high jinks, the cotton-eyed Joe is a moving experience for any true Texan. Understanding the dance’s appeal is a three-step process. First, there’s the lively music, an Irish air that was already popular during the Civil War. Then there’s the relatively easy choreography, honed by decades of folk-dancing fanatics. Finally, there’s the naughty thrill of the bandleader’s repeated mid-song call: “What you say?”—to which the dancers respond, at the top of their lungs, “Bullshit!” To Texans, though, the cotton-eyed Joe is more than just fast music, fancy footwork, and dirty words. Given its enduring appeal, its indomitable spirit, and its feisty individualism, it is nothing less than a metaphor for the state of Texas itself, that great, grand, glorious bastion of—what you say? Runner-up: the Texas two-step, a staple for twirling twinkle-toes in Western nightclubs worldwide. Anne Dingus
Artistic Subject of the Century
Thanks to the bluebonnet landscape, the state flower adorns the entire state all year. Texans are equally fond of its official-symbol status and its intense and mesmerizing hue. Wealthier residents might acquire an original canvas by, say, Porfirio Salinas, Jr., a bluebonnet specialist (LBJ was a fan); regular folks settle for color snapshots of the kiddos posing by the roadside in endless fields of blue. Reproductions of such scenes also decorate plates, postcards, tea towels, T-shirts, gift wrap, rugs, you name it. In the century to come, will the bluebonnet landscape still capture Texas hearts? Azure as shootin’. Runner-up: the Virgin of Guadalupe, who, with her full-body halo, graces church windows, barrio murals, and even human skin. Anne Dingus
Jazz Artist of the Century
Ornette Coleman changed the way people played and listened to jazz. Born in Fort Worth in 1930, the saxophonist had early roots in bebop and toured in rhythm-and-blues bands before settling in Los Angeles in the fifties. There he began developing the concept of free jazz with a handful of sympathetic musicians. Free jazz lacked conventional chord changes and, to some listeners, such basic qualities as melody and harmony; instead, soloists worked off the mood of each piece, improvising freely. It represented the first real advancement in the genre since Charlie Parker’s bop breakthroughs. Coleman arrived professionally in 1959 when he took his quartet to New York’s Five Spot, where his radical music won a few followers but enraged most jazz critics, musicians, and fans. In the late seventies he redefined his theory of music as “harmolodics,” meaning that melody, harmony, and rhythm all carried equal importance. But Coleman has blazed a largely lonely trail. Today the New York resident struggles to get his music recorded and, because American promoters balk at his high fees, he plays mostly in Europe. Yet his music seldom fails to surprise and delight. Runner-up: Herschel Evans of Denton, who blew sax in the original Count Basie Orchestra in the late thirties and defined the bluesy, wide-open style that came to be known as Texas tenor. John Morthland
Conjunto Artist of the Century
Narciso Martínez was not the first Tex-Mex accordionist to enter a recording studio, but no one else’s albums have ever matched the impact of his first twenty recordings, all made in 1936. Played hard and fast, singles like “La Chicharronera” quickly earned him the nickname El Huracán del Valle—the Hurricane of the Valley—among rural, working-class Tejanos. But they also sold well in cosmopolitan Mexico City and in Basque communities on the West Coast; marketed under the name Louisiana Pete, they succeeded with Cajuns, and they pleased Polish Americans as the work of the Polski Kwartet. Martínez was born in 1911 in Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, and his family moved to Texas that same year. While still a teenager, he began playing at dances and other social events. At that time, the pairing of the accordion with the bajo sexto, a bass-like twelve-string Mexican guitar, already defined conjunto music (known south of the border as norteño). But while other Tex-Mex accordionists had traditionally supplied their own bass chords, Martínez left that to Santiago Almeida, who accompanied him on the bajo. Thus he freed himself to play high, careening runs on the treble end of his instrument. Runner-up: accordionist Santiago Jimenez of San Antonio, a contemporary who rivaled Martínez in popularity but favored a slower, softer sound and who founded a dynasty that includes two of his sons, traditionalist Santiago Junior and experimentalist Flaco. John Morthland
Guitarist of the Century
T-Bone Walker was the first American guitar hero. He was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker in Linden on May 28, 1910; his family moved to Dallas when he was two. He learned acoustic blues from the great Blind Lemon Jefferson, whom Walker would lead around the streets of Oak Cliff in the twenties. By the mid-thirties, after he had moved to Los Angeles, Walker was playing early-model electric guitars, bending the strings to produce an almost human screaming and crying. Soon Walker and his various bands had created something entirely new: the sexy, shuffling sound of electric urban blues. Walker was also a showman, playing the guitar behind his head or doing the splits while he riffed. More was going on here than just guitar playing. Chuck Berry’s trademark riffs? B. B. King’s lapidary lines? Walker was the source. In retrospect, as pop music has proven to be as much about style as it is about sound, it’s clear that the first electric bluesman was also the first rock star. Runner-up: colorful Stevie Ray Vaughan, the hard-living, fast-playing guitar-slinger who grew up not far from Walker’s Oak Cliff home and who died in a 1990 helicopter crash. Michael Hall
Record Label of the Century
Until the founding of Motown Records, Don Robey’s Duke-Peacock combine was arguably the nation’s largest black-owned record company. Born in Houston in 1903, Robey owned the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club, one of the classier rooms on the black touring circuit. In 1949 he launched Peacock Records from his record store on Lyon Avenue to spotlight his favorite nightclub performer, bluesman Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (who later left Peacock after a bitter falling-out over Robey’s strong-arm tactics, which became notorious). The label survived largely on the talents of gospel groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Original Five Blind Boys of Mississippi until 1953, when Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton gave Peacock its first number one rhythm-and-blues hit with “Hound Dog” (later covered by Elvis). Robey also acquired—some say took over—Duke Records of Memphis to get Johnny Ace, a crooner with crossover potential who, on Christmas Day in 1954, fatally shot himself in a backstage accident at the Houston City Auditorium. Fortunately for Robey, the Duke purchase also included Bobby “Blue” Bland, whose “Farther Up the Road” in 1957 was the first of countless soul-blues hits produced by Joe Scott, Robey’s musical brains. Together with his partner, Evelyn Johnson—who expanded the business into booking, management, and song publishing—Robey helped usher what was once termed “race music” into the mainstream. He died in 1975. Runner-up: Pappy Daily’s D Records, also of Houston, which began in 1958, produced early sides by George Jones and Willie Nelson, and lasted long enough to release George Strait’s first records in the seventies. John Morthland
Book of the Century
As a young writer, Larry McMurtry was a habitual Texas-basher—he once called the state “a country literate America hopes to hear no more about”—and he deplored its “religious allegiance” to the myth of the cowboy. Yet his most ambitious and affecting work is the ultimate Texas cowboy novel, and it riveted literate America. Published in 1985, the 830-page Lonesome Dove follows the fortunes of a band of Texas traildrivers who, en route to Montana, do battle with desperadoes, Indians, the elements, and their own deep-seated emotions. The book single-handedly revived the western genre (and subsequently the television miniseries), and lassoed its author a Pulitzer prize. Runner-up: Texas History Movies. The cartoon paperback, distributed free by Magnolia Petroleum beginning in 1928, taught generations of schoolkids about both Texas pride and Texas prejudice. Anne Dingus
Venue of the Century
The idea of the Armadillo World Headquarters would have been inconceivable in the dreamy sixties and out of place in the go-go eighties. But the decade in between was perfect, as Austin struggled to find its musical and cultural identity. The building itself was nothing special—a former National Guard armory run by (gasp!) hippies. Adorning the walls were counterculture icons like cartoonist Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; on the west wall hung Jim Franklin’s huge painting of Texas bluesman Freddie King playing the guitar with an armadillo bursting from his heart. Perhaps the club’s defining moment came in the summer of 1972, when country star Willie Nelson, who had just moved back from Nashville, played a wild homecoming concert. Nelson was a troublemaker: He wore a beard, wrote concept albums, and smoked pot. Under the heady lights of the ’Dillo, though, he looked like some kind of shabby prophet. All of a sudden Austin had found its symbol and the progressive-country movement its star, and the crowd—an odd mix of freaks and rednecks—realized they had more in common than they ever knew. Runner-up: Gilley’s in Pasadena, the “world’s largest honky-tonk”—for a while—and the setting of Urban Cowboy (1980). Michael Hall
Song of the Century
Where there’s a Wills, there’s a way with words and music. Western swing king Bob Wills penned many a pretty song, but none tops “San Antonio Rose.” Its fiddle-infused melody, written in 1938, has made it a staple in the repertoire of every self-respecting Texas dance band, and the romantic imagery (“Lips so sweet and tender, like petals falling apart”) elevates it to the love song hall of fame. Finally, the evocation of a moonlit Alamo taps directly into Texas’ collective memory, the shared mythology that still underpins our culture today. Runner-up: “Streets of Laredo,” an old ballad about an English soldier that morphed into the greatest cowboy song ever written (lament division). Anne Dingus
Writer of the Century
He had eyebrows like wind-tossed drifts of Panhandle snow…and an unabashed hatred for that kind of gushy prose. The son of ranchers, cantankerous J. Frank Dobie harassed fellow Texans into dumping highfalutin romantic themes and tackling something more modern and muscular: their own state. (His own eighteen books examined such subjects as Longhorns, conquistadores, and cowboy life.) After persuading his reluctant colleagues at the University of Texas that regional books were worthy of study, he developed his famous course on Life and Literature of the Southwest; he also helped establish the Texas Institute of Letters (which obligingly presented him with its first best-book award). Today Dobie is often dismissed as a folklorist, but he dominated the state’s literary scene for three decades; without him the phrase “Texas letters” might still mean the postal kind. Runner-up: Katherine Anne Porter, whose ragtag Texas childhood inspired “Noon Wine” and other impeccable works. Anne Dingus
My Library
