Gotta Lubbock
Long Before Austin Was The Live Music Capital Of The World, A Cotton-Pickin' High Plains City Put Texas On The Map. From Buddy Holly To Jimmie Dale Gilmore, An Oral History Of The State's Most Storied Scene.
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Pianos in Every House
Waylon Jennings Music was our entertainment, especially when I was growing up, in the forties. Every other house had a piano or a fiddle or a guitar, and somebody knew how to play it. Music was the only thing we had — it was a big part of growing up.
Sonny Curtis We used to go to people’s houses when I was a kid, you know, to visit, and they’d have a party, and man, whatever you had — if it was an accordion or a guitar or whatever — you’d bring it along. Some people would break off and play dominoes, and others would go into the living room and play their fiddles and guitars and their accordions and whatever.
McClinton When I was a little guy, my parents would go to the Cotton Club and dance to Bob Wills and all the kids would play in the parking lot. We used to lean in the windows or peak in the door. And we could always hear the music.
Tommy X Hancock Every little town around Lubbock had a jamboree, and all the amateur bands played. Fifty miles of anybody every Saturday night.
Charlene Hancock Anybody was invited to play or sing or do their thing. And you didn’t have to be good.
Curtis People would get together for these musicals on Saturday night or whenever, and well, if you had a trumpet, you’d bring a trumpet. A whole bunch of different styles came together. I think Bob Wills’ style was started that way. Man, he had a clarinet in the band at one time and a trumpet and a fiddle and, you know, just whatever.
Kenny Maines I have always had a theory that the reason Lubbock established a unique sound is that we had people like Bob Wills and Buddy Holly. There were a lot of similarities in what they did — they were both pretty radical in what they were doing at the time. And growing up in that area, we would try to imitate those types of sounds. We failed at doing that, but in the attempt, maybe we created something else altogether, because we were bad imitators. That helped create our own sound.
We Drove Our Mom and Dad Crazy
Charlene Hancock The generations of musicians who have come up have grandparents and great-grandparents who played music.
Lanny Fiel [Fiddler] Frankie McWhorter used to sing at home with his mom. People around here grew up singing songs — it was just part of everyday life. They weren’t imitating this and imitating that. People were playing music they’d heard directly from somebody, not influenced and bombarded by all these different things.
Kenny Maines It was part of family activities: On Saturday or Sunday afternoons people would gather round for entertainment. You had to find something, and so it seemed like music was the easiest and most convenient. At one time there was actually an exhibit at the museum in Lubbock called “Nothin’ Else to Do.”
Fiel The “nothin’ else to do” thing is coming from the perspective of a person born in this culture at this time. In the early days nobody knew “nothin’ else to do.” Literally, you were working your butt off to stay alive. You didn’t know what a radio was or a TV or free time.
Curtis Our family was certainly into music big-time. I think we drove our mom and dad crazy, my two brothers and me. My brothers played fiddle and guitar. We were real big bluegrass fans. As a matter of fact, our uncles, the Mayfield Brothers, were a bluegrass band, and Edd Mayfield, who was a big influence on me as a guitar player, played guitar and sang with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys.
Ely When I got the first version of my band together, with Lloyd [Maines] and Jesse [Taylor], Steve Keeton and Gregg Wright and Rick Hulett, we were all talking, setting up at the Cotton Club. Everybody knew that everybody else’s daddy, except for mine, had played in bands, but they started talking, and by the end of the conversation, they realized that at one time, their daddies all played in the same band together. Which was pretty amazing.
Lloyd Maines When we were kids, six or seven or eight years old, we would sit on my grandmother’s floor and watch my dad and uncles have these kind of jam sessions, singing sessions. This was before any of us had thought about doing anything, but I’m sure it had kind of an osmosis effect on us. Then [my daughter] Natalie [the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks] did the same thing. Whenever the Maines Brothers were playing locally in the early eighties, she came to those gigs. She never got up and sang, although I knew she was a good singer. She liked to just sit back and enjoy it and soak it all in.
The Radio Was Everything to Me
Jo Carol Pierce There were great radio stations that came in the night. I was fascinated with that world, and I couldn’t wait for night.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore I have this sense of late-night radio in the car out there — that’s just one of my visions of heaven.
Butch Hancock There’s nothing like coming up from Post, up onto the Caprock at night, and all of a sudden you can get the radio stations.
Ely We used to pick up XERF, the old station out of Mexico that was Wolfman Jack’s station — the only place that played blues and old country stuff, gospel.
Strehli I liked WLAC out of Nashville, and there was a Shreveport station, KWKH, that had a great blues show. The radio was everything to me. I heard all kinds of music on the radio, but when I heard the blues, it really bent my ear. I didn’t know what to call it or anything, and I didn’t have any idea where it came from. So in the years after that, I was just sort of looking around and trying to find it.
Jennings “The Louisiana Hayride” was the thing for country music. And, of course, [the broadcasts of] the Opry in Nashville. Then there was KDAV in Lubbock, which I believe was the very first full-time country station in the entire nation.
Practice or Plough
Jennings Lubbock was almost a way out of the cotton fields. We were all farm boys, and we knew there was a better way somewhere.
Virgil Johnson This is an agricultural area, so when you got off one evening and you weren’t too tired, before you took the tub off the side of the house and took a bath, you would probably do a little singing. You would strum on a guitar. That was the thing — to learn and play a guitar, to learn and play a piano. And so you had a little pastime. It’s not now as it was then. Now a kid gets in his BMW and sees how fast it’ll go to the next streetlight. But during that particular time, you couldn’t go out and get on the wagon and ride around in a square. So more than likely, what you would do is you would harmonize. You would vocalize. You would get with your friends, you would come up with a tune, or you would try and emulate someone that you had heard on the radio.
Fiel Joe Stephenson’s dad wanted him to play fiddle so bad that he offered him a deal. He said, “You can practice or plough.” And Joe became the 1968 Texas fiddle champion. Same thing with Bob Wills. He’d rather be playing and making money in that than working in those cotton fields, but that’s what he did for the longest time.
Jennings Well, anybody who spends his life in a cotton patch is going to be weird or unique. I learned a song one time while I was working out there. I was about fifteen. I had a piece of paper in my pocket, and “The Last Letter” was the name of the song — a country song. What I would do was look at it on one row, at one end, and pull cotton all the way until the other end, and try to not look at the piece of the paper until I had memorized the song.
Hancock While we were there, Lubbock went from being a tiny little cotton farming town — where agriculture was the main industry — to Texas Tech becoming the major industry.
Gilmore In certain ways Lubbock was a typical middle-America town. It was one of those examples of the explosion after WWII. We were the first generation off of the farm, so we had the real rural culture in us, but at the same time, we were slammed into the twentieth century.
Lust, Sin, Death
Kenny Maines Our father’s father grew up in a church music family. He and his brothers — my dad’s uncles — sang at the church. Afterward, they would gather for meals.
Johnson There were no doo-wops here. I would sing with spiritual groups. I did some singing in church. Most singers began in church.
Rob Weiner Lubbock has all of these religious traditions: Baptist, Pentecostal, Church of Christ, Methodist, Presbyterian, Mormon. On just about every corner, no matter where you go, there’s a church and a restaurant. You sing in church, you go to a restaurant, you sing later.
McLarty Lots of churches with signs and little slogans like “LSD: Lust, Sin, Death.” I thought, “Hmmm, maybe I’ll try it.”
Pierce The meanness of the town drove us all closer in, for defense. People were extremely conservative. They were blaming everything on Communists and were terrified that their youth would become Communist and were just terrified of any originality or anything. So I think that kind of goaded us into a rebellion.
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