The 100 Best Texas Songs

by Jeff McCord and John Morthland

April 2004

(Page 2 of 5)

What do Jethro Tull and Manfred Mann have in common with Albert, Freddie, and B. B. King? They are among the hundreds who have recorded the 1947 anthem of the world’s most influential electric blues guitarist, Linden’s T-Bone Walker. With his fluid and far-reaching single-note guitar lines, Walker recalls another major talent, Charlie Christian. Christian and Walker knew each other and even shared a guitar tutor. Both had a taste for speed, but it was Walker’s relaxed, after-hours sides that best suited his smooth vocal style. As the most famous of these, "Stormy Monday Blues" settles into a resigned helplessness that’s hard to let go of. Just as it’s difficult to overstate Walker’s importance, it’s impossible to conceive of the modern blues without his unforgettable couplet: "They call it stormy Monday/But Tuesday’s just as bad."

9

Little Joe y la Familia
"Las Nubes"

Fronting various bands, Temple’s Little Joe Hernandez had been riding near the top of the Tex-Mex circuit for close to two decades when he cut Para la Gente ("For the People") in 1972 , the album that best gave voice to the emerging Brown Pride movement. Its version of this Mexican standard ("The Clouds") is a hard-swinging, big-band ranchera; the lyrics tell of a drunken, despairing youth watching clouds drift by and hoping for rain, because rain brings new life. That attitude mirrored both current Chicano disillusionment and the faith to rise above it, and the song quickly spread through the Southwest to become the anthem of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers—and probably the first true great example in the modern style eventually dubbed tejano.

10

Janis Joplin
"Me and Bobby McGee"

In a neat bit of gender switching, Joplin turned Kris Kristofferson’s wistful tale of two lives intersecting into one of powerful longing. It wasn’t her choice of pronouns but her well-lived-in voice that transformed the song. Port Arthur-born, Joplin would become the finest white blues singer of her generation. Though she at first tended to elevate everything into a screech, by 1971, when she recorded "McGee" for her album Pearl, she had a newfound maturity on display, constantly lifting lines ("Windshield wipers slappin’ time") and reigning them back in ("Holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine"). It made moments of found emotion, like the bitterness that springs from ". . . nothin’, that’s all that Bobby left me" all the more powerful and authentic. "Me and Bobby McGee" would be Joplin’s first number one single, but she would not live to see its release.

11

Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
"Wooly Bully"

Though the drummer couldn’t find the beat with a GPS, the Farfisa-fueled band churns out a boogie rhythm on this 1965 Tex-Mex rock classic, which Dallas’s Domingo Samudio, the self-proclaimed Sam the Sham, transforms into magic. "Watch it now! Watch it!" Sam warns, as if to caution the thousands of future bar bands who’d be amending their set lists to make room for the song—which, in case you were wondering, is about Samudio’s cat.

12

Gene Autry
"Deep in the Heart of Texas"

Singing cowboys were strictly a Hollywood creation—real cowboys dressed functionally and sang work songs in crude voices—but at least Tinseltown had the sense to make this native Texan, raised on a farm near Tioga, tallest in the saddle. And Alvino Rey may have been the first of many to record this sing-along, clap-along love song to the state, but Autry’s version, from the 1942 movie Heart of the Rio Grande, is the best known because, simply, it’s the best.

13

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators
"You’re Gonna Miss Me"

God, what a scream. Roky Erickson’s paint peeler, which opens this minor hit and major milestone from Austin’s Elevators, takes a place on the honor roll of instantly identifiable moments in rock and roll. It was 1966; the Grateful Dead had yet to release an album. Psychedelic music and, not coincidentally, LSD were just starting to take hold when these acid-rock pioneers made the scene. But even devoid of its trippy atmospherics, "You’re Gonna Miss Me" would work as high-dosage rock.

14

Roy Orbison
"Only the Lonely"

Orbison began his career as a rockabilly singer on Sun Records, but it wasn’t until he signed with Monument Records, in 1960, that he discovered what to do with his near-operatic range. "Only the Lonely" was the first of many memorable hits for the Vernon singer, and it perfectly encapsulated his style; blending elements of rock, doo-wop, and rockabilly to a lush vocal and string pop arrangement, which builds Bolero-like to the inevitable big finish.

15

Ernest Tubb
"Waltz Across Texas"

Dwight Yoakam didn’t invent honky-tonk music, nor did Buck Owens or even Merle Haggard. Blame a Jimmie Rodgers devotee from Crisp whom his friends called E.T. Tubb didn’t have much of a voice, but his ebullient charm made up for it. A quarter century and fifty-odd hits into his career, he penned this 1965 tune that professes an unabashed love as big as his home state. To this day, Texas bands don’t go to the dance hall without it.

16

Geto Boys
"Mind Playin Tricks on Me"

Nothing else in Texas rap compares to this 1991 B-movie vision of urban paranoia from Houston’s Fifth Ward. The so-called "hard" beats are actually better described as "deliberate," and rapper Scarface’s keyboardlike guitar writhes through his stream-of-consciousness imagery, which is unforgivingly brutal. He claims these hallucinatory visions were the feelings he had as a teenager, when he spent two years in a mental hospital. Offensive? Doubtless to some, but also, like a good low-budget action flick, "Mind Playin Tricks on Me" is so over the top that it quickly turns surreal.

17

Jimmie Dale Gilmore
"Dallas"

Gilmore and his band of Lubbock unknowns, the Flatlanders (Joe Ely and Butch Hancock), played spare acoustic backing, including a musical saw, that emphasized his Texas warble. Not quite country or rock, it conjured the Plains so completely that you could taste the dust. His 1972 yin-yang paean to Dallas is direct and honest. The city might be beautiful at a distance, but she’s also a "woman who will walk on you when you’re down."

18

Bobby "Blue" Bland
"Farther Up the Road"

In some ways, the stomping up-tempo shuffle that first made him a star is atypical Bland; after all, slower songs gave the quintessential sexy-blues smoothie more room to "work" a lyric. Though Bland was Memphis-bred, he was based in Houston for most of his tenure with Duke Records. His personal vocal style is finally beginning to emerge on this 1957 track, while his uptown band is inventing the soul-blues sound. Even today, it’s the one tune that any new Texas blues band has to know.

 

19

Ornette Coleman
"Lonely Woman"

As Fort Worth’s Ornette Coleman is one of music’s most important and innovative composer-performers, singling out any one piece of his might seem impossible. Yet this haunting 1959 beauty clearly resonates the loudest. Its appeal lies not only in the angular melodic lines but also in the marvel of its performance. Bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, and Coleman find a weightless rhythm and float through the mournful tune without ever bumping into one another.

20

Joe Tex
"Show Me"

Navasota’s gift to soul music—and the genre’s most unsung hero—had uncommon common sense. A pre-rap rapper whose soothing voice had just enough rough edges, he got his singular countrified sound by recording in Nashville with salt-and-pepper bands. His slyly humorous, down-home philosophizing ("Show me a man that’s got a good woman/I’ll show you a man that goes to work hummin’") was tinged with the knowledge that to err is human, and celebrations like this snappy, rhythmically shifting 1967 affirmation of the do-right couple gave soul a whole new dimension. Joe Tex knew.

21

Freddy Fender
"Wasted Days and Wasted Nights"

Fender was one of the first in the Valley to pick up on rock and roll, and this 1960 plaint (he re-recorded it as a country song in the seventies) is easily the greatest Gulf Coast triplet to come out of Texas. The band plays with a swampy, swaying undertow while Fender’s sweet, choked-up tenor milks the lyric for every last drop of desolation. No wonder that though nearly everything else in this style now seems a period piece, "Wasted Days" still sounds both urgent and eternal.

 

22

Blind Lemon Jefferson
"See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"

Couchman’s Blind Lemon Jefferson was an originator of country blues and the first successful male blues performer. And thanks to his intricate and complex guitar work, which was a huge influence on the emerging music that came to be known as jazz, he is owed a lot of musical debts. The father of Texas blues recorded almost one hundred songs throughout the twenties, but it’s this simple and earnest plea that defines his remarkable and tragically short life.

 

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