The 100 Best Texas Songs

by Jeff McCord and John Morthland

April 2004

(Page 3 of 5)

23

Lefty Frizzell
"If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time"

Frizzell had already paid his musical and civic dues (he did a bit of hard time) when a studio owner heard him in a Texas club, leading to his signing with Columbia. "Money" was recorded in 1950 and launched a hit-making decade for the Corsicana singer. Frizzell, with his elongated crooning style ("I’ve go-awt the tii-ime"), attracted a wide audience to his honky-tonk and became a huge influence on almost every country singer to follow.

24

Ledbelly
"The Midnight Special"

Folk song collector John Lomax came across 45-year-old Huddie Ledbetter in Louisiana’s Angola prison in 1933, but it was during the songwriter’s first prison term, in Sugar Land, more than a decade earlier, that Leadbelly heard this traditional tune and completely made it his own. He even included the names of the real-life lawmen who had put him there. The Houston to San Antonio train would roll through each night at midnight, and the prisoners all imagined it to be their ticket home.

25

George Jones
"He Stopped Loving Her Today"

The greatest voice in country (and maybe all of popular music) was all but written off by 1980, as the Saratoga-born singer’s tumultuous personal life had almost consumed his stellar two-decade career. The last thing anyone expected was a comeback, but "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was pure Jones pathos. It’s all setup; we’re two minutes in before we realize the real reason the song’s subject finally got over the woman who walked out on him. He died.

26

Charlie Christian (with Benny Goodman)
"Breakfast Feud"

Few if any artists were more important to their instrument than Dallas’s Christian was to the electric guitar. He wasn’t the first, but he played with an invention no one had imagined before (and some would say since). Swing bandleaders routinely "appropriated" tunes from their sidemen. Goodman’s most blatant theft from Christian was "Flying Home," but 1940’s "Breakfast Feud" played like an orchestrated Christian riff, artfully blazing new melodic paths with effortless grace.

27

Townes Van Zandt
"Pancho and Lefty"

His best-known tune (released in 1972) tells of an ill-fated meeting. Now Lefty wears his "skin like iron," and Pancho . . . well, "the dust that Pancho bit down south/Ended up in Lefty’s mouth." Such literate tragedy could only come from a haunted heart, and Fort Worth’s Van Zandt was an outrageously talented songwriter with a body of work gripped by melancholy. In the end, he poured so much of himself into his songs that there was almost nothing left but a shell.

28

Jimmie Rodgers
"Blue Yodel #1 (T for Texas)"

Though this was released in 1927, two years before he moved to Kerrville hoping that benign weather would cure his tuberculosis, Rodgers’s million-seller (10,000 qualified as a major hit at the time) suggests that he may not have been a native Texan, but he got here as soon as he could; besides, he’d spent much time in the state during his hoboing days. His savvy, utterly natural fusion of rural string band, blues, and pop ushered in the era of modern country music, and soulful "blue yodels" became his staple.

29

Illinois Jacquet (with Lionel Hampton)
"Flying Home"

Jacquet was only nineteen when he first entered a recording studio with Lionel Hampton’s 1942 band and played the solo that would define his more than sixty years on the stage. Jacquet’s surefire cockiness kicked "Flying Home" to an entirely new level. At his solo’s peak, the Houston-raised saxophonist blows a brash single note twelve times in a row, then he does it again. Audiences fed off his frenzy. Jazz became more dangerous, raw, fun. And Jacquet’s still at it.

30

Henry Thomas
"Railroadin’ Some"

Big Sandy songster Thomas, who was also known as Ragtime Texas, was already in his fifties when he cut his remarkable late-twenties recordings. He had a singular style that included a booming voice and an expert use of quills, which accentuated his fast, rhythmic high-string strumming. He incorporated vaudeville, ragtime, and a touch of the blues, nowhere more effectively than on "Railroadin’ Some," a single-chord state tour that mimes a conductor’s station calls while the quill train whistle blows.

31

Gene Austin
"My Blue Heaven"

Though it wasn’t among his one-hundred-plus original compositions, the Gainesville crooner’s 1927 hit was so soothing that it sold about 12 million copies, making it America’s best-selling record until Bing Crosby’s "White Christmas" fifteen years later; it helped him become one of the most popular night club entertainers of the Depression era. And though he spent his entire career up north, his radio-friendly tenor and his mellow phrasing retained just enough Texas grit to make him a seldom-credited influence on Floyd Tillman and other honky-tonk trailblazers.

32

Lightnin’ Hopkins
"Mojo Hand"

A master of improvisational, stream-of-consciousness blues, Houston’s Third Ward street poet was the bridge between acoustic and electric, rural and urban. With his quirky guitar and his dry, bemused vocals, he could—and did—write and sing about nearly anything; he’s also perhaps the most recorded bluesman ever (he cut this song twice, in ’60 and ’69). Yet in his entire free-ranging repertoire, there’s something about this melodic slice of Louisiana black magic, most of its lines adapted from other songs, that remains irresistibly pure Lightnin’.

33

Flaco Jimenez
"Ay Te Dejo en San Antonio"

Here’s two Jimenezes in one. Don Santiago Jimenez, one of the San Antonio architects of pre-war conjunto, wrote and originally recorded this betrayed lover’s blue and bitter ranchera in 1937. Nearly fifty years later, in 1986, his son Flaco revived it with his own modern but tradition-based brand of brown bounce and bop. It was the title song of an album that won Jimenez a Grammy and solidified his standing as the lone conjunto accordionist known to the non-Tex-Mex audience.

34

Sunny and the Sunglows
"Talk to Me"

While San Antonio was incubating a stunningly diverse and accomplished rock and R&B underground in the late fifties and early sixties, orquesta still ruled. Then Sunny Ozuna and his group (which eventually morphed into the Sunliners) revived this 1958 Little Willie John ballad. The strings—and all of Sunny’s lead—are sugary and sentimental but also silky and sincere. A teen make-out classic, "Talk to Me" finally took the San Antonio sound way up the pop charts in 1963.

35

Ray Price
"Crazy Arms"

The Perryville native turned Nashville upside down in 1956 when he introduced the Texas dance hall sound to conventional country, replacing the standard 2-4 beat, double-stop fiddle, and vocal choruses with a 4-4 featuring drums and heavy bass, single-string fiddle, and high harmony over his own swelling lead vocals, which verged on the croon he’d later adapt. And steel player Ralph Mooney’s opening line ("Now blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel") helped get everyone’s attention fast.

36

Gatemouth Brown
"Okie Dokie Stomp"

It was T-Bone Walker’s virtuosity that drove Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown to the soaring heights he has reached on the guitar. Club owner Don Robey was so knocked out by the Orange-raised string-bender that he launched his seminal Peacock label just to record him. Like Walker, Gatemouth’s talent transcends the blues. The hard-swinging 1954 recording of "Okie Dokie Stomp" takes off like a bullet and never slows down. It perfectly captured Gatemouth’s fiery eclecticism.

37

Floyd Tillman
"Slippin’ Around"

Tillman’s characteristic jazzy electric-guitar chording and his slip-sliding, behind-the-beat vocals had already helped make him one of the fathers of honky-tonk country when this song came along in 1949 to seal the deal. A product of the San Antonio and Houston scenes, Tillman cast aside country’s usual euphemisms to write and sing about extramarital love and sex with no apologies, no moralizing, no excuses. And thus was born the modern cheating song. He was such a maverick that he still doesn’t get proper credit.

38

Selena
"Bidi Bidi Bom Bom"

What, not one of her affecting love songs, like "Como la Flor"? Well, no offense to them, but Selena cut her share of novelties too. And if you’ve ever heard this one—a sort of serious love song with an addictive novelty hook—while zoning out on the beach, you might have recognized the 1994 track for what it is: one of the ultimate Texas summer songs, transcending language barriers with its good clean goofy sense of fun.

39

Soul Stirrers
"Walk Around"

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