The 100 Best Texas Songs

by Jeff McCord and John Morthland

April 2004

(Page 5 of 5)

Latin Breed: "El Tejano Enamorado" With their sophisticated, sax-heavy arrangements and jubilant vocal style, this ten-piece San Antonio band’s polka-ranchera fusions helped usher in the modern tejano era in the early seventies. Along with Little Joe’s "Las Nubes," this is one of that era’s undisputed highlights.

Mance Lipscomb: "Tom Moore’s Farm" So notorious was employer Tom Moore that Navasota songster-sharecropper Lipscomb first issued his 1960 recording anonymously. The song illustrated his hardships and his encyclopedic musical mind.

Scotty McKay Quintet: "Train Kept A Rollin’" Fort Worth’s McKay morphed this Johnny Burnette hit from rockabilly to incendiary rock in 1967, obliterating a similar attempt by the Yardbirds two years earlier. Oddly, McKay always claimed that the Yardbirds’ Jimmy Page played the blistering guitar solo on his version.

Lydia Mendoza: "Mal Hombre" For her 1934 solo recording debut ("Cold-Hearted Man"), the mother of Tex-Mex took the words she’d memorized off a gum wrapper in Monterrey eight years earlier. At age eighteen, she put them to music and sang them like a woman scorned. The Houston native thus earned the title the Lark of the Border.

Amos Milburn: "Chicken Shack Boogie" Houston powerhouse pianist Milburn made irresistible good-time music, celebrating drinking, carousing, and carrying on. His first hit, 1948’s "Chicken Shack Boogie," typifies his effortless-sounding R&B style.

Roger Miller: "King of the Road" Though Miller had written hits for others, the Fort Worth singer was known for novelties like "Dang Me" until this finger-popping 1965 smash about a "man of means by no means" came along.

Ella Mae Morse: "Cow Cow Boogie" Fronting the Freddie Slack Orchestra, this saucy seventeen-year-old stylist from Mansfield and Paris had a sense of rhythm that verged on shocking for someone working in the white mainstream in 1942. But she may be the only white, mainstream boogie-woogie performer of that time who doesn’t, in retrospect, sound campy.

Moon Mullican: "Well Oh Well" Oddly, the hillbilly piano pounder from the Piney Woods, one of the least-recognized fathers of rock and roll, scored most of his hits on saccharine ballads. But this wild 1950 ride is perhaps the most dynamic and exciting of the up-tempo barrelhouse boogie and blues he’s best remembered for today.

Bill Neely: "Never Left the Lone Star State" Written in the forties, recorded in 1985, and unreleased until 2002, "Never Left" is the ultimate Texas travelogue (a.k.a. "Texas Map Song") from the ultimate Jimmie Rodgers throwback, a Depression-era native of North Texas’s blackland farms who moved to Austin mid-century to become the homespun father of the town’s folk and singer-songwriter scenes.

Willie Nelson: "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground" In lesser hands, his 1979 song might seem irredeemably hokey, but Nelson pulls off this slow-dance heartbreaker with his usual aplomb. Nashville would drown this in strings; Willie lets his guitar do the talking.

Nightcaps: "Wine Wine Wine" Texas’s white-boy blues scene begins here, in 1959, with a Dallas quintet that had a convincingly loose, loping feel on this jivey blues-and-rock standard. They inspired everyone from their homeboys Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan to ZZ Top, over in Houston.

Joe Patek Orchestra: "The Shiner Song" John Patek started the orchestra in the twenties, but it was his son Joe, who played clarinet and sax and eventually took over as bandleader, who overhauled the traditional "Farewell to Prague" in 1949 and named the results after their hometown. It’s still Texas Czech polka’s most enduring anthem.

Buck Owens: "Act Naturally" Owens suffered a lot of false starts before this self-effacing 1963 chart-topper launched his career. "Act Naturally" delivered the Sherman-born singer’s country-pop Bakersfield sound to the rest of the country and, eventually, to the Fab Four.

Jeannie C. Riley: "Harper Valley PTA" The Anson country singer’s sexy but righteous unmasking of small-town double standards ("Then you have the nerve to tell me you think that as a mother I’m not fit/Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites") was one of the biggest phenomena of the sixties.

Rondels: "If You Really Want Me To I’ll Go" Despite his apprenticeship in the only white band working Fort Worth’s hard-knocks Jaxbeer Highway R&B scene, bandleader Delbert McClinton enjoyed his first brush with fame with this out-of-character little pop-country-folk ballad from 1965. It was later revived by both Doug Sahm and Waylon Jennings; how much more Texan can it get?

Clifford Scott: "Honky Tonk" Though released under bandleader Bill Doggett’s name, this is San Antonio composer-tenor saxman Scott’s record all the way. It’s also the smokiest, scorchingest bar-band R&B instrumental ever.

Ray Sharpe: "Linda Lu" Usually pegged as black rockabilly, the Fort Worth singer-guitarist’s 1959 hit might be the sexiest thing to come out of a Texas roadhouse.

Billy Joe Shaver: "Old Five and Dimers Like Me" Everyone from Elvis Presley to Waylon Jennings knew about the talent of Corsicana songwriter Shaver. His 1973 debut, which included this endearing biographical track, told the rest of the world.

Sir Douglas Quintet: "At the Crossroads" Doug Sahm pulled all his influences into his music, and he pours them out on this memorable 1969 ballad, known for the lines "But you just can’t live in Texas/If you don’t have lots of soul."

Sly and the Family Stone: "Family Affair" No one mixed it up like Dallas-born Sylvester Stewart (Sly) and his interracial band. Soul and rock lived with strident politics and hippie sentiments, all of which made you dance to the music. "Family Affair" was their last great single, from 1971.

George Strait: "Amarillo by Morning" The spiffiest of modern Texas swing/honky-tonk singers is known for his love songs. But this 1982 rodeo ballad puts you right there in the pickup truck, next to the broken-down cowboy pushing on to the next county fair competition. Compared with that, love songs are easy.

Jack Teagarden: "Basin Street Blues" A double threat as both a superb vocalist and trombonist, Vernon’s Teagarden somehow missed the limelight. His 1929 "Basin Street Blues" remains definitive, which, for such an oft-recorded tune, says a lot.

Hank Thompson: "Wild Side of Life" Honky-tonk country meets western swing and fills up the dance floor on this 1952 megahit. The Waco star took its melody from the Carter Family’s "I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes" and its lyrics from any Saturday night in a Texas bar.

Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton: "Hound Dog" Houston-based R&B belter Thornton growled the words to "Hound Dog" over swamp-funk backing. It was a huge hit for her in 1953 but it was eclipsed three years later by a version from a Mississippi kid named Elvis.

Ernest Tubb: "Walkin’ the Floor Over You" You’ll not find a simpler sound than that unveiled on the Texas Troubadour’s first massive hit, from 1941. Nor a more pleasing one, nor one easier to identify with. E.T. was the icon next door.

Stevie Ray Vaughan: "Texas Flood" With one dirty, dramatic slow blues track that gave him all the space he needed to rip it up, the Austin guitar hero of the eighties anoints himself. He’s respectful of the black original but eager to show what he can do too; unlike so many of his peers who got themselves lost in the blues, he never forgot he was a white interpreter.

Jerry Jeff Walker and Gary P. Nunn: "London Homesick Blues" Walker helped make his band mate Nunn’s 1973 tune (with Nunn on vocals) part of the vernacular before Austin City Limits dubbed it its theme song. Recorded, home with the armadillo, in Luckenbach.

T-Bone Walker: "West Side Baby" Walker’s precise, cleanly articulated licks and exquisite tone are timeless, and this slow burner from 1947 is all late-night atmosphere, leavened with a dash of humor.

Sippie Wallace: "Woman Be Wise" Houston’s Wallace started out early enough to have Louis Armstrong as a sideman, but this spunky 1966 recording, made after she was lured from retirement, endeared her to the emerging folk scene and made her a hero to a new generation.

Lucinda Williams: "Side of the Road" A Hope Diamond in the jewel box of then-Austinite Williams’s breakthrough album (1988’s Lucinda Williams), "Side of the Road" yearns for self, identity—"I want to know the touch of my own skin"—and momentary peace and solitude.

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys: "Faded Love" Originally a fiddle instrumental, "Faded Love" hit it big when Wills added sadly wistful lyrics for this 1950 recording, ending a year-long drought and establishing yet another country signpost.

ZZ Top: "La Grange" Before Burt Reynolds ever heard of it, the Chicken Ranch was immortalized in 1973 by Houston’s ZZ Top, who took (yes, took) a John Lee Hooker riff and set it to their sleaze-boogie motif. Funny, rocking, and undeniable.

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