I didn’t really get academia. I liked teaching, but I wasn’t a good scholar. I like to connect a lot of different things and drive a strategy, and that’s not what most scholarship is about. Most scholarship is about having absolute depth in one or two areas and pushing
In recent years Elliott Smith has owned up to his fear of playing the kind of music he wanted. A bit of a mope, Smith avoids discussing his Dallas boyhood and has veiled much of his earlier work in an obtuse cloud of hipness, resulting in pop Chinese food. Yet
It’s the beginning of a new decade, so like clockwork, it must be time for a new Joe Ely live album. Live Shots (1980) chronicled his tour with the Clash; Live At Liberty Lunch (1990) was a career snapshot that captured the power of his performances. Live At Antone’s, a
Visualize Sheryl Crow in overalls, or maybe Ani Difranco with a down-home Texas perspective: that’s Terri Hendrix, the singer-songwriter-entrepreneur-czarina, in a nutshell. Born and raised in San Antonio and now living in San Marcos, Hendrix is a walking advertisement for sunny confidence and boundless enthusiasm, qualities that she’s been polishing
If not for this CD, which was recorded last year, most Texans would never have been aware of Beaumont’s Ervin Charles, who died on April 1 at age 68 with little more than two credits on 1999’s Lone Star Shootout CD to show for a storied, fifty-year career. The ferocious
If you haven’t heard of Centro-matic, it’s certainly not for lack of effort on the group’s part. All the Falsest Hearts Can Try is the Denton band’s third CD in little more than a year; it dates back to a 1998 recording session that produced more than sixty songs, completing
As a novelist, Austin’s R. J. Pineiro is a great computer engineer—but that’s not necessarily bad since his thriller Shutdown (Forge) relies on his knowledge of chip manufacturing. You wonder, though, if Texas Instruments expected its chip to be blamed for a fictional train crash that tosses 164
“It doesn’t get any better than this” is the motto that graces the entrance to Stewart Beach Amusement Park in Lubbock native Sean Stewart’s phantasmagorical Galveston (Ace Fantasy). But during Mardi Gras 2004, those words acquire droll irony after a tidal wave of magic inundates the Island and wreaks insidious
Some authors dream up bizarre murders and other aberrations to thicken their plots. World of Pies proves that even the simplest of stories can leave readers fully satisfied. The first novel by Austinite Karen Stolz, World of Pies is about coming of age in a small Texas town—specifically
What do you do when you win a $295,000 MacArthur “genius” grant? If you’re biologist David Hillis, you keep teaching at the University of Texas as if nothing happened, and you keep chasing frogs.
So says Don Baylor, the Austin native now managing baseball’s lowly Chicago Cubs. His players hear him loud and clear, but history has a way of repeating itself.
Three friends, seven years, untold pounds of barbecue pork chops and prime rib, and a single tradition that elevates the experience above mere food.
Good neighbors, good fencers.
UT regents want their next chancellor to be an academic? Whatever. At Texas Tech, a politician is the one in charge, and he's more than making the grade.
The Time It Never Rained.
As surgeon general—the nation’s top doctor— C. Everett Koop was much beloved and undeniably respected. So why is the Web site that bears his name in such disarray?
The New York Times versus Texas: It’s only the beginning.
Six months after the merger of Exxon and Mobil, a tally of the winners and losers.
Those jeans! That hat! George Strait returns to Dallas and Houston. Plus: Wichita Falls heats up the gridiron; San Antonio discovers Lebanese kibbe; Round Top sings James Dick's praises; and the Houston Comets tip off.
Why dot-com investors shouldn't be so nervous.
Together for the first time: Two Tommys (Hancock and Shannon), two Montes (Montomery and Warden), two Hubbards (Blues Boys and Ray Wylie) and two Clarks (Carrie and W.C.), plus a Butthole Surfer, three Gourds, six Bells of Joy, a Tailgator, and 87 others who give their all, creatively speaking, to
Many types of nineteenth-century American music entered into the making of jazz, and a number of these originated in West Africa and from that region were brought by slaves to the New World. Among the African, antebellum traditions of southern blacks was the music of their everyday lives: work songs,
© 1992. Used by permission of Harper Collins Publishing, Inc.Tom B. Blocker liked to think that Texans who had the misfortune to find themselves in New York City needed to stick together. This was never more true than in 1935, the sixth year of the Depression, when Texas dress and
106 musicians who give their all to the Live Music Capital of the World.
We set up a store with all the CD's deemed "essential listening" in this issue.
Sixty-five years after his first recording sessions with the Texas Playboys, 25 years after his death, Bob Wills is still the king of western swing.
If a picture is worth only a thousand words, then a single cover image couldn’t begin to tell the story of Texas music. That’s why, for this month’s special issue celebrating all things musical in the state’s past, present, and future, we decided to publish four different covers for the
It has a nice beat, you can dance to it, and it unites us as nothing else does. The sounds of our state — past, present, and future.
Financial success may have eluded Dewey Redman, whose career as a jazz journeyman has taken him from his hometown of Fort Worth to San Francisco and on to New York, but happiness hasn't.
In July 1966 El Paso rocker Bobby Fuller was found dead in Hollywood. Whodunit? We still don't know.
Larry Gatlin's Odessa high note.
Jessica Simpson wants to love you forever.
As the girlfriend of a musician, I get to carry guitars at three in the morning and hear the particulars of our relationship come blaring out of the radio. Would I change it if I could? Not on your life.
Emilio Navaira and Gloria Trevi get their days in court.
Rules for movies about music.
The verdicts are in on the new Cullen Davis.
Five years after Selena's death, tejano music is struggling to be heard.
The places, people and stories behind Texas music.
Who was Stevie Ray Vaughan's musical role model?
Meet the senior class of what might be called Texas Music U. four up-and-coming acts that should graduate to the big time.
What they lack in cash they make up for in cachet: on the road with the Trail of Dead, Austin's coolest punk rockers of the moment, as they head east in search of fans, fame, and a free place to crash.
How did Lloyd Maines get to be a revered guitarist and record producer? How did his daughter Natalie find fame as a Dixie Chick? Chalk it up to musicianship—and kinship.
Buddy Holly. Waylon Jennings. Carolyn Hester. The Hancocks. The Flatlanders. An oral history of the state's most storied music scene.
What is Texas music?
The return of King George Jones, that is. Plus: Squeezing into the Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio; commemorating Gruene's dance hall days; raising heavenly voices in Columbus; and swinging into action in La Grange.
CDs by Ernest Tubb, Blind Willie Johnson, and Guy Clark; books about Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly, and John A. Lomax.
Readers point out our mis-givings.
I was born in San Marcos at my grandmother’s house in 1933, but I grew up in San Antonio. I did most of the kid stuff you do when you grow up in Texas, like play sandlot baseball. I read all the comics — Li’l Abner, Captain Marvel, and all
PART ONE: TOWARD THE LITTLE PIGEONI am busy and will only say how da do, to you! You will get your land as it was promised, and you and all our Red brothers may rest satisfied that I will always hold you by the hand.—letter from Sam Houston to
The Borderland, Bud Shrake’s epic novel about the early days of the Republic of Texas, is the crowning achievement of a life that is itself the stuff of legend.
