Armadillo Heroes and Texacali Blues

This past weekend we stopped in at Threadgills North and as it happened, Eddie Wilson was there. We got to talking about blogs - he has a nice one on the Threadgills site:

Supperman Stories

You'll notice the last post was a memorial to his friend Bill Narum from last November - Eddie hasn't gotten back into a blogging frame of mind since then. The other person he talked about in that post is Hank Alrich. Eddie said to watch the Austin American Statesman the next day for a story about the real hero fo the Armadillo World Headquarters. As it turned out, we had already read the article on Austin 360:

Home with the Armadillo

What a great story about the behind the scenes manager that turned the chaotic phenomenon that was the Armadillo World Headquarters into a financially sustainable concern until the landlord saw more lucrative opportunities in Austin's development boom. Eddie Wilson during this time was already working on his plan to resurrect the Historic Threadgills gas station/beer joint as a destination for fine southern cooking and, frequently, excellent live music.

Eddie said that he's going into seclusion the next three months so he can finish his Armadillo World Headquarters "MemNoir." Losing friends from those time may provide additional incentive. As an historical era passes the forty year mark, the first hand remembrances aren't everywhere you look around any more. We look forward to Eddie Wilson's MemNoir as a contribution to those who were there and those who wish they could have been.

There is this amazing book called Lone Star Swing by Scottish writer Duncan McLean in the 1990s that documents the Scotsman's road trip through Texas in search of the original heroes of western swing. It is a very entertaining read, on account of McLean's skill at juxtaposing his passion for the music with his ironic observations about the culture he encountered versus what might have produced the astounding innovative jazz/country/blues/cajun/tejano/and-more fusion some six decades earlier. Bob Wills had been dead for twenty years. He met some better known and some lesser known heroes from the beginning of the western swing era. His encounters with them are purely fascinating. Several were crazy octogenarians that probably hadn't changed much in sixty years, except physically. But now, fifteen years later, many of them have passed on. We feel fortunate to have met them courtesy of McLean and his Lone Star Swing. Would we never have known these heroes of Texas Music without someone from another continent to appreciate what we had ignored or forgotten? Texas Songbook does not want that to happen, so here we are.

Now back to Threadgills, we had the opportunity to enjoy a Bluegrass Brunch this past weekend, after having on several occasions enjoyed the Gospel Brunch at Threadgills South. Now it could be the exceptional quality of the musicians on this Sunday, but we discovered that bluegrass provides a very pleasurable setting for a Sunday brunch. The players were Billy Bright and Wayne "Chojo" Jacques and they have a very nice CD Texacali Blues, which we recommend you pick up if you can track it down. They have a slightly jazz tinged style, which many do these days, thanks to influences introduced by Bela Fleck and David Grisman. There isn't a very strong tradition of bluegrass in Texas music, if you discount Robert Earl Keene's "Bluegrass Widow," which you can go ahead and do. But, since we mentioned western swing, we might point out that in the thirties, that label hadn't been invented - Bob Wills and Milton Brown called the music they invented "hot string band" music. The jazzy "newgrass" music these days could be called "hot string band" and would be sort of a cousin of the early western swing. In any case, thanks to Eddie, Billy, and Wayne and the rest of the Threadgill folk for a great weekend.

Well, we've taken about three weeks off from the Texas Songbook blog as you may have noticed. That may not have inconvenienced you, at least we hope, but it has put us behind schedule considerably, so we thought we'd give you a preview of what you've missed the last three weeks:

January 12 - Joy in Hillbilly Heaven - Cowboy Music Lives - being Tex Ritter's birthday, yes, just a week after the anniversary of his death, but it is very fitting to give him some more attention and talk a bit about cowboy music and Michael Martin Murphy, who inherited his mantle and has ensured that cowboy music will remain vital for the next few decades.

January 12 - Last of the Breed - also being Ray Price's birthday, and since we have already talked about two of his protegees, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson, we should pay attention to this 84 year old honky tonk patriarch.

January 19 - Texas Pearl - Janis Joplin's birthday, so we will pay a little tribute and speculate on what might have been with her and two others from the top ten list of "tragically taken from us in their prime" musicians, Milton Brown and Buddy Holly.

January 22 - Music from the Heart - Rod Kennedy's birthday, and we'll have to pick and choose what to talk about in this post and what to leave out for another time. If we can catch up to here by next week, we may just give a review of his big eightieth birthday celebration at the Paramount in Austin February 2.

Coming Hayride Will Be the Ride of a Lifetime

We are on the cusp of a media innovation that will propel the next creative explosion in Texas music. It may be here now, just under the radar of the general public. Technologies that have become popular in the past decade - music downloads, social networking, streaming video, mobile devices - are waiting to be harnessed in an imaginative way to create a new kind of hayride to delight Texas music listeners.

Hayride? Let's explain...

In the early 1920s commercial radio stations started popping up in the larger cities around the country. Some brave early adoptors bought receivers to find out what was going on out there on the airwaves - their great grandchildren became those first people on your block to by a Blue Ray player or iPhone. It took a while though for the radio station operators to figure out what to broadcast and how to make it work as a business. Amon Carter started WBAP ("We Bring a Program") in Fort Worth in 1922and on January 4, 1923, rolled out a "Hayride" format consisting of "a fiddler, a square dance caller, and ... a familiar mélange of wisecracks, music both lugubrious and jolly, and country costumes" as described by the Handbook of Texas Online. The original star of the show was the fiddler Captain M J Bonner (Captain as in Confederate army Captain, so he was no spring chicken). The format was a hit, and spread to Chicago as the "National Barn Dance," and then to Nashville, where it became the "Grand Ole Opry," which of course is still thriving today. These venues helped shape what became known as country music later on. At the time, record companies called it "hillbilly" or "old time" music.




Here is a Biscuit sketch of M J Bonner from our Texas Songbook artist Randy Biscuit. We will use Biscuit sketches here in the blog from time to time to give the blog some class, but don't be alarmed on account of the name - we'll leave out the really randy Biscuit sketches.

One of Bonner's associates, Eck Robertson, also played fiddle on WBAP in the 20s. He's the unnamed fiddler from Amarillo mentioned in the last post for having made the first ever country record, "Sally Gooden" in 1922. He is given credit for being the first musician to plug his own record on the radio too. By the early 30s, radio had gotten how to work the business part - get money from sponsors for marketing stuff to the people who tune in. A string band named the Aladdin Laddies (for their sponsor who sold lights) became a hit on Fort Worth radio, then they changed sponsor and name to Light Crust Doughboys (for the flour they were selling) and birthed Milton Brown's Brownies and Bob Wills' Texas Playboys and the whole Western Swing movement, with radio programming playing the midwife.

Fast forward to the mid 70s. Willie Nelson had bridged the gulf between hippies and redneck by creating a musical genre known as "progressive country" or "cosmic cowboy" or several even sillier names, and had achieved a wildly enthusiastic regional following. Then a TV program called "Austin City Limits" was launched using Gary P Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" as its theme song and presenting a nicely balanced mix of Texas and national artists, and vastly extended the reach and influence of this brand of Texas music, artistically and geographically. Thirty five years later, ACL is going strong, the longest running music program in TV history. ACL continued as the music morphed from "progressive country" into the next trendy forms and helped Austin in its endeavor to proclaim itself the live music capital of the world. By the 70s, TV had already demonstrated its cultural power by producing the first generation of stay at home couch potatos, and had shown an ability to impact where music was going - as in the Ed Sullivan show acting as the armada carrying the Beatles and the first wave of the British invasion to our shores. But ACL has proved the deeper and more sustaining power of TV programming in the musical world and especially Texas music.

Now days, radio and TV seem passé, so what about the new kind of hayride? Well, just like radio in the hayride days and TV before ACL, there are these new technologies out there that constitute a new media platform. Most of them have been around for a decade or so, but no one has yet formulated the programming that will launch the next wave in Texas music. Is there any reason to doubt that history will repeat itself? Is there any reason to doubt that it will germinate in Texas as it always has, with creative Texas musical content? Well, okay then, we think we have a compelling case, so...

Texas Songbook predicts that a cyber hayride will be unveiled and it will be the big happening in this last decade of the Texas music century. It will propel a new creative musical outpouring of Texas music. Given the high tech credentials, media savy, and abundance of musical creative content in the Austin area, the cyber hayride is probably already underway and will emerge from there. We shall see...

Happy New Year and Welcome to Texas Songbook!

So here we are at the start of a brand new decade. Here is what is special about this one: it is the last decade in a century of recorded Texas music, a century that started with a fiddler from Amarillo making the first country record, an ex-cowboy from Jefferson turned New York light opera singer making the first big country hit, and a blind blues man from the streets of Deep Ellum becoming the best selling blues artist of the time. These recording milestones barely even hint at the amazing decade that was starting in Texas music 90 years ago, but let's talk about 20s music, or as the Texas Songbook and Musical Companion called it "songs to play before a great depression," another time. The important thing is that each of the past nine decades in Texas music has unveiled surprises, wonders, great stories, and most of all history making music. We need expect any less of the present one.

The Texas Songbook and Musical Companion celebrates the treasures of Texas music past and present in equal measure. "These are the good old days" of Texas music, Eddie Wilson blogs as he chronicles his own golden age of the Armadillo World Headquarters in the 1970s, and we agree, so they are. Never have the opportunities and potential been greater to produce and enjoy great music in greater variety than now. But without the rich legacy of the past nine decades, this would not be so.

But enough pontificating...

In Fort Worth, this decade was rung in on the "Eve before New Year's Eve" at Bass Hall by Robert Earl King, Jr. Keen delivered the expected crowd pleasing ballads and earned approving reviews in the Fort Worth Star Telegram and from Channel 8's art critic Gary Cogill, who said how great it was to hear some real, good, Texas music. Keen's music is a collection of stories from various Texas slices of life, stories that are better with each re-singing, and the audience knows them well enough to join in more often than not.

Also in Fort Worth, on January 2, 1936, Roger Miller was born. He was a member of the legendary Cherokee Cowboys backing up Ray Price. (They were Hank Williams band, the Drifting Cowboys, till his death, when Ray Price took them under his wing.) He wrote Price's hit "Invitation to the Blues" and became one of Nashville's most prized songwriters hitting his peak in the 1960s with his own hits such as "Kansas City Star" and "King of the Road." His most endearing songs were novelty items which ranged from quirky to wacky.

Also on January 2 in 1974, Tex Ritter died in Nashville. Ritter was a protege of the great music historian John Lomax and star of over sixty "B" westerns of the 30s and 40s. The unique thing about Ritter as a movie singing cowboy is that he always viewed his films as a vehicle to expose the authentic cowboy music rather than the manufactured Hollywood variety. Ritter provided Bob Wills his first movie opportunity in Take Me Back to Oklahoma in 1940. He became best known for his hits "Rye Whiskey," "Boll Weevel," and "High Noon."

Keen, Miller, and Ritter used widely diverse styles to make superb Texas music, but they do have a common link - to Willie Nelson. Miller and Nelson were part of Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys together, and they were also in Nashville together in the sixties as two of country music's elite songwriters. Ritter appeared in Nelson's Dripping Springs Reunion, the precursor to the Willie Nelson picnics, in 1972, along with country music legends Ernest Tubb and Roy Acuff and many others. Keen attended Willie Nelson's second Fourth of July Picnic in 1974, where he was able to meet Nelson as a result of his car being one of 40 burned up a in a grass fire in the parking lot. Nelson unfortunately had to cut the meeting short because he was "jamming with Leon Russell," as hilariously told by Keen on his Live No.2 Dinner CD on the "Road Goes On Forever Intro."

We will return to these three in future posts for a Keen-Miller-Ritter road trip and play list.

Here is the Robert Earl Keen site: http://www.robertearlkeen.com/

Roger Miller's site is: http://www.rogermiller.com/

Tex Ritter's museum site is: http://www.carthagetexas.com/HallofFame/museum.htm