Dallas: W.H. Adamson High School

In the mid-1960s, W.H. Adamson High School in Oak Cliff, Dallas, was home to one of the most remarkable concentrations of musical talent in Texas history. Ray Wylie Hubbard sat in its classrooms alongside Michael Martin Murphey, who would go on to write “Wildfire” and become a defining voice of Texas country. B.W. Stevenson, who recorded the enduring classic “My Maria,” also walked its halls. And Larry Groce, known as a singer and radio host, was part of the same era. Consequently, a single Oak Cliff high school seeded the Texas progressive country movement with an extraordinary collection of future artists.

Adamson High School itself has a history that reaches back to 1915. It sits in the heart of Oak Cliff, four blocks from the Texas Theatre where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured in 1963. The school was designated a Dallas Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

Its Colonial Revival architecture reflects the ambitions of a community that wanted its children to have something fine. In addition, the school’s long history includes a 1924 state football championship and decades of cultural achievement.

Adamson High School: The Classroom Where Texas Music Was Born

Hubbard graduated from Adamson in 1965 and enrolled at North Texas State University in Denton. However, the musical friendships formed in Oak Cliff stayed with him. Indeed, the progressive country movement that emerged from Texas in the early 1970s bore the unmistakable marks of what those Adamson graduates had absorbed in the streets and classrooms of southwest Dallas.

Hubbard and Murphey remained connected figures in that movement, each pursuing his own path but always carrying the Oak Cliff years within him.

The school today continues to serve the Oak Cliff community — its historic building a reminder of the era when a remarkable generation of Texas musicians first found their voices in its hallways.