College Station: Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett at Texas A&M

A dorm room at Texas A&M University holds one of the most remarkable coincidences in Texas music history. In the late 1970s, Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett were college roommates in College Station. Both were from Houston. Both loved classic country and folk music. Both were learning to write songs. Their friendship would produce “This Old Porch,” one of the most beloved songs in the Texas singer-songwriter canon.

Keen arrived at Texas A&M to study English and graduated in 1978. Lovett shared the same musical obsessions. Together they played for each other, traded influences, and pushed each other toward a specific kind of songwriting they both instinctively understood: deeply Texan, deeply personal, and deeply literary.

“This Old Porch,” which the two co-wrote, appeared on Keen’s debut album in 1984. Lovett recorded his own version shortly after. The song captures the spirit of Texas — its nostalgia, its sense of place, its bittersweet relationship with time — in ways that resonate decades later.

A Friendship That Shaped Texas Music

The College Station years gave both men something essential: a collaborator who understood exactly what they were trying to do. Moreover, the Texas A&M campus provided a performance scene that prepared them for life on the road. Keen won the New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1983, just as his time in College Station was winding down.

The Texas A&M Distinguished Alumni Award, which Keen received in 2018, brought him back to the campus where his career had begun. He stood in the place where he and Lovett had first shaped their musical identities. Furthermore, his induction into the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016 cemented his place in the tradition that College Station had helped him discover.

The dorm room where two Houston kids wrote songs together is long gone. The songs, however, remain — still played at honky tonks and campfires across Texas, still carrying the spirit of that unlikely creative partnership in College Station.