Today is the birthday of Michael Nesmith. He would be 84 today. Robert Michael Nesmith was born in Houston, Texas on December 30, 1942. His mother Bette Nesmith Graham invented Liquid Paper correction fluid and became a millionaire. Michael grew up in Dallas and San Antonio, wrote his first songs as a teenager, and moved […]
Today is the birthday of Roger Miller. He would be 91 today. Fort Worth handed Roger Miller his birth certificate on January 2, 1936, and then he was gone. His father died early. The family split. He was raised by an uncle in Erick, Oklahoma — a Panhandle town with more tumbleweeds than ambitions. But […]
Today is the birthday of Tex Ritter. He would be 122 today. Woodward Maurice Ritter came out of Murvaul — a Deep East Texas hamlet in Panola County — on January 12, 1905. He studied law at the University of Texas and sang cowboy songs on the side. The songs won. He moved to New […]
Today is the birthday of Ray Price. He would be 101 today. Ray Price built a shuffle beat so sturdy that honky-tonk still leans on it today. He grew up near Perryville in Wood County, Texas, deep in East Texas farmland. Ray Price's Wood County, Texas roots gave him a plainspoken, working-class sense of rhythm. […]
Today is the birthday of Janis Joplin. She would be 84 today. Port Arthur is a refinery town on the Texas Gulf Coast — the kind of place that smells like industry and feels like the edge of something. Janis Lyn Joplin was born there on January 19, 1943. She was odd from the start: […]
Today is the birthday of Mac Davis. He would be 85 today. Scott Davis was born in Lubbock, Texas on January 21, 1942, in the same flat, sun-hammered West Texas world that produced Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings. Unlike them, Davis didn't stay in music's underground. He went straight for the mainstream and hit it […]
Today is the birthday of Angela Strehli. She is 81 today. Angela Strehli was born in Lubbock, Texas on January 22, 1945. She could have stayed in West Texas. Instead, she moved to Austin in the late 1960s and helped build something from the ground up. Strehli co-founded Antone's Records and became a central figure […]
Today is the birthday of Blind Willie Johnson. He would be 130 today. Blind Willie Johnson grew up near Temple, Texas, and violence took his sight as a child. He never let that darkness silence him, though. Instead, he picked up a guitar and played it with a pocketknife slide. His voice rasped like gravel […]
Today is the birthday of Johnny "Guitar" Watson. He would be 92 today. Johnny "Guitar" Watson grew up in Houston, Texas, playing piano in his father's church. But a neighbor named Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown changed everything. Watson traded the piano bench for a guitar, and he never looked back. He played it behind his head. […]
Today is the birthday of King Curtis. He would be 93 today. King Curtis grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, blowing saxophone in local church bands. He moved to New York as a teenager, chasing bigger stages and bigger paychecks. But his Texas honk never left his playing, not for one second. That raw, gritty […]
Today is the birthday of Ernest Tubb. He would be 113 today. Crisp, Texas sits in Ellis County, about thirty miles south of Dallas. It barely registers on a map. But Ernest Dale Tubb was born there on February 9, 1914, and that matters. He grew up listening to Jimmie Rodgers records and was devoted […]
Today is the birthday of Joe Ely. He is 80 today. Joe Ely was born in Amarillo, Texas on February 9, 1947. The Panhandle stamped itself on him permanently — the flat horizons, the wind, the sense that you're always standing on the edge of something too big to name. He moved to Lubbock as […]
