Pearsall: Pearsall High School

At Pearsall High School George Strait found music — or more accurately, music found him. The kid who grew up on his father’s 2,000-acre cattle ranch outside Big Wells, who knew more about fence lines than record labels, picked up a guitar during his high school years and joined a rock ‘n’ roll band called the Stoics. They were devotees of the Beatles and the British Invasion, which might seem an unlikely starting point for the man who would define neotraditional country, but it tells you something important: Strait learned to play music before he decided what kind of music to play.

Pearsall is the seat of Frio County, a hardscrabble South Texas town about 80 miles south of San Antonio, and it is where Strait spent the years that mattered most. His father John raised him and his older brother Buddy there after their parents divorced when George was in the fourth grade. They worked the ranch, went to school, and on weekends drove into town. His musical tastes shifted from rock toward country — Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Bob Wills, George Jones — and by the time he graduated from Pearsall High School, he had eloped with his sweetheart Norma Voss and was headed to the Army.

The Pearsall years shaped everything that came after. The ranch work gave Strait his bone-deep relationship with Texas cattle culture — the same culture that runs through albums like Strait Country and Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind. The local country performances gave him his first sense of what live music could do to a room. He was paying attention, even then. See also the Texas State University campus in San Marcos, where that ranch kid would eventually reinvent himself as the leader of the Ace in the Hole Band.