Charley Crockett was born in San Benito — the Rio Grande Valley town that also produced Freddy Fender fifty years before.
You could hear him before you turned the corner. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s spot in Deep Ellum, Dallas — the corner of Elm Street and Central Tracks — was no club stage or concert hall. It was a piece of sidewalk. But from that sidewalk, Jefferson launched the Texas blues tradition....
He died in Chicago on December 19, 1929, and nobody could agree on how. The Blind Lemon Jefferson grave in Wortham, Texas is where that mystery settled. Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Father of Texas Blues, was thirty-six years old. His death certificate listed “probably acute myocarditis.” But rumors circulated for...
Every blues guitarist who ever played a single-string solo owes something to a farm in Freestone County, Texas. The Blind Lemon Jefferson birthplace near Wortham is that piece of ground. Jefferson was born here in September 1893, near the community of Coutchman — the youngest of seven children born to...
Patty Griffin has made the Continental Club her Austin home stage — from Robert Plant charity gigs in 2012 to her 2020 livestream residency on South Congress.
Patty Griffin came to Austin in 1997 on a hunch. Two Grammys and three decades of South Austin folk-soul later, she's still here.
Caravan of Dreams opened in downtown Fort Worth in 1983 with a rooftop geodesic dome and Ornette Coleman performing on opening night. It was the most interesting room in North Texas.
I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth, Texas, produced Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Prince Lasha — an unlikely nursery for the free jazz revolution.
Ornette Coleman grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and changed jazz forever. The city that shaped his sound gave him the keys to it in 1983.
Lubbock High School produced Mac Davis, who wrote “In the Ghetto” for Elvis Presley, and Joe B. Mauldin, bassist for Buddy Holly’s Crickets — two of the most important figures in 1950s American music.
Two streets in Lubbock carry the names of musicians. One is Buddy Holly Avenue. The other is Mac Davis Lane — the renamed 6th Street that runs through the downtown blocks where Mac Davis grew up.
Mac Davis wrote seven songs for Elvis Presley, including “In the Ghetto,” from the flat Panhandle city where he grew up. He promised to be buried in Lubbock in his jeans. He kept the promise.