The store started as a man-cave. Raul Garcia kept finding records, kept finding space for them, and kept finding people who wanted to share. That slow accumulation became Atomic Wax — El Paso's beloved vinyl destination since 2015.
Evelyn Mendez's father never stopped playing music. That obsession became The Spins Vinyl Café — coffee, tamales, and weekly vinyl themes in the old Sugar Browns building on 19th Street.
Spencer Gaydon has been collecting records since junior high. In 2024, he finally opened Hub City Records on Boston Avenue — Lubbock's collector-focused vinyl shop for punk, metal, and experimental.
Ralph DeWitt opened Ralph's Records across from Texas Tech in 1980. Owner Doug Stapp started working there at 16. Now he owns it, plays guitar, and keeps Lubbock spinning.
Sound Systems, Ltd. has been selling Amarillo high-end audio since 1977. When the city's last record store closed, they filled the gap — turntables and vinyl under the same roof.
In 2017, fifty thousand vinyl records turned up in a farmhouse basement north of Sunray, Texas. Ray Wilson got a phone call. That call became High Fidelity.
Devin Drake got laid off at 51 and started digging through storage unit auctions. What he found became Faded Blue — 5,000+ vinyl records and vintage goods on North Locust Street.
From the outside, Books & More looks like a one-room dive. Inside, six rooms hold 20,000 vinyl records, as many books, and walls lined with vintage music posters.
The Wright Opera House was built from bricks salvaged from a lightning-struck courthouse. In 1990, Don Foster moved his record shop in. The building finally found its calling.
Fort Worth’s Saint Marie Records opened in 2022 and won Best Record Store in the city three years later. The shop on Chandler Drive stocks vinyl across every genre — shoegaze to hip-hop, jazz to soul — and does it with the kind of curation that makes browsing feel like a conversation.
Spinster Records landed in the Bishop Arts District and turned what had been an art gallery into one of Dallas’s best record shops — vinyl, turntables, and live events in the thick of Oak Cliff.
Top Ten Records opened on West Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff in 1956. Nearly seventy years later, it’s still there — and it became a nonprofit music archive before it became a legend.