At 114 S. Brooks Street in Mexia, Cindy Walker spent the most productive decades of her career writing songs at home.
The Cindy Walker birthplace near Mart, Texas marks the beginning of one of the most extraordinary careers in American songwriting history. Three miles north of this small McLennan County farm town, Walker was born in July 1917.
Piney Woods barrel houses were lumber camp juke joints where itinerant pianists developed the music that became rock 'n' roll.
You went to see Freddie King to have your ass kicked. That was the deal. He was the AC/DC of East Texas blues — and it all started in the Upshur County pines outside Gilmer.Freddie King was born in Gilmer on September 3, 1934, the son of Ella Mae King,...
T-Bone Walker's birthplace in Linden, the town that produced the inventor of electric blues guitar and inspired B.B. King and Chuck Berry.
Marshall's barrel houses were lumber camp juke joints along the Texas & Pacific where boogie woogie was born and Lead Belly learned to play.
Nobody agreed on the exact boundaries of the Swampoodle District. What everyone agreed on was what happened there — and that the piano players who worked those juke joints changed the sound of American music.The Swampoodle District ran along the west side of Texarkana, Texas, defined by Swampoodle Creek and...
In 1880, a group of German businessmen built an octagonal dance pavilion in Galveston and called it the Garten Verein. The 1900 Storm took nearly everything in the city. The pavilion survived.
Frank Sinatra played the Balinese Room three times a year, and each time he came, Galveston felt like the center of the world. For thirty years, it was.
Etta's Lounge never had a biography the way some clubs do. What it had was the Fifth Ward, and in the 1950s that was enough to make it one of the most important rooms in Houston blues.
Dowling Street was once Houston's blues highway — the strip where Lightnin' Hopkins worked, where the Third Ward came to hear what Texas sounded like. Miss Ann's Playpen was the last keeper of that flame.
From 1951 to 1997, the Continental Zydeco Ballroom on Collingsworth Street was the largest and most important zydeco venue in Texas — the room where the King of Zydeco held his court.