In July 2025, Shooter Jennings produced Charley Crockett’s album Clovis at Norman Petty’s legendary studio — just over the Texas border in New Mexico, where Buddy Holly once changed American music.
In the early 1920s, a teenage T-Bone Walker guided Blind Lemon Jefferson from bar to bar through Deep Ellum.
The Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas has been home to Bob Wills, Jack Ruby, Merle Haggard, and the Sex Pistols — one building, three eras, and one very strange marquee.
On July 3, 1976, Tina Turner walked out of the Statler Hilton Hotel in Dallas with thirty-six cents in her pocket. She crossed Interstate 30 on foot — and did not look back. The night she ran changed American music forever.
For sixty years after his 1913 death in Marlin, Texas, Anderson McCrew toured America as a carnival mummy. Don McLean heard the story and wrote the song that finally gave him a name on a stone.
In 1925, blues legend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter wrote a song begging Texas Governor Pat Neff for his freedom. He played it for the governor on the back porch of the warden's house at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land — every single time Neff came to visit. On his last day in office, the governor heard him.
On January 8, 1978, the Sex Pistols played Randy's Rodeo on San Antonio's Bandera Road. Beer cans flew, Sid Vicious swung his bass, and Texas punk was born.