Road Trip Music : Texas

Texas. From the Gulf Coast at Galveston to border at El Paso, from windswept landscapes of the Permian Basin to the Riverwalk in San Antonio, from the hill country of Austin to the cattle country of Amarillo, Texas is a state filled with music and with the names and lives of towns, cities, musicians, and places that resonate through music’s past and present. Willie Nelson, Flaco Jimenez, The Flatlanders, Bob Wills, Lee An Womack, Johnny Gimble, Carolyn Hester, Alejandro Escovedo, Albert & Gage, The Dixie Chicks, George Straight, Clint Black, Robert Earl Keen, and Buddy Holly are but a few of the musicians who have called Texas home. Here is a soundtrack as the Great American Road Trip Music travels through Texas.





Guy Clark is a songwriter's songwriter, and even a Texas songwriter's songwriter. Even if you’ve never heard his name, you’ve heard his music through the many pop, country, and folk artists who have covered his songs. For this trip, take a listen to one of his recent albums, Some Days The Song Writes You

Terri Hendrix well knows how to build a song, and how to cover one too. She was once awarded a scholarship to study opera, but decided to pass that by in order to go deeper into creating her own music. She draws on folk, blues, jazz, and country, seasoned with social justice at times and flavored with humor too. You can hear her latest adventures with this on Cry Till You Laugh.



Kelly Willis is a storyteller, both in what she chooses to sing and in how she sings it. Love and its challenges is her most frequent subject matter. Love seen from both dark and light sides, and more than anything, love seen as part of life’s journey and never ending quest for understanding. She has a voice which can handle the bluest country rock and also turn quietly gentle when it’s right to do so. Take a listen to her voice and song choices on What I Deserve

Bruce Robison is another one of those musicians whose music you may know better than you know his name. The Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill are among those who’ve taken Robison’s music to the top of the charts. For this trip, reach into his back catalogue for an album which among other things includes his version of the song Travelin’ Soldier. The album is called Long Way Home From Anywhere.

Tish Hinojosa brings her experiences as a first generation Mexican American to her work. She was born in San Antonio. You’ll hear more of her work as the road trip travels to New Mexico, but while we are in Texas, listen to Frontejas.

photographs of Kelly Willis and Tish Hinojosa copyright Kerry Dexter

you may also wish to see
Music Road: ten songs
Austin City Limits: 35 Years in Photographs
Texas honky tonks and Donegal fiddles
more music from the road trip

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I originally partnered up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’d find there. The Library is closed now, but I think you will still find the journeys through music interesting.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins


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Music for a spring road trip: six albums

One from Scotland, three from Texas, a duo from Massachusetts, and a vintage collection from top Irish American musicians. Love songs, songs about children, travels, journeys, questions, mountains, rivers, markets, birds, trains, fish, grits and fancy pears, and many other things....all fine companions for where your late spring roads are taking you now.

Tish Hinojosa’s own roads have taken her from the west side of San Antonio to the mountains of northern New Mexico, to Nashville’s Music Row, through a time in Austin’s lively music scene, and a current base in Germany. All these experiences play into the music she’s made for Our Little Planet. Sparked in part by her rediscovery of some old work tapes from her time in Nashville, it is in many ways a more country sort of record than Hinojosa has made in a long time. It’s not mainstream country, but it is country of the country, and of Texas and the southwest. There’s a knockout duet with Carrie Rodriguez called Mi Pueblo, and Mountain Lullabye, a song which sounds like a western sunset, and ten more.

Jeff Talmadge comes from Texas too, though he’s been living in Georgia for a while. One of the ways he looks back on At Least That Much Was True is through the evocative Austin When it Rains. Talmadge does not shy from life’s harder questions, as with the songs White Cross and Let Her Go. There’s always a perspective, though, however indirect, of hope and change for the better. The anthem for that, on this record, might be the understated, quietly sung story in Wrong Train.


Jim Malcolm does a good bit of quiet reflection on his album The First Cold Day,
including a tribute to Robert Burns and the gentle pleasures of fishing, in a song called An Hour in the Gloaming. There’s a taste of highland legend in Schiehallion, and a hilarious road trip of his own through the American south in Down in Alabama. That's where the grits and fancy pears come in.

If Hinojosa didn’t get you dancing with her title track for Our Little Planet, then her fellow Texan Terri Hendrix will with Posey Road Stomp, or Wallet, or Bottom of the Hill, or one of the ten other songs on Left Over Alls. One of the great things about Hendrix is that she knows how to be serious through being funny, and also when it’s the right moment o focus on one or the other side of that equation.

Massachusetts based husband and wife duo Matt and Shannon Heaton know how to look at a subject from many aspects, too. They base their work in Irish tradition, and for Lovers' Well they’ve sought out your not so usual love songs. A chance encounter is the hinge for the story in Where Moorcocks Crow, waiting and wondering about a lover for Bay of Biscay, love turned to jealousy tells the tale in Lily of the West, love found in taking chances begins the story of Golden Glove. These they interweave gracefully and naturally with traditional and newly composed tunes meant for dancing together, Shannon playing flute and Matt guitar and bouzouki.

Cherish the Ladies is now a a well known Irish American band, but they started before Riverdance, before Celtic Women, and before the work of women in Irish music had received much recognition or respect. They'd been at constant touring for several years before they made their first record as a group, and through changing line ups, they’ve made many since. That first one, The Back Door, catches the group of seventeen years ago in fine form, tunes and songs alike reflecting Irish and American style and connections. It’s worth a look and a listen, once again.

If you’d like to dance -- alone or together -- to sing along, to laugh, to reflect, or just to listen, all of these will serve you well on your late spring travels. What would you add?


you may also want to see

Terri Allard: Live from Charlottesville

season of change: music for autumn 2008

hanneke cassel

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Looking toward Christmas: Kidstuff

Is there a young child, or the parent of one, on your gift list? Here's music to consider for them.

Both parent an child will likely enjoy Down at the Sea Hotel. By turns as whimsical as the title cut, by Iowa singer songwriter Greg Brown, and as thoughtful as Steve Earle’s Nothing but a Child, which is sung together by many of the artists who contribute to this album, it’s a varied collection with top singers and songwriters offering familiar and less familiar songs by other top contemporary writers. Guy Davis singss a bluesy Midnight Lullaby, while Eliza Gilkyson delivers two of the really standout cuts on the disc, Midnight in Missoula and the Carole King classic Child of Mine. Other singers include Lucy Kaplansky, John Gorka, and Lynn Miles, on songs written by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tom Waits, and others.

Do kids themselves create songs that will hold up to repeated listening? Well, at the very least you know you’ll get a few topics adult writers might not at first choose. The Football Toad and Papaya People are two of those Rory Block helped the kids in her sons’ school classes bring to life on the album Color Me Wild. Block is known as an intense and powerful blues singer and guitarist, but she says “I also have a really off the wall sense of humor.” That probably came in really helpful when her children were small, which is when she put together this project.

A whole list of well known (and Grammy winning) musicians from Darrell Scott to Amy Grant joined up with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and Paul Reisler’s Kid Pan Alley project to let kids see and experience what it’s like to create a song. The result: some lovely lullabyes, some funny stuff, and, well, a song about socks...

Tish Hinojosa offers a batch of songs both parents and children will enjoy on Cada Nino. Hinojosa is first generation Mexican American, and she draws on this background to remember in song trips to visit her grandmother back in Mexico and talk about some women of border history. Soon you and your kids will liklely be singing along with Hinojosa in both English and Spanish, especially on her hilarious imagining of what the vegetables get up to when we’re not looking, El Baile Vegetal/Vegetable Dance.

Jane Siberry offers a recording that’ll likely have you singing along too, although in a quieter way, as you might suspect from its title, Hush. This is Siberry in a relaxed folk mode, offering familiar songs including We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, All Through the Night, and The Water Is Wide. If you are in a lullaby frame of mind, you might want to look up Padraigin ni Uallachain's music, especially her recording Irish Lullaby. If you're looking more for humor, laughter, and challenge, then check out Celebrate the Difference, from Terri Hendrix.

Music on the album Mother is traditional, from Ireland, and original, out of the lives of the three artists who created this record, Susan McKeown, Robin Spielberg, and Cathie Ryan. It is music you probably have not heard before. Though it was intended for mothers, it works for mother, grandmothesr, and their children: It’s a powerful and loving celebration of the connections and disconnections and understandings that motherhood and making all life’s transitions invites. It’s also music that allows much as much space for the listener as it does for the artists who created it.

There are lively tunes and gracious ones, simple ones and complex, ones presented with sparse accompaniment and those with intricate acoustic support. Spielberg’s piano exploration without words of a walk with her mother, McKeown’s evocation of older times in Ancient Mother, the lively dance of joy of both child and grandparent in Ryan Grandma’s Song, each offer gifts of understanding and connection, as do the other songs on this collection.

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now playing: Terri Hendrix

Terri Hendrix has a direct and unique voice in folk music -- a combination of beat poet, political commentator, and insighful musician. She's been spreading the musical gospel for a good few years now, running her own record company and building a dedicated fan base that spans generations and countries. Along the way she's written a Grammy winning instrumental for the Dixie Chicks and created an award winning children's album, among other accomplishments . Her latest release, The Spiritual Kind, talks of friendship, change, love, acceptance, and connection in songs such as Acre of Land, If I Had a Daughter, and What Is the Color of the Soul, along with a right on cover of Pasures of Plenty.

The photograph over here to the right shows her with frequent band mates Paul Pearcy and Lloyd Maines one Austin summer night.


The Spiritual Kind