The rocker, the singer-songwriter, the guitar hero all sprung from this holy trinity, who recorded before any of the more celebrated Mississippi Delta deities. And yet, because they played gospel, not the more collectable and researchable blues, Arizona Dranes, Washington Phillips and Blind Willie Johnson had been woefully bypassed by musicologists and historians until recently. […]
Money, independence, big noise and dirt: that’s Texas, a land of opportunity within the land of opportunity. It’s where the South ends and the West begins and yet Texas remains independent of those regions.
It’s somewhere between the time they get their electricity turned on and when they get their Texas driver’s license that newcomers to Austin are exposed to that big Austin tradition: hearing about all the great clubs in town that they’ll never get to go to. It is not unusual, in fact, for our nouveau citizens […]
Before I devoted myself to history, I was prone to hysteria, as a rock critic in love with the notion that opinion can’t be proven incorrect. There was no right or wrong, only interesting or boring.
“Ghost notes” is a musical term for sounds barely audible, a wisp lingering around the beat, yet somehow driving the groove. The Texas musicians profiled here, ranging from 1920s gospel performers to the first psychedelic band, are generally not well known, but the impact of their early contributions on popular music is unmistakable. This beautiful Tim Kerr-illustrated collection provides more background on the Texas from which these artists sprang, fully formed.
By Michael Corcoran First published April 2003 in AAS Willie understood. When Frank Sinatra kept touring well into his 70s, reading the words of his classic songs off giant TelePrompTers, critics and fans wondered why he didn’t retire. How much money did he need? But Willie Nelson knew that concert receipts had nothing to do […]
This oral history was originally published in the Diboll Buzzsaw newspaper in August 1947, when Will “Professor” Jackson was 77 years old. by William James Jackson (1870- 1972) My musical career began when I was six years of age. A Dr. J. L. Tylon took me in his care with three other colored boys and […]
By Michael Corcoran It’s East Austin in 2003 and the slow and furious promenade rolls almost non-stop. When an SUV, spewing trunk-rattling bass, sidles up to the corner of 12th and Chicon, the intersection sounds like Vietnam, 1968. You’ve heard the stuff — that rap music with the nuclear bass that flattens out and sustains […]
“It’s the same ol’ tune, fiddle and guitar, where do we take it from here?” An ol’ honky tonk hero sang that in the ‘70s, but back in the early ‘30s, Milton Brown and Bob Wills were thinking the same thing. The singer and the fiddler worked together less than two years in the Light […]
“Country band looking for singer” was all it said, with a phone number. From that seed of torn paper stuck on the cluttered bulletin board at the Southwest Texas State University student center in August 1975 grew a chapter of country music history that’s still a page-turner. The first person to answer the ad, placed […]
![Intro to ‘[Ghost Notes] Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music’](https://i0.wp.com/www.michaelcorcoran.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/bwj_188295.jpg?resize=200%2C192&ssl=1)
