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Overview
A lavishly illustrated collection of forty-two profiles of Texas music pioneers, most underrated or overlooked, All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music covers the musical landscape of a most musical state. The first edition was published in 2005 to wide acclaim. This second edition includes updated information, a bonus section of six behind-the-scenes heroes, and fifteen new portraits of Lefty Frizzell, Janis Joplin, and others, spanning such diverse styles as blues, country, hip-hop, conjunto, gospel, rock, and jazz. D.J. Stout and Pentagram designed the reborn edition, with photographer Scott Newton providing portraits. Michael Corcoran has been writing about Texas music for more than thirty years, for the Dallas Morning News and Austin American Statesman, as well as in such publications as Texas Monthly and Spin. These pieces are based on his personal interviews with their subjects as well as in-depth research. Expertly written with flair, the book is a musical waltz across Texas.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781574417104 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2017 |
| Series: | North Texas Lives of Musician Series , #11 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 669,903 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
MICHAEL CORCORAN retired after decades writing about music for various newspapers to pursue his passion projects. His book on Arizona Dranes (He Is My Story) was nominated for a Grammy as best historical recording. In 1996 he was named Writer of the Year for the entire Cox Newspaper chain. He is based in Austin.
Read an Excerpt
All Over the Map
True Heroes of Texas Music
By Michael Corcoran
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2017 Michael CorcoranAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-681-7
CHAPTER 1
Soul Stirrers
In Search of Rebert Harris
TRINITY, TX
There are certain voices you can't forget hearing for the first time: Aretha Franklin, George Jones, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin. In my case add Rebert H. Harris. Before I heard R.H. Harris for the first time on Rhino's Jubilation! set about 20 years ago, the only thing I knew about the Soul Stirrers was that they were the group Sam Cooke sang in before he went and became a pop/soul superstar in 1957. Cooke's been called "the man who invented soul," but he always acknowleged the elastic vocals and melismatic phrasing of Harris, the man he replaced in the Soul Stirrers.
Harris's New York Times obituary ran six days after he passed away in September 2000 at age 84, attesting to the obscurity of the prematurely bald man they started calling "Pop" while he was in his 30s. That two of the Stirrers names were misspelled and Harris was described as a "soul singer" in the Times headline (a designation that could've killed the gospel purist if his heart hadn't already given out) proves that this musical pioneer has never gotten the glory he deserved.
In the '30s and '40s, the Soul Stirrers were a fountain of influence for doowop, as well as such Motown groups as the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Four Tops. The original group (E.R. Rundless, W.L. LeBeau, A.L. Johnson, S.R. Crain, and O.W. Thomas), which recorded for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress in 1936 as The Five Soul Stirrers of Houston, revolutionized gospel even before Harris took them to a higher vocal ground when he joined in 1937. Lomax called that four-song session in Austin "the most incredible polyrhythmic music you've ever heard." Gospel historian Ray Funk wrote, "No other recordings from that era are anywhere close in style," pinpointing a Stirrers innovation as the harmony based around a higher tonal center — with "piercing falsetto" and a lighter bass — than the popular quartets from Birmingham, Alabama, and Norfolk, Virginia. Though the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet is often cited as an influence on the Stirrers, the quartet from Texas actually recorded first, by a year.
The Soul Stirrers defined "quartet" as less to do with the number of singers and more about a harder, more emotional sound. The fifth member of the group meant the four-part harmony wouldn't be disturbed as the two leads took turns wailing. Recording for the Specialty label out of L.A., the Stirrers brought syncopated tension to the gospel mainstream and won just about every "battle" with other top quartets.
"Most everybody out there singing has got a bit of me snuck up in them," Harris told writer and gospel authority Anthony Heilbut in the book The Gospel Sound. Harris also liked to remark that most of the people imitating him didn't even know his name.
This lack of recognition bothered Harris to the point that he would often overcompensate by making outlandish claims. In a 1987 interview on behalf of the Texas Music Museum, Harris took credit for inventing the falsetto and later teaching the style to Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots. Harris went on to say that he wrote the first true gospel song (at age seven), inspired vocal arrangements by Duke Ellington, and inadvertently taught Tex Ritter how to yodel.
There could've been truthful pebbles in all that, but Harris's boasts stretched thin over the course of the hour-long interview. There's really no graceful way to make up for 50 years of being overlooked.
Tired of the endless gospel highway, Harris left the Stirrers in 1950 to become president of the National Quartet Association, then watched his 20-year-old replacement Cooke give the group its biggest hit ever with "Jesus Gave Me Water" in 1951. Married to Jeanette Harris of the Golden Harps, who were signed to Houston label Peacock, Harris worked as a florist to support his family and sang with the moderately popular Christland Singers and then the Gospel Paraders. That latter group was produced by Cooke for his SAR label.
His years as a star were over, but gospel scholars continued to hoist R.H. Harris as a true innovator. "His was a vocal sound never before heard in gospel — nor has it been heard since," wrote Horace Clarence Boyer in How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel. Boyer, a singer himself, offered that Harris's unique style comes from a choice "to place his voice between the head and the chest, so he could call on the power of his lower voice, as well as the falsetto." Harris had a three-octave range.
Harris claimed to have no musical influences besides that which he found in the trees and fields of his family's farm outside Trinity, 85 miles northeast of Houston. "The falsetto sound that traveled from gospel to soul to the Beatles began as a Texas birdsong mimicked by a latter-day Mozart," wrote Heilbut, who also produced a Harris tribute program in Chicago in 1990 called "The Father of Them All."
* * *
A sign proclaiming Trinity, population 2997, as "A City of Prayer" welcomes visitors to this spot about 85 miles north of Houston where the Trinity River feeds into Lake Livingston. But it's also a prison town, located next to the Huntsville state correctional facilities, the area's biggest employer. Harris grew up on a farm 13 miles outside Trinity, in the former "Blackland" settlement (named after the darkness of its soil, not the racial make-up of its residents). James and Katie Harris and their nine children (Rebert was No. 6) lived about 300 yards from the barbed wire fence of the Eastham Prison Camp, where convicts would toil in the fields and sing themselves back home with a mixture of spirituals and blues.
Rebert said he started arranging his first gospel quartet, with his brother Almo and two cousins, before he even knew what the quartet style was. "I was seven years old and the closest boy in age was six years older," he said in that 1987 interview. "I heard the sound of each part in my head and I'd tell each person how to sing it." The group was called the Friendly Four and then the Friendly Gospel Singers when Harris moved to town to start seventh grade at the Trinity Colored High School. After tenth grade, which is as far as the school went, 15-year-old Harris attended Mary Allen College in nearby Crockett and weighed a tempting offer to join Trinity neighbor S.R. Crain's group the Soul Stirrers, who had formed in Houston.
Like the "e" in his name where the "o" should go, Rebert Harris set the Stirrers apart from the growing mass of gospel quartets. He made them even harder and smoother, when you're usually either one or the other. The group's influence quickly outgrew the Houston gospel scene, where their acolytes included a couple of farm boy cousins from Cleveland, Texas, named Kylo Turner and Keith Barber, who would go on to create musical magic of their own in the Pilgrim Travelers. Chicago beckoned, but the Soul Stirrers never forgot their Texas roots and whenever they needed to recruit new singers they usually found them in their home state, including Austin's James Medlock and Paul Foster in Houston.
Harris's parents were devout churchgoers and choir singers who, in 1911, helped build a church that bears their name (Harris Chapel C.M.E.) on the main road leading into town. It was still active until recently, one of 23 places of worship in Trinity, which is one of those seemingly joyless hamlets where porches are piled like thrift stores and folks sell barbecue and trinkets out of their homes. But on Sunday, the burdens dissipate in feverish church singing.
On a 1999 visit to Trinity, I tracked down several former classmates of Harris, including 84-year-old Hill Perkins, who was a member of Harris's Friendly Gospel Singers 70 years earlier. Perkins recalls that Harris was always singing, even on the field during football games. He also fathered a child out of wedlock with Lucille Norman, Perkins said, with a smile and twinkle.
"You could always tell Rebert by the way he walked, kinda slow and smooth," recalled 72-year-old Lois Saldana, who got to know the gospel legend during his yearly visits from Chicago to Trinity. The last time Harris came to Trinity was 1996 to attend the funeral of S.R. Crain, whom everyone in Trinity calls "Simp" for a reason no one can recall.
On the way out of town, I visited the Harris Chapel one more time. I sat in my car outside the simple, white, boxlike building and listened to Rebert Harris sing on my CD player. God, what a marvelous voice, so pure and clear and filled with the spirit. In my mind, the chapel doors outside my window opened to reveal a little boy standing on a chair so he could to be as tall as his fellow singers. His voice, like those of the mockingbirds, was effortless in its leap from the soul.
Two months earlier, I sat in a rental car, listening to a different version of Rebert Harris's voice on my cell phone. I had flown up from Austin to interview Harris and was a block away from his home on the West Side of Chicago, when I called to let him know I'd be at his front door within minutes. But Rebert said that on the advice of his lawyer he changed his mind about doing the interview. "People are making all this money offa me and I don't see a cent," he said. "You could turn around and write a book and I wouldn't get nothin'." He tried to shake me down for money, saying the Chicago Tribune paid him a little something for an interview (untrue). When it became apparent that he wouldn't budge, I told him that since I was in the neighborhood, I just wanted to shake his hand and thank him in person for all the great music, then I'd be on my way.
"Well, alright then, I'll see ya for a minute," he said, as I wondered how I was going to justify travel expenses from Austin to Chicago for a howdy.
His wife Mary glumly met me at the door and led me inside a dark, ornately decorated house. A plastic trail on the carpet led us to a back room where Harris rose from a chair with much effort and the aid of a walker to greet me. He sat back down and gestured for me to sit. A little shell-shocked from our earlier phone conversation, I left my tape recorder in the car, but it didn't matter. Although I was there for about 20 minutes, Harris didn't give any useful quotes, even when I set him up with a question about how he tutored Sam Cooke. Instead, he showed me fan mail from as far away as Japan and described pictures on his walls.
One side of the room was dominated by family photos. Facing it was a wall containing Soul Stirrers memorabilia, including a newspaper article announcing the group's 1989 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When I asked him who I should talk to in Trinity about the Soul Stirrers, Harris said, "I'm the only one who knows the real story." I got my picture taken with my idol R.H. Harris, but drove away empty.
Maybe all the loose ends of life come together in the sweet by and by, as Harris sang in that song that moved me towards fanaticism 20 years ago. The truth, whatever it is in this tale of fuzzy memories and furry pride, was buried with Rebert H. Harris the month after I met him. Or maybe it's all in the music.
CHAPTER 2Harry Choates
Dead in an Austin Jail Cell
PORT ARTHUR, TX
They remembered it like it was yesterday. "He was shaking uncontrollably, stumbling around his jail cell in a stupor, with a big cut on his forehead," Jimmy Grabowske said in 2001 as the 50th anniversary of his former band mate's death approached.
"He didn't know us. He didn't know anything," said fiddler Junior Burrow, also there with cigarettes and magazines.
Harry Choates, the wild-eyed music wizard who popularized the Cajun standard "Jole Blon," was in bad shape in the Travis County Jail that afternoon of July 17, 1951. Steel guitarist Grabowske, Burrow and drummer Eddie May went looking for assistance, but only found shrugs. "We went to one of the guards and told him that Choates [pronounced "Shoats"] needed a doctor, badly, but he said there was nothing he could do about it," Burrow said.
The three musicians headed back to the Brown Building, where they performed with Jesse James and All the Boys at 1 p.m. every day on Lady Bird Johnson's KTBC radio station, looking for anyone who might help. Then they heard the ambulance's siren, an ominous shriek that signaled the flaming out of another troubled musical genius. Twenty-eight-year-old Choates was declared dead in his cell at 2:45 p.m. He had been in jail three days for failure to pay child support.
The autopsy on the musician, who grew up in Port Arthur, but lived in Austin the final year of his life, noted a one-inch cut on the forehead, plus there were large irregular contusions over the left hip and upper thigh and several reddish spots on the body. Those injuries seem consistent with a beating and for years that was the rumor, that Choates was drunk and belligerent and said the wrong thing to a guard or fellow inmate.
Grabowske dismissed such speculation, believing the injuries to be self-inflicted in a crazed state. But he wondered if the musician could've been saved by proper attention. "He was an absolute alcoholic suffering from DTs [delirium tremens]. Why was he left alone in a cell, staggering around and hitting his head on everything?"
Even though Choates had been to Cajun music what Bob Wills was to Western swing, he died penniless. Beaumont deejay Gordon Baxter had to organize a benefit dance to pay for Choates's burial in Port Arthur's Calvary Catholic Cemetery.
"He was a maze of contradictions," Houston music historian Andrew Brown said of the musician who gained fame singing in a language (French) he wasn't fluent in and rarely used in conversation. "He was an exceptional jazz guitarist and multi-instrumentalist whose best-known records portray only a simple folk fiddler. He was a wild, disreputable character who sang mournful lyrics set off against traditional Cajun melodies."
Misinformation about Choates starts with his place of birth (Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, not Rayne) on Dec. 26, 1922. Even though he moved to Texas at age six with his parents Clarence and Edolia, he was always billed as hailing from Lake Charles, Louisiana.
But one aspect of his life is without refute: Choates had a hankering for the hard stuff. His drinking was already out of control by the age of 12, when whiskey became a steady part of his diet. "I didn't even know that he was an alcoholic because there was never any change in his behavior," said Burrows. "I guess it's because he was always drinking." Grabowske agreed. "He wasn't obnoxious like some drunks. He just seemed to always be in a good mood."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All Over the Map by Michael Corcoran. Copyright © 2017 Michael Corcoran. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface
A Lone Star State of Mind 1
East Texas
1 Soul Stirrers 8
In Search of Rebert Harris (Trinity)
2 Harry Choates 14
Dead in an Austin Jail Cell (Port Arthur)
3 Barbara Lynn 21
The Empress of Gulf Coast Soul (Beaumont)
4 Janis Joplin 26
Lust for Love (Port Arthur)
5 Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown 33
The Count Basie of the Blues (Orange)
Houston
6 Geto Boys and DJ Screw 40
Where the Dirty South Began
7 Floyd Tillman 46
Country Gypsy in a Suit
8 Milt Larkin Orchestra 50
Birth of the Texas Tenors
9 Archie Bell and The Drells with the TSU Toronados 56
"Hey, Everybody, That's Me!"
Dallas and Fort Worth
10 Ray Price 62
"The Good Times, My Ass!" (Mount Pleasant)
11 T-Bone Walker 68
Fountainhead of Electric Blues (Oak Cliff)
12 Townes Van Zandt 74
Poet. (Fort Worth)
13 Ella Mae Morse 81
"You Sing Like a Black Girl" (Mansfield)
14 King Curtis 87
Cowlown Soul Stew (Fort Worth)
15 Lefty Frizzell 94
The Voice of Notify Tonk (Gorsicana)
16 Freddie King 102
The Stingin' Leads Heard 'cross the Atlantic (Gilmer)
17 Arizona Dranes 108
Inventing the Gospel Beat (Sherman)
18 Ronnie Dawson 114
The Blond Bomber (Waxahachic)
Waco Area
19 Billy Joe Shaver 120
"The Second Time I Done it on My Own" (Waco)
20 Bobbie Nelson 129
Amazing Grace (Abbott)
21 Tom Wilson 135
Big Ears from Texas (Waco)
22 Cindy Walker 141
The First Lady of Texas Song (Mexia)
23 Johnny Gimble 146
The Common Man as Master (Waco/Tyler)
Austin
24 Stevie Ray Vaughan 152
Straight from the Heart
25 Blaze Foley 159
Killing of a Songwriter
26 Butthole Surfers 167
Showing Worm Movies
27 Don Walser 173
Last of the Singing Cowboys
28 Alejandro Eseovedo 178
Hands of the Son
29 Calvin Russell 185
The Man Makes the Hat
San Antonio and Rio Grande Valley
30 Steve Jordan 192
The Invisible Genius (San Antonio)
31 Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm 200
The Groove Brothers (San Benito/San Antonio)
32 Selena 207
Frozen in Perfection (Corpus Christi)
33 Lydia Mendoza 212
The Mother of Tejano Music (San Antonio)
West Texas
34 Waylon Jennings 218
Nashville Rebel (Littlefield)
35 Chuck Wagon Gang 224
The Texas Carter Family (Lubbock)
36 Bobby Fuller 229
King of El Paso Rock (El Paso)
37 Bobby Keys 236
Rolling Stone from Texas (Slaton)
38 Ernest Tubb 242
"Thanks a Lot" (Crisp/ San Angelo)
39 Guy Clark 246
Songs That Work (Monahans)
Just Kids
40 Nick Curran 254
Up on the Sun (Dallas/Austin)
41 Bobby Ramirez 258
Everybody's Brother (Port Arthur)
Behind the Scenes
Burton Wilson 265
Evelyn Johnson 268
Clifford Antone 271
Chet Flippo 273
C-Boy Parks 275
Brent Grulke 278
Dedication Stephen Bruton 281
The 34 Greatest Texas Recordings 288
Additional Sources 298
Index 299
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