Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound

John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music

by Alan Govenar

Texas Blues allows artists to speak in their own words, revealing the dynamics of blues, from its beginnings in cotton fields and shotgun shacks to its migration across boundaries of age and race to seize the musical imagination of the entire world. Fully illustrated with 495 dramatic, high-quality color and black-and-white photographs—many never before published—Texas Blues provides comprehensive and authoritative documentation of a musical tradition that has changed contemporary music. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author Alan Govenar here builds on his previous groundbreaking work documenting these musicians and their style with the stories of 110 of the most influential artists and their times. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Aaron “T-Bone” Walker of Dallas, to Delbert McClinton in Fort Worth, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins in East Texas, Baldemar (Freddie Fender) Huerta in South Texas, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin, Texas Blues shows the who, what, where, and how of blues in the Lone Star State.

Genres: Music

624 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2008

Reviews

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a history of the blues music in Texas, and focuses mainly on the early Black blues musicians. The cover has a photo of Stevie Ray Vaughn, which is misleading as is the title that it is about the "rise of a contemporary sound." Stevie Ray passed away in 1990, and there have been a plethora of talented musicians in Texas in the last thirty years that are not even mentioned such as Malford Milligan.