The storm blew in and rained down on Austin with a swift fury, for the second year in a row, on the second day of the South By Southwest musical dog-and-pony show. Perhaps it was a warning from above to the festival organizers for trying to shoehorn a record 960-plus…

It’s one of the oldest saws in show business: Ya gotta have a good gimmick. For Los Straitjackets, the gimmick came about by accident, but it turned out to be a nifty one: Mexican wrestling masks. Not that there is any relationship, per se, between Mexican wrestling and the instrumental…

Jimmie Dale Gilmore One Endless Night (Windcharger/Rounder Records) The rise of the singer-songwriter has been one of the most gratifying and disastrous developments in contemporary popular music. Yes, Bob Dylan raised the folk and/or pop singer’s own song to high art. But ego has subsequently placed more weight on the…

What’s a rock-and-roll guy to do after the hits have faded and the big major-label record deals are over? Perhaps scale down and sign the band to an indie label. Make a solo record and strike out touring on one’s own. Maybe find a liquor company that wants to target…

Guy Clark As time passes and his peers such as Townes Van Zandt pass away, Guy Clark seems more like a sage than like a poet laureate. His voice is the sound of whiskey mixed with cigarette smoke, a pungent concoction with an afterburn that reminds you how some of…

The Pretenders Back in the heyday of new wave, band names were often dipped in irony, like The Pretenders. But now, some two decades later, The Pretenders have proved themselves anything but false icons. For at a time when so much rock seems forced and/or faked, The Pretenders are one…

Even though it’s plainer than the nose on a face, the point that sometimes gets obscured in folk music is it’s music for folks, for the people. Now that doesn’t automatically make Ricky Martin a folkie because he sells shiploads of CDs, concert tickets, T-shirts, and teen magazines to the…

More a Legend Than a Band. That was the fitting title bestowed on the one album made by The Flatlanders when it was finally released in 1990, nearly 20 years after the group formed by Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock actually recorded it. Now, a decade later,…

There are literary theorists who propose that there are but a few basic stories in the world, perhaps little more or even less than can be counted on the fingers of both hands. Hence every novel — or, for that matter, every story told by a movie or reported in…

In the next century, please bring me freedom from these dreaded Top 10 album lists. May I never again have to enumerate for the public the fact, obvious by omission, that I do not give a hoot about hip-hop or modern rock or the latest bit of arch obscurity that…

It’s that time of year again, the season for eggnog, pine wreaths, ribbons and wrapping paper, and — shudder — Christmas albums. Every year, a blizzard of holiday records falls upon the record racks, most all of them filled with a certain spirit: the spirit of commerce. Because I actually…

We live in a time when country music is divided into two nations: the commercial dictatorship of Nashville, and the anarchic republic ineptly named alternative country, Americana, No Depression music — anything but what it always was and still is, which is basically country-rock. And the rule seems to be…

They call themselves Hot Club of Cowtown, are based out of Austin, and play a vigorous acoustic mixture of Western swing and 1920s hot jazz. So one might expect that this trio’s genesis was sparked by some primal musical experience in an old Texas dancehall, or the Left Bank of…

Waylon Jennings It’s ironic how country music, once a realm where the adage “respect your elders” was all but religious law, has become so negligent of its aging Great Men. Even the youth-obsessed rock and pop game doesn’t urge its elders out to pasture in the lazy and fattening grasses…

Although New Orleans is the main attraction in Louisiana for music fans, as too many House of Blues T-shirts attest, the state’s real musical magic, and maybe also the best food, is actually found in the heart of Cajun country to the west of the Crescent City. In fact, the…

Del McCoury Band Don’t go see Del McCoury just because he cut an album (last year’s The Mountain) and toured with Steve Earle. Not that it isn’t a fine recommendation, but McCoury’s anointment by postmodern country icon Earle is just part of the story with the bluegrass singer, guitarist, and…

Jack Ingram Close enough (Lucky Dog/Sony Nashville) It might not be fair to blame Jack Ingram for such acts as the execrable Pat Green or a thoroughly unoriginal and clichéd newcomer like Adam Carroll, but as one of the originators of the post- Robert Earl Keen syndrome, Ingram has definitely…

One of my favorite popular musical tales concerns the writing of “Okie From Muskogee,” a song that enmeshed its author, Merle Haggard, within a cultural and political misunderstanding that seems to have lifted only in the last decade or so. As the story goes, Hag and his band were traveling…

Cornell Hurd and his longtime guitar-playing cohort Paul Skelton are lunching on Cajun food at Hoody’s in Oak Hill, on the southwest edge of Austin. They aren’t sure how they ended up there, but they’re trying to figure it out, tracing the long and sordid line that brought them to…

One might imagine that Doug Sahm came up with the idea of forming the Texas Tornados — his Tex-Mex supergroup with Chicano country crooner Freddy Fender, conjunto music legend Flaco Jimenez, and Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet compadre Augie Meyers — while sipping Corona con lima in a rustic cantina down…

There are moments in Ray Wylie Hubbard’s past he would prefer to forget, as well as some he honestly does not remember. But he offers one tale that he can recall from his lost years with neither embarrassment nor the barely concealed glee of the unreformed. “I came out of…