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Over the Map:
True Heroes of Texas MusicBy
Michael Corcoran
(Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2005)
Number Seventeen in the
Jack and Doris
Smothers Series
in Texas History, Life, and Culture.
Illustrated. 176
pages.
ISBN: 978-0-292-70976-8.
Review
by Dr. Kirk Bane |
|
“Waylon
Jennings had it all. Movie-star looks. A warm, forceful voice. A gift for writing
frill-less songs that roused the soul. But Jennings possessed one quality that
rose above all the others. When he announced his arrival as a country music star
with 1968’s ‘Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,’ he sounded like no one who had
come before him. That’s only happened three or four times in the history of country
music…In an era when label bosses kept their acts in the middle of the road, Jennings
swerved from side to side and told them to eat his dust. That black hat wasn’t
just for decoration, Hoss.” So begins Michael Corcoran in his engaging essay on
the outlaw musician from Littlefield,
Texas, one of thirty-five pieces in this conversational, captivating collection.
In addition to Jennings, Corcoran, former music critic for the Dallas
Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman, also features lively vignettes
on Lone Star performers as diverse as Ernest Tubb, Doug Sahm, Sly Stone, Bobby
Fuller, Archie Bell and the Drells, Cindy Walker, Selena, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Blind
Willie Johnson, and the Butthole Surfers. He divides his study into seven parts:
East Texas/Houston, Dallas Area, Waco Area, Austin, San Antonio and the Rio Grande
Valley, West Texas, and Bonus Tracks, which includes such articles as “The New
Sincerity: Austin in the Eighties” and “The Texas Top 40: Michael Corcoran’s List
of the Best Texas Recordings Ever.” Corcoran’s artists not only come from various
regions of the state, they also play a wide range of music, including country,
blues, rock, rap, soul, gospel, Cajun, and Tejano. Hence his clever title, All
Over the Map.
“No state is more musical than Texas,
whose very geography seems to hum. Almost every city reminds you of a song, and
so it’s easy to break into a medley of ‘San Antonio Rose,’ ‘El Paso,’ ‘Streets
of Laredo,’ ‘Amarillo by Morning,’ ‘Galveston,’ and ‘La Grange’ while checking
out the ol’ Rand McNally…Indeed, Texas is the biggest
and the boldest when it comes to its songs and sounds.” Corcoran offers unforgettable
portraits of his subjects. Sly and the Family Stone, he maintains, “erased the
boundaries of race, sex, and musical styles back when Prince and the Revolution
were wearing swaddling clothes…The Family Stone’s eternal moment came at the Woodstock
festival on August 16, 1969, when they tore up a crowd of four thousand with a
wicked version of ‘I Want to Take You Higher.’ Because of transportation problems
and scheduling snafus beyond their control, Sly and the band didn’t go on at Woodstock
until 3:30 A.M. When they revved up their turbulent soul revue, though, it became
midnight all over again.” Assessing Willie Nelson, Corcoran asserts that the “phases
and stages of Willie’s career have found him evolving from the honky-tonk sideman
to the hit Nashville songwriter, from progressive country pioneer to crooner of
standards. And now the iconoclast has become the icon, with Willie achieving American
folk hero status…This pot-smoking Zen redneck in pigtails, who sings Gershwin
through his nose and plays a guitar that looks like he picked it up at a garage
sale, transcends music and has come to personify the individual, the rectangular
peg to the round hole of corporatization.” Or consider Corcoran’s observations
on Selena Quintanilla. “By its very structure,” he contends, “Tejano is a blend
of two cultures, and Selena was a bridge between them. Such tunes as ‘Techno Cumbia,’
with its Michael Jackson-like trills, and the reggae-heavy ‘Bidi Bidi Bom Bom’
present a seamless blend of convex styles. Dreaming of You also contains a duet
with world music frequent flier David Byrne on ‘God’s Child,’ with Selena handling
the Spanish parts with fire and grace. Like Elvis Presley, whose legend has overshadowed
his skill, Selena could sing it all, from Latin soul to mariachi to Valley pop
to lounge act schmaltz…The countless quickie bios tell us that Selena loved to
shop at Wal-Mart, even after she was rich and famous. Her favorite restaurant
was Pizza Hut. Like most Tejanas, her first language was English. She was very
much a product of her surroundings.”
Students of Texas popular culture,
especially those interested in music, will relish this entertaining, informative
anthology, a true treat to read. They’ll definitely demand an encore!
Note:
Corcoran’s latest publication is He is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona
Dranes (Tompkins Square, 2012), a biography of the blind gospel singer from Sherman,
Texas.
- Review by Dr. Kirk Bane (Blinn College—Bryan campus)
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