Sam Baker
Heralded as among America’s finest songwriters since his debut in 2004, Sam Baker is a stone cold original with no discernible influences other... Read more →
Songwriter Profiles
Our favorite songwriters who have paid their dues and earned their stripes. Many have Texas roots and many more have been impacted by the Austin music scene. It’s a pretty long list, and it just keeps growing.
Darden Smith
Since moving to Austin in the early eighties to attend the University of Texas, Darden Smith has grown into a renowned songwriter and performer, as... Read more →
Michael Fracasso
Michael Fracasso’s voice is high, pure and lonesome, but full of hope and strength, and his delicate songs beg us to feel a little deeper. On-stage... Read more →
Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison's voice might have been enough, as strong and versatile as ever to grace American roots music. But stack that voice next to the... Read more →
Freddie King
Hailing from Gilmer, Texas, Freddie King held his own with B. B. King, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and other masters of the electric blues. In the... Read more →
Justin Trevino
If you’re a two-stepper, find Justin Trevino in a Hill Country beer joint and travel back a few decades. Born in Brownsville, raised in Austin and... Read more →
BettySoo
BettySoo writes profound pop/folk with just enough country to makes things comfortable. At once powerful and vulnerable, she handles us like a big... Read more →
Miles Zuniga
Miles Zuniga left Laredo for Austin in 1984, determined to make a life out of music. In 1994, he teamed up with Tony Scalzo and Joe Shuffield and... Read more →
Butch Hancock
Another musical luminary from the Lubbock area, Butch Hancock is best known for his on and off collaboration with Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore... Read more →
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Mary Chapin Carpenter is a songwriter of uncommon depth and sensitivity who came of age in the seventies as a folksinger in the clubs of Washington,... Read more →
John Fullbright
Oklahoma is sort of the Bermuda Triangle of the Great Plains. We know there's some magical stuff going on within those dusty borders, but we're a... Read more →
John Prine
John Prine began his artistic journey in 1971 with the release of John Prine, a stunning collection of poems set to melody that revealed middle... Read more →
Ruthie Foster
Many fine artists had their beginnings in gospel. Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Al Greene, even Elvis and Jerry Lee. A surprising progression, maybe,... Read more →
Willis Alan Ramsey
Confounding and eccentric, Willis Alan Ramsey thundered onto the scene in 1972 with the release of Willis Alan Ramsey, a rollicking, joyful, sexy... Read more →
Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett is an artistic renaissance man with an impeccable Texas pedigree and a life that testifies to Lone Star independence and... Read more →
Jimmy LaFave
Jimmy LaFave, who passed away on May 21, 2017, was another Austin artist who took the building blocks of folk and country, strength, soul and an... Read more →
Jo Carol Pierce
The empty spaces of West Texas have proven a petri dish for the fashioning of powerful but unorthodox art. Music, of course, but also literature,... Read more →
Jim Lauderdale
Jim Lauderdale's baritone twang is booming and earnest and sketches a roadmap of the roots and pedigree of real American country music. The journey... Read more →
Townes Van Zandt
Perhaps the purest poet of all Texas songwriters, Townes Van Zandt wrote essential love songs and portrayed the shattered lives of lonely... Read more →
Jon Dee Graham
Jon Dee Graham was raised on a Texas ranch down near the Mexican border and moved to Austin to attend school. By 1979 he was playing guitar for... Read more →
Rodney Crowell
Rodney Crowell entered the world at Crosby (formerly known as "Lick Skillet"), Texas, and was raised in a musical family in Houston. He started... Read more →
Bruce Robison
Bruce Robison hales from the storied Texas town of Bandera, way out on the western edge of the paradise they call the Hill Country. One of the... Read more →
Max Gomez
Max Gomez was raised in the starkly beautiful terrain that surrounds Taos, New Mexico. Nothing that the average American would recognize. Tall,... Read more →
Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons was born Ingram Cecil Connor III, in 1946 in Winter Haven, Florida, to Coon Dog and Avis Connor. By his death at the age of... Read more →
