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 →
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.
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 →
Janis Joplin
>Janis Joplin's short life illuminated many hard truths. The isolation of a social outsider, the perils that lay in wait for a willful and hard... 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 →
Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez
While their significant individual accomplishments are also profiled here, Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez also collaborated for several magical... Read more →
Willie Nelson
What can be said about this man that hasn't already been debated, cussed and discussed? Not much, given his iconic status in country music and... Read more →
Shawn Colvin
Shawn Colvin is a musical renaissance woman. An important songwriter, but also a dazzling guitarist and singer of extraordinary power with... Read more →
Patty Griffin
Patty Griffin lays herself bare in achingly beautiful meditations on love and all the things that bear on love. Work that is completely fresh and... Read more →
Vince Bell
Vince Bell was born in Dallas in 1951 and the road has since taken him to homes in Venezuela, Houston, Austin, California, Fredericksburg, Nashville... Read more →
James McMurtry
Nobody writes lyrics like James McMurtry. Brilliant, piercing and wry. Sweeping vistas of ordinary lives, set mostly in small towns and dark... Read more →
Lucinda Williams
It is impossible to exaggerate Lucinda Williams’ significance to the evolution of alternative country music. An early voice of independence and... Read more →
Jimmie Vaughan
Jimmie Vaughan learned to play the guitar while growing up in Dallas, and headed south in the late sixties to help create the emerging Austin rhythm... Read more →
Billy Joe Shaver
Stories abound about Billy Joe Shaver, the tragedies endured, the stands taken, the paths chosen. Suffice to say that there is not an insincere bone... Read more →
Buddy Miller
Certain artists serve as engines for the songwriting scene. Their talents go beyond writing and performing their own work into catalyzing and shaping... Read more →
Doug Sahm
Doug Sahm’s influence on Texas music is not well enough known, but impossible to overstate. With his original stew of rock and roll, country, soul,... Read more →
