A lot of places have local music, and many local scenes are widely celebrated. In no other state in America can so many musicians make a living without ever leaving. Nowhere else has its own fully formed musical infrastructure, its own dedicated music chart, its own dedicated stations, its own festivals. Much of it has arisen only in the last 30 years.
Admittedly, I never asked this question when I arrived here from Kentucky. Texas has its own power grid, I said to myself, why wouldn’t it have its own music scene?
The MusicFest at Steamboat was the first festival of its kind to embrace the new music for a multi-day event. Since its start some 4 decades ago, it has exemplified the character of camaraderie that sets Texas country apart.
In a business known for being ruthless and cutthroat, the Texas music scene has always been more about mutual benefit than a zero sum game.
Inevitable tho it may seem now, these things didn’t simply happen. Texas developed its own distinct ecosystem thanks to the foresight and daring of a small group of entrepreneurs, who built a market where one did not yet exist. They laid the ground for a working alliance of independent promoters, radio stations and bands. This mutually beneficial relationship was especially a boon to the audience, who would never have heard this music otherwise, and the artists, many of whom-myself included- may not have been able to make a living without it.
A young John Dickson began his career in another era, when authentic country music was very much on the wane. Around the time of his first Big Ski Trip in 1986, he was promoting regional shows for the likes of Willie, Merle, and Kristofferson. Soon his bills would include local greats like Robert Earl and Jerry Jeff.
In 1996 Dickson started Outlaw Thursdays in Austin, focusing “on established artists of the time that radio would no longer play,” he said. For opening acts he’d often book young Texas artists, like Cory Morrow, then still a college student. The crowd’s enthusiastic response impressed him, and in January 1997, for the first time, multiple Texas artists performed at The MusicFest.
Sensing the potential in this music, Dickson decided to test new waters. In the fall of 1997, he moved Outlaw Thursdays to College Station, at Shadow Canyon (current day known as Shiner Park) , directly across from the A&M campus. He approached the program director of local radio station KORA with a proposition: KORA would be the exclusive presenting station for the concert series, if in exchange they would agree to add these independent Texas artists to their rotation. They agreed, Dickson remembers. “They played these artists when nobody else in the country would.”
KORA DJ Corbin Mock played a crucial role. “I’ve been living, breathing & eating this music for 3 decades of my life,” she said with a laugh. She saw her program director, the late Jason Hightower, begin to slip a Texas country song or 2 into the rotation. “Well if Hightower’s doing it, I wanna do it!” she said. Soon he invited a band to be live on-air guests. “Well if he interviews the band,” she remembers thinking, “I wanna interview the band.”
In short order, Mock became the artists’ go-to DJ. They often addressed packages with their CDs to her, care of the station.
It’s hard now to imagine the monoculture of the late 1990s. If your favorite musician wasn’t on the radio or for sale in the record store racks, the only way you could hear them was in person. The only way to buy their CD was at the merch booth or out of the trunk of their car.
Many Red Dirt artists, fully independent and decidedly unsigned, had only burned CDs to offer up, more than one of which Mock played on her show. Phones would light up, usually with enthusiastic callers wondering who they had just heard, though once she did take a call from her angry station manager, who complained “That’s not country music!”
The new music’s growing popularity allowed DJs to take some risks, and get away with it. Mock remembers thinking “You mean I can play these guys on the radio without asking permission?”
Years before, the likes of Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen had secured its reputation as a songwriter magnet, but by the late ’90s a critical mass of wayward talent had begun to coalesce in College Station. Among the couch surfers and A&M students were future stars of the scene, like Cross Canadian Ragweed, Max Stalling, and Pat Green. It helped that Dickson’s Outlaw Thursdays became a giant hit and spawned similar shows. The Dixie Chicken hosted free shows every Sunday, with artists like Radney Foster, Dale Watson, and Ray Wylie Hubbard playing to huge crowds.
Corbin Mock started producing a syndicated show, The Back Porch, (later called Live From North Gate), where she hosted a band for two hours in front of a live audience. The show became so popular that city hall had to get involved. “We had city ordinances changed!” Mock remembers. People even started tailgating, waiting for the show to start.
Eventually, her show would be syndicated by 17 stations, spreading the music further. Mock had some clever tactics aimed at broadening the appeal. “Whenever I’d interview crowd members,” she explained, “I told them to say their hometown, instead of College Station, to make the scene seem more global.”
They were riding a wave, but, she remembers “Dickson coming a couple years before laid the groundwork. None of us had really heard of these people.”
With Nashville beset by hierarchies and other barriers to entry, word spread of the independence and opportunities arising in Texas. Despite the name, Texas country has embraced artists from everywhere, as long as they have the talent & authenticity to cut it. Being Indiana-born and Kentucky-raised myself, I can attest to the generous welcome extended my way.
Idaho-born Cody Braun and his brother Willy left home in their teens to start the band that would become Reckless Kelly. They first experienced the scene in Portland and Seattle, where there was “no camaraderie,” Cody remembers. “You fought for your space. Every band was like a gang, and every gang was for themselves. It was you against everybody.”
Austin was the opposite. Playing the Continental Club one night a couple years later, they were shocked when Pat Green, then a stranger to them, hopped onstage to sing a Ray Price song. “Down here it was like you were all in the same gang,” Braun said.
Not that everyone was necessarily welcome. “The bar is really high in Texas,” Braun said. “Songwriting, it’s Townes Van Zandt, and on fiddle, it’s Johnny Gimble.”
Cody Canada remembers his fellow performers being a crucial part of bringing Cross Canadian Ragweed to Texas from their hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma. “Other Texas artists embraced us,” Canada said, “so we were accepted.”
The Braun brothers were fortunate to have been raised in a multi-generational musical family, who instilled them with stage manners at a young age. “Play in between,” Cody remembers being told onstage in his early teens. “We’re all taking turns here.” Perhaps that stage etiquette informed inter-band etiquette, lending credence to the notion that cooperation was a far more profitable path than competition.
By the late ’90s the MusicFest had taken off, becoming more of a musical event than a ski trip. Having so many bands at the same fest made for a great fan experience, certainly. But the secret to its special place in the calendar lies on the artist’s side.
In a life characterized by ships passing in the night, Steamboat has become an opportunity to slow down, relax and enjoy each other’s company, to jam off the clock without having to schlep to the next spot. As any musician will tell you, the work lies in moving yourself and your gear all over the country. Once that’s done, work is the furthest thing from a musician’s life.
Much of the magic takes place away from the official shows. Upstairs hangs are legendary for a reason, sometimes lasting all night, and usually featuring at least one unknown. Dallas Burrow, now a seasoned performer with 3 LPs under his belt, took his first trip to Steamboat without a band or a festival gig, lured there on the strength of its reputation for breaking new artists. “I knew there were a ton of music fans migrating to the mountains every year,” he said, “hoping to stumble on a young up and comer.”
You can count on the unexpected. Braun remembers a friend asking him, as a favor, to sit in with a 17-year old at Bear River. Cody was immediately impressed; the kid had a unique thing about him. The kid was named Ryan Bingham, and this proved to be their first of countless gigs together over the years. Reckless Kelly bore the benefit of cross-generational access also, touring with Joe Ely & Robert Earl Keen, relationships that were fostered & strengthened at Steamboat.
Steamboat has been a special place in my life, from my earliest Texas beginnings. I moved to Texas to join Uncle Lucius in December 2010, specifically so I’d be ready for MusicFest 2011, the band’s first. Some of my favorite musical memories happened there, like the time the power in the Big Tent cut off in the middle of our set. We inched to the edge of the stage, guitars and accordion in hand, and played acoustic while hundreds of people stood together silently to listen. Or the time I sat in a song circle with Stoney, Mando, Eady, and Galloway for 8 hours, staying up all night on the last night of the fest, until delirium, and the morning sun, finally set in.
The importance of the scene was far more than mere commerce. Mock waxes rhapsodic when remembering what drove her to become a fanatical supporter of this new music. “It was just so real, so raw, authentic, honest. And accessible! You were hearing them on the radio that day, then going to see them that night, and afterward you’re hanging out and having a beer with them.”
Sometimes you’d even be a part of it. “Someone’d jot something down on a napkin and you’d wonder ‘was I just there for the next big hit?'” she remembers. Above all, Mock expresses gratitude at getting to be a part of the scene’s beginning. “Being in College Station then was the right place, right time.”
Dickson admits he never saw it coming. “Our independent music spread like no one expected. Good music rose to the top- for the right reasons!”
Jon Grossman, writer and musician, Austin, Tx.
Edited by Kathy Grossman