Willie Nelson, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, Tish Hinojosa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lyle Lovett...the list of popular songwriters from Texas just goes on and on. In this collection of thirty-four interviews with these and other songwriters, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs, letting the singers' own words describe where their songs come from and how the diverse, eclectic cultures, landscapes, and musical traditions of Texas inspire the creative process.

Conducted in dance halls, dressing rooms, parking lots, clubs-wherever the musicians could take time to tell their...

"They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad/Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's also sad." There's a lot more to the blues than three chords played on an old beat-up guitar. Squeeze My Lemon is a collection of some of the best bluues lines ever recorded. From birth ("Born under a bad sign/I've been down since I began to crawl") to death ("Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants tto die") and everything in between, this volume quotes classic blues phrases by ssongwriter/artists B.B. King, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Robert JJohnson and many, many others....

It is our most passionate music, rooted in ancient Africa but brought to blossom in America at the doorstep of the twentieth century. It is a living heritage of song born in poverty, persecution, and hard labor, born of love and love betrayed, of holiness and sin, the pleasures and the pains of the flesh, the experience of tragedy, comedy, drunkenness, despair, desolation, and pure joy. It is the blues.
At root, the blues is rich in its simplicity, but it has flowered across the years in a variety of rare complexity. Perhaps no form of popular art is more immediately appealing than the...