The young Tejano singer onstage — clad in skintight black head-to-toe, hair dyed black in a short shiny pompadour and wearing big loop earrings — looks like she’s skipping or maybe doing a modern tango. She’s in flight, and the …
Category: Texas Music
Backstory to an iconic photo of “brotherly love.”
The iconic photograph of the legendary Vaughan Brothers – Jimmie and Stevie Ray – sitting on a couch, smiling, arms over each other’s shoulders and flanked by electric guitars was taken by Scott Van Osdol and Jeff Rowe in spring …
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Stevie Ray Vaughan comes to The Wittliff
The recent acquisition of a substantive Steve Ray Vaughan archive is the latest gem preserved at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, home of more than 500 historic literary, photographic, film and music collections. The new SRV collection offers …
Looking into the face of the Grey Ghost
In 1994, sculptor Cindy Debold met the Grey Ghost. Her first impression of the legendary blues pianist born Roosevelt Williams was that he was rather frail and shy. He was 90 at the time. The Grey Ghost arrived at Debold’s …
Who was Mr. Bojangles?
Polka Dot Slim. Pork Chops. Babe Stovall. Re-Pete. They are the nicknames of African American street performers who worked the New Orleans’ French Quarter in the early and mid-1960s. One of them is likely Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles.” The …
Jerry Jeff Walker memorial was like a deep dive into his archives
Tales of a pilfered puppy in Nashville, campfire songs in Ohio, sangria wine in Coconut Grove. Jerry Jeff Walker was remembered with affection and honored in song at an outdoor memorial tribute concert for 1,000 fans and friends in Luckenbach …
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Original ‘Mr. Bojangles’ lyrics on display at The Wittliff
The earliest known surviving set of Jerry Jeff Walker’s handwritten lyrics for “Mr. Bojangles” exist because a plucky young guitar repairman in New Jersey asked Walker to write them down so he could learn the song. Walker wasn’t yet a …
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Jerry Jeff Walker: The First Demo
The recording was unearthed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in January 2018, more than a half century after it was made. The audio captured on the portable reel-to-reel tape machine – a German-made UHER 4000 Report-L popular in the early 1960s …
“It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll” in Tennessee and Texas
By Wittliff staff member, Library Specialist, Sherri Turner-Herrmann. Rock and roll hit me like a freight train early on. When I was 8, my cousin introduced me to Alice Cooper and that’s when the first train hit. Shock rock, hard …
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The Moving Sidewalks meet Jimi Hendrix
Texas music lovers hold ZZ Top especially dear. After 50 years, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard feel more like friends than rock icons. Here at The Wittliff Collections, we love ’em, too. The new Netflix documentary “ZZ Top: …
THE KEYSTONE 