Bøger i John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music, sponsored by the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University serien

Provides a wide view of the myriad contributions Mexican American artists have made to music in Texas and the United States. Based on interviews with longtime stalwarts of Mexican American music and conversations with newer voices, Kathleen Hudson allows the musicians to tell their own stories in a unique and personal way.

Following the successful pattern established in his works on Townes Van Zandt and Ray Wylie Hubbard, music journalist Brian Atkinson has interviewed artists such as Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, and many others to learn how Mickey Newbury's influence continues to shape the musical and artistic approach of both seasoned and newer performers.

Today, more than sixty years after he first stepped onto a stage, Delbert McClinton shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to play sold-out concert and dance halls, theaters, and festival events across America. This book offers readers a soundtrack to some of the most pivotal moments in the history of American popular music - all backed by a cooking rhythm section.

Billy Joe Shaver wrote ten of the eleven songs included on Waylon Jennings's landmark album Honky Tonk Heroes and played a dominant role in the origins and development of the Outlaw Country movement of the 1970s. This book seeks to give Shaver the recognition his prolific output deserves.

""Transcendence came with a price," Brian T. Atkinson writes in his introduction to this collection of reflections by and about pioneer psychedelic rocker Roky Erickson (1947-2019). The singer and songwriter who fronted the 13th Floor Elevators burst onto the Texas music scene in 1966 with the release of "You're Gonna Miss Me," the band's only charting single, which featured Erickson's primal vocal stylings. The band attracted considerable regional attention, including interest from a young Janis Joplin, who considered joining the group before opting to go to San Francisco instead. Through his interviews with those who were there and presentation of Erickson's own words, Atkinson chronicles how Erickson was haunted for most of his life by mental illness, likely compounded by his liberal usage of hallucinogenic and other drugs. Despite that, however, his influence on Texas musicians of various genres is vast. As Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top attests in his foreword, "He stands alone to this day and is revered as an artist because he had the gift of a wonderful voice." As with his previous books on Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Mickey Newbury, Atkinson has recorded hours of interviews with veteran and upcoming musicians who were impacted by Roky Erickson. Along with the insights of long-time music journalists like Joe Nick Patoski and the bittersweet recollections of friends and family members like Mikel Erickson, brother of the singer, this work includes poetry and lyrics written by Erickson during his confinement at Rusk State Hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The picture that emerges is that of a brilliant, troubled mind and an artist whose influence extended far beyond the period of his greatest notoriety, continuing even beyond his death"--