Texas Country

Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Singer-Songwriters Billy Joe Shaver, Kris Kristofferson, and Townes Van Zant are the spiritual godfathers of the progressive Texas Country scene that sprung up around Austin, Tex., in the 1970s. When Nelson moved back to Texas to escape the artistic constraints of Nashville's assembly line Country, he and a loose group of confederates were seen as the leaders of the so-called Outlaw movement. Their sound was stripped of the studio gloss-it was spare, hard, and Honky Tonk, with lyrics that were far more instrospective and ambitious than the usual drinking and cheating clichýs. Texas-based artists Jerry Jeff Walker and Kinky Friedman, and their descendents Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock, took the music of Texas bar rooms and dance halls-Honky Tonk and Western Swing-combined it with folk and rock, and imbued the music with with a sense of the metaphysical. Witness Hancock's "If I Were a Bluebird" and the mythologizing of beautiful losers in Van Zant's "Pancho and Lefty."