Texas Blues

Texas Blues are either songs and music that are made in Texas or Blues made by Texas
artists who then take it on the road or overseas to other countries. The audiences around
the world can make a distinction about Texas Blues, because the songs speak of or tell the
story of "some happening" in the Lone Star State, say ZZ Top's "La Grange", T-Bone
Walker's "Trinity River Blues", or Townes Van Zandt's "Rex's Blues". The two principle
areas producing Texas Blues are the Dallas / Ft. Worth area and it's surroundings and the
Houston area and surrounding cities, with Austin and San Antonio also producing native
blues in smaller numbers. Rural cities and small towns also produce Texas Blues, like
Bastrop, Texas which produced Roosevelt Thomas "Grey Ghost" Williams in December 1903, who
in 1940 recorded "Hitler Blues" which was heard all the way across the Atlantic on the
BBC (England) during WWII. Some out of state artists, like Robert Johnson, born May 1911
in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, recorded only in Texas! In San Antonio (1936) and in Dallas
(1937), Johnson recorded 29 different blues songs, his entire catalog. Thousands of blues
guitarists have played his songs over the decades that followed his death in 1938 at the
young age of 27! Are they all playing Texas Blues? Very possible. "Walking Blues",
"Riverside Blues" and all the rest, they were all originally "made in Texas". They might
be considered Texas Blues also, as some of Johnson's songs have "the feel of driving under
the stars, late at night on a dark, lonely Texas dirt road."