Drunken, turban-topped white folks channeling their inner Mexicans and ripping loose with gringo gritos ("ayayay-ayayay-aiiiieeee!") seemed like great theater to everyone there. Corona bigwigs must have thought otherwise; the commercial never aired. Still, all these years later, the moment stands out as a seminal snapshot in the occasionally rocky marriage of Mexican culture and Texas Outlaw Music. The trend exploded in the 1990s. Now, it seems, there's a gringo on every corner singing his heart out about border towns, cerveza, dark-eyed señoritas, and tequila. "Now that I think about it, everybody has a song about Mexico," said Taylor. "You associate Mexico with having fun." After a while, homage can border on shtick. The latest wave of Texas singer-songwriters has added Mexico to their lyrical list of cheap tricks, although some have relationships with the Hispanic culture that's about as deep as the dregs in a beer bottle. Not a problem for the overwhelmingly white crowds who pack Texas Music concerts and festivals, and maybe not even a stumbling block for thousands of Hispanics in Texas who are drawn to the music of people like Taylor, Robert Earl Keen, and Roger Creager. Still, perhaps what's needed is more Hispanic musicians like John Gómez of Haltom City, an unassuming 21-year-old whose combination of scruffiness, soul, and songwriting talent might be enough to put him at the head of a third wave of Outlaw Music -- a Bandido wave, perhaps -- if he and others like him can crack the white audience's veneer of indifference.
The Texas Music genre has followed a circuitous route to today's market, where major recording companies are increasingly squeezed out of the action by hundreds of regional artists recording their own c.d.'s and selling their own t-shirts, caps, and koozies at gigs they book themselves. A few are getting rich (Pat Green sold 300,000 copies of his indie albums before moving to a major label in 2000). Most are getting by, happy to be doing what they love. A couple of years ago, I watched Slaid Cleaves and his hard-working band burning up a stage in Stephenville with a kick-ass show. Afterward, I opened a Sunday newspaper and saw Parade Magazine's annual study of incomes. Amid the depictions of a smiling cross-section of Americans and their annual incomes was Cleaves, who listed his salary somewhere in the $30,000 range. Texas Music is a hybrid of folk, country, and rock, spawned from Austin-based musicians such as Willie Nelson, Rusty Wier, and Jerry Jeff Walker in the 1970s. The scene collapsed in the mid-1980s, asphyxiated by Nashville "hat acts." The 1990s witnessed an Outlaw return after Keen inspired a new crop of pickers, led by Green, Charlie Robison, Jack Ingram, Jason Boland, and other songsmiths celebrating the Texas way of life, both real and imagined. Nashville cowboy songs, such as those by Marty Robbins in the 1960s, often included references to gauchos, señoritas, and caballos, but the 1970s Outlaw movement paid little attention to Mexico. Instead, the songs bashed Nashville, lamented lost love, and praised Texas, freedom, and outlaw behavior. Current artists are definitely down with the brown. The trend began with the self-titled 1990 album by the Texas Tornados, a band consisting of two Hispanics (Freddy Fender, who'd enjoyed a brief period of Nashville fame in the '70s, along with Flaco Jimenez), plus Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, San Antonio-raised Anglo cult figures from the original Outlaw era. After a big splash, the Tornados were soon forgotten, as white artists began incorporating bilingual lyrics and a Mexican feel in their tunes. Some of their songs are well crafted and fun (Taylor's "Meet Me In Corpus," Ingram's "Inna From Mexico," Tommy Alverson's "Una Mas Cerveza," and a handful by Keen). Some are terribly contrived, such as Kevin Fowler's "Señorita Mas Fina," with these embarrassing lines: "I wanna be your numero uno/ Your one and only vato/ Me love you long time/ That's for sure." Even Keen, who obviously has a soft spot for the Mexican culture, wrote in "Merry Christmas from the Family" the crass (but probably honest) lines, "Little sister brought her new boyfriend/He was a Mexican/We didn't know what to think about him/ 'Til he sang Feliz Navidad." During the 1990s, several talented Hispanic entertainers made a run at Texas Music, without much success. Rick Trevino and Justin Trevino recorded some excellent if obscure albums, but they were seldom seen at the popular festivals and concerts. Tish Hinojosa's lyrical sketches of Mexico found an appreciative audience among folkies, but her music wasn't geared for the more superficial Outlaw crowd. Singer-songwriter Danny Santos had played Houston-area clubs for years, doing cover tunes of Texas artists such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He headed to Austin in the early 1990s hell-bent on singing his own compositions and becoming a Texas Music star. Ten years later, he's still trying, and much wiser in the pitfalls that await a Hispanic singer in a white man's domain. Subtle -- and sometime not so subtle -- prejudices flow from both sides. Some Anglos enjoy the novelty of seeing white entertainers delve into Spanish influences, but are less interested in seeing it done by Hispanics. Entertainers interviewed for this article described intense moments with racist Bubbas, seeing graffiti such as "No Meskins Allowed" in restrooms, and dealing with honkytonk club owners who refused to put Spanish surnames on their marquees for fear of scaring off regular customers. On the flip side, the Mexican culture's reverence for tradition can also cause tension. "The Chicano community can get a little clannish, just like the Anglo community," Santos said. "I've heard references from other Chicanos that I'm a coconut -- brown on the outside and white on the inside. Chicanos are into their culture and that's a good thing. There are not a whole lot of guys like me out there. That may be a blessing or a curse. A lot of labels that I've pitched my music to just didn't know how to market me, or know what I was about, or if they even dug me." For every fluent Spanish-speaking Chicano in the Lone Star State, there's probably another whose Spanish isn't much better than that of a typical Anglo. Bobby Ozuna, 28, grew up in Fort Worth and grew to love Texas Music, especially Pat Green, in part because he was taught to embrace the white world. "I was raised by my father to not speak Spanish because my father grew up with prejudice," he said. Once Ozuna acclimated himself into the white world and country music, his father harped about tradition. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, Ozuna said. "If I could sing, I would sing country music before Tejano music because I can speak the language a heck of a lot better," he said. "But it would get a lot of shit from traditional Mexican people. I'd be a coconut. I'd be a sell-out to the older crowd, but to the younger crowd I'd be cool." Ozuna said he knows many Hispanics who are drawn to Texas Music but aren't interested in going to concerts and festivals and sitting among a sea of white faces. "I talk to a lot of people who are my peers and my background, and they love Pat Green. They love the music -- it's just how to embrace it and where to go. You have to go to Billy Bob's in Fort Worth instead of Desperados in Arlington; different territory, different crowd. It's the same as when I used to go to Tejano clubs, and there were always two or three black guys there dancing to Tejano, and people would wonder, 'Why are they here?'" |
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From the week of January 28
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