Soon the writers-who had all grown up in small towns, with Musgraves hailing from tiny Golden, in East Texas-found themselves heading down a melancholy path, their words outlining the experiences of rural folks trapped in lives of quiet desperation: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, we get bored so we get married.”ĭespite the desolate lyrics, the music had a lilting vibe that was almost sweet. “I don’t know what they’re selling,” his mom had said, “Mary Kay or Mary Jane, but they’re doing something.” Musgraves latched onto the “Mary” theme, and the three began playing around with it. While they worked, McAnally told a story about his mom, whose neighbor always had a bunch of cars out front. She had put out a few indie albums in her teens, and now the 22-year-old was preparing for her major-label debut. Several years ago Kacey Musgraves was on a ranch near Strawn, west of Fort Worth, writing songs with her friends Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne. Meanwhile, the Tornadoes soldiered on, bitter but wiser, until 1971, when they disbanded. “Tighten Up” eventually went to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100, taking Bell with it. Yet when the 45 came out, it had only two composers listed: Bell and Butler. I said, ‘I’m gonna write a song for that.’ ” Regardless of who wrote the words, it’s clear that the Tornadoes wrote the music. And according to Bell, he wrote them himself: “Billy Butler, one of the guys in the, was dancing in the house one day, and I asked him what he was doing and he said he was doing the tighten up. The Tornadoes’ drummer said they came from the trumpeter. But where Bell actually got the words is open to conjecture. “I can’t remember how many times we tried it, over and over again-maybe twenty-five or thirty takes-before Archie said ‘tighten up’ to everything,” Frazier wrote in his autobiography.Īs Bell says in the song, the “tighten up” is a dance he and his pals started. In 1968 Frazier got the Tornadoes to record one of their biggest songs, an ebullient two-chord instrumental with a phenomenally catchy guitar riff, then brought the Drells front man into the studio to add words. Frazier also managed bands, including R&B dance band the TSU Tornadoes and vocal group Archie Bell and the Drells. One of the city’s prime movers was Skipper Lee Frazier, a DJ on the black-owned soul station KCOH. Houston music in the sixties wasn’t all psychedelia there was a thriving soul and R&B scene too. And you’ll definitely never listen to Gladys Knight again without thinking of Farrah Fawcett. You might find yourself, for example, giving a shout-out to the TSU Tornadoes or Scarface’s grandmother.
The stories, whether told by Willie Nelson or Augie Meyers, Kacey Musgraves or the Butthole Surfers, are as funny and weird, as heartfelt and tragic, as the songs themselves and may even change how you hear them. From nothingness to immortality, these are the secret histories behind 25 great Texas songs. Others were slaved over until the words and music were just right, the heart working with the head and the tune working with the lyrics to create a classic, a song that will live forever. Some of the songs, as the writers like to say, practically wrote themselves. Then came a narrative, something about the girlfriend of a guy on the touch-football team or the fry cook who’s about to go fight in Iraq. This happenstance led to a riff or a melody, maybe from an old blues ballad or a nursery rhyme twisted by memory. So where do these great songs come from? The short answer-acquired after interviews with the writers of some of the state’s best-loved songs, the ones being sung at this very moment in cars and grocery stores all over creation-is that many of them began as happy accidents, spurred by a curious headline, a chance comment, a strange encounter. These are not the songs being churned out by staff songwriters. But what about a great song, one you can’t get out of your head, with verses that seem to be written about your own life and a melody that makes your heart feel as though it’s literally aching? A song you wake up mumbling, sing out loud when it comes on the car radio, mouth the words to when you hear it at the grocery store-then laugh when you see the person in line next to you doing the same thing? Great songs haunt us and arouse us they make us think and feel in a way that no other art can, taking us to places we long to go every time we hear them. The world is absolutely cluttered with tales told in song, most under four minutes long. So do countless songwriters in Nashville: melody, verse, chorus. Children do it all the time, humming tunes and making up words. It’s not that hard to write a song, really.
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