Lone Star Beer And Bob Wills Music (Red Steagall)

I forget who loaned me the Red Steagall album with this as its title song, but I know it was in Vancouver, BC, and I taped all the songs I liked–which was most of them–and learned this one and “Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You),” which remains a staple of my repertoire.

At the time I barely knew who Bob Wills was and had never tasted Lone Star, so I’m in Steagall’s debt for introducing me to Western Swing, one of the most exciting and influential byways of American music.

That first album also spurred one of my rare and abortive ventures into songwriting. Under its influence, I composed a pseudo-western swing number called “The Beer Stain on the Counter Looks Like Texas.” I don’t remember the first and only verse, but the chorus went:

That beer stain on the counter looks like Texas,
The peanuts are El Paso and the ashtray’s San Antone.
Yeah, that beer stain on the counter looks like Texas,
And I wish that I was back there now, down in my Texas home.

Which may explain why I don’t do more songwriting. Around the same time I wrote half a George Jones-style weeper called, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now.” I tried to get Bill Morrissey to collaborate on that one, but he wasn’t biting.

I don’t think I’ve heard another Red Steagall album, but along with Willie and Waylon — particularly Waylon, who composed a parallel song, “Bob Wills Is Still the King” — he focused my attention on Texas music, and I’m duly grateful. I’ve since spent a fair amount of time in the state, hitching and driving around and across it, and I won’t claim I know it well, but I’ve certainly developed a deep respect for its musical offspring. I’ve spent many interesting hours immersed in Wills’s canon, and that took me to Spade Cooley and Milton Brown, and then the long line of honky-tonkers following Ernest Tubb, Dave Dexter, and the marvelous Floyd Tillman, and later-generation songwriters like Terry Allen, Jo Carol Pierce, Joe Ely, and Lyle Lovett. Not to mention all the Mexican and Chicano music that’s come out of there, and all the blues, and jazz — Flaco Jimenez, Little Joe, Steve Jordan, Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Ornette Coleman… it’s a big state, but still disproportionately rich and generous in terms of its music.

And while I’m touching on this subject, I should plug a wonderful book that never got enough attention: Lone Star Swing, by Duncan McLean, a Scottish novelist who won a literary prize that had to be spent on travel outside the UK and, having never been further than London, decided to spend it hunting up Wills’s surviving bandsmen. It’s a very funny book, with a wonderfully off-kilter view of the American southwest, and an affectionate primer on the music. McLean’s Scottish rewrite of “That’s What I Like About the South” is worth the price of admission by itself, notably overshadowing my own half-assed efforts in that direction.