Women in Texas Music
By Jay Brakefield
This history of women in Texas music first appeared in the 1996-1997 Texas Almanac. It has been expanded and updated for the Texas Almanac Web site.
The music business has been as male-dominated as other aspects of our society. Until recently, women generally could succeed as performers only when they shaped their careers in socially acceptable ways.
But there were always strong, ambitious women who were willing to push the envelope. In some cases, this led to success; in others, to tragedy.
Several are profiled here.
Country: Texas Ruby, Charline and Cindy
One of the first female performers to challenge male dominance in the country music industry was Texas Ruby, who was billed as the "Sophie Tucker of the Feminine Folk Singers."
Ruby Agnes Owens was born in 1908 in Wise County. Her musical family included niece Laura Lee Owens McBride, who sang with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the '40s.
With her husband, trick fiddler Curly Fox, Texas Ruby was a fixture at the Grand Ole Opry from 1944 to 1948. During that time she also had hit records for Columbia and King. She sang honky-tonk material in a strong, distinctive voice and wrote many of her own songs.
Ruby was a favorite of Texas audiences while she and her husband lived in Houston from 1948 to '62. After returning to Nashville, they recorded a comeback album together in early 1963. A few days later, she died in a fire in their mobile home while her husband was away performing. She apparently passed out while smoking.
Charline Arthur was a classic case of someone born ahead of her time. In the 1950s, "Charline leaped from stage amplifiers, hollered honky-tonk blues, sang lying down on stage, and cavorted wildly to entertain the tough Texas crowds," according to the book Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music.
She left Paris, Texas, in 1945, at age 15, with a medicine show. Four years later, she was playing honky-tonks with husband Jack Arthur as her manager and recorded a single, "I've Got the Boogie Blues," for the Bullet label.
Colonel Tom Parker, who later managed Elvis Presley, heard her on a West Texas radio station and, in 1952, brought her to the attention of RCA Records. She toured with the top country stars of the time and appeared on such important programs as "Louisiana Hayride" and Dallas' "Big D Jamboree."
But her relationship with RCA was stormy, because of her feisty personality and her sometimes racy lyrics. RCA dropped her in 1956, and no other label picked her up; she was reduced to playing small honky-tonks. She managed a comeback in the '70s, but had to give up performing due to crippling arthritis in her hands. She died in her sleep in 1987 at age 58.
Cindy Walker of Mexia achieved success as both singer and songwriter. She broke into show business in 1941 on a trip to Los Angeles with her parents.
Walker remained in LA for 13 years, writing hundreds of songs, many of which became hits for a diverse roster of artists, including "Dream Baby" (Roy Orbison), "You Don't Know Me" (originally recorded by Eddie Arnold, later revived by Ray Charles and Mickey Gilley) and several Bob Wills songs, including "Cherokee Maiden," "Dusty Skies" and "Bubbles in My Beer."
Walker also made "Soundies," the 1940s-filmed predecessors to videos, and appeared in movies with Gene Autry. Her song "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again" was a Top 10 hit in 1944.
Walker quit performing in 1947 to concentrate on songwriting. In 1954, she returned to Mexia, where she continued her writing with the help of her mother, Oree Walker, who played piano on all her daughter's demo tapes. They lived together until Oree Walker's death in 1991.
Cindy Walker was the first woman inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Blues, Gospel and Jazz: Sippie, Katie and Ella Mae
"Sippie" Wallace illustrated the connection between blues and gospel, two forms often believed diametrically opposed. Born Beulah Thomas in Houston in 1899, she was playing organ in church by age 7. While living in Chicago in the '20s, she had a string of hit blues records on the Okeh label.
She found not a bit of difference between blues and gospel, she said in the 1985 interview, a year before her death. "I play for a church right now. . . . You don't see any place in the Bible that says you'll go to hell if you sing the blues. If you can sing gospel, you can sing the blues. The only thing that divides the blues from the gospel are the words. Where you say 'Lord' in gospel, in blues you say 'Daddy.'"
Sippie Wallace recorded and performed almost to the end of her long life, sometimes with pop/blues singer Bonnie Raitt, who recorded some of Wallace's delightfully bawdy songs such as "Mighty Tight Woman" and "Women Be Wise."
Katie Webster, too, mixed a number of influences into her sound. The pianist and singer, born in Houston in 1939, explained her style this way in the book Meeting the Blues: "I have a little bit of everything in my style. I don't just do blues. I do country and western, gospel. My dad was a minister and my mother was a missionary and classically trained pianist." Though her mother didn't want her playing jazz or blues on the family piano, family friends included rhythm and blues artists Amos Milburn and Little Willie Littlefield. She also listened to jazz singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and out of all these influences fashioned her own vital, distinctive style.
In a career that began in the 1950s, Webster performed and recorded with everyone from Houston bluesman Juke Boy Bonner to Otis Redding and James Brown. She remained popular in this country and in Europe until her death in 1999.
Ella Mae Morse had a brief but meteoric career as a ground-breaking big-band singer. Morse was born in Mansfield in 1924. When she was 13, she boldly auditioned with Jimmy Dorsey's band at Dallas' Adolphus Hotel. She and her mother told Dorsey she was 19, and he hired her.
According to the book, All Music Guide, the teenager was fired when Dorsey learned her true age, and she joined Freddie Slack's band in 1942. Her recording of "Cow Cow Boogie" with Slack's group became Capitol's first gold record. The following year, she began a solo recording career that lasted until 1957. She continued performing until 1987.
The white singer's recordings often rose higher on the black charts than in the pop category. She mixed jazz, country, pop and R& B, and the beginnings of rock 'n' roll can be heard in such tunes as "Blacksmith Blues," "Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet" and "House of Blue Lights." Ella Mae Morse died in 1999.
Texas-Mexican: Selena, Lydia, Chelo and Carmen y Laura
In recent years, Tejano music has become synonymous to many with Selena Quintanilla Pérez, whose popularity has only increased since her 1995 shooting death.
Selena, as she's known, was born in 1971 in Freeport, and displayed musical talent from an early age. She performed in a family band managed by her father, Abraham Quintanilla, who had abandoned his own musical career to raise a family.
Selena had it all: She was intelligent and attractive and possessed of a powerful voice and stage presence. Her rise paralleled the soaring popularity of Tejano, which resulted from the fusion of older forms.
In the words of writer Ramiro Burr, "Selena's great talent was her ability to reinvent the basic Mexican cumbia, turning it into a keyboard-driven dance-party fever tune. Her pop hits crackled with catchy hooks, sing-along choruses, the celebratory improvisation of salsa, and even the sweaty jump fever of reggae."
Selena's posthumously released crossover album, Dreaming of You, included pop songs in English and illustrated her versatility. It also underscored the tragedy of her early death.
Selena was hardly the first Texas Mexican-American woman to achieve stardom, however. Before her, the premier solo female performers in Texas-Mexican music were Chelo Silva and Lydia Mendoza known as "Las Grandes de Tejas" – the two Texas greats. Both enjoyed wide popularity not only in Texas, but throughout Latin America. Their styles were quite different, though both possessed a very soulful quality.
Lydia Mendoza, known as the "Lark of the Border," was born in Houston in 1916. The family moved around a great deal in this country and Mexico when she was young, but by 1927 had settled in San Antonio. The next year, she made her first recordings in that city for the Okeh label as part of her family's traveling musical group. While they were playing in San Antonio's Plaza del Zacate (Haymarket Square), Lydia came to the attention of radio pioneer Manuel J. Cortez and became a local radio success. In 1934 she recorded "Mal Hombre," accompanying herself on 12-string guitar. This record made her the first Texas-Mexican recording star. She performed until suffering a stroke in 1988. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented her with a National Medal of Arts.
Mendoza performed and recorded with various bands, in a duet with her mother, Leonor, and in a trio with her sisters, María and Juanita, who attained popularity on their own as the duet Hermanas Mendoza (the Mendoza Sisters).
Chelo Silva was the undisputed queen of the bolero, a form of song in which women, in no uncertain terms and often rather salty language, voice their complaints about the no-good, cheating men in their lives. She should not be confused with a Mexican ranchera singer simply known as Chelo, who was popular in the 1970s.
Silva was born in Brownsville in 1922 and began her long career performing at the Continental Club there. She made her first recordings in 1954 for Discos Falcon. During the late 1950s, she was "probably the best-selling female recording artist on either side of the border," according to the liner notes for the Arhoolie album Tejano Roots: The Women (1946-70).
Arhoolie founder Chris Strachwitz recalls seeing Chelo Silva perform in San Antonio's Rosedale Park not long before her death in 1988. Though her voice was almost gone and she talked her way through the songs, she held a huge crowd spellbound and inspired her accompanist, accordionist Flaco Jiménez, to new heights of creativity.
The popular duet of Carmen y Laura consisted of sisters Carmen and Laura Hernández, born in Kingsville in 1921 and 1926, respectively. Carmen married Armando Marroquín, who went into the jukebox business in nearby Alice. After World War II, Marroquín began making his own records, first recording his wife and her sister in the Marroquín kitchen.
A few months later, Marroquín and businessman Paco Betancourt founded Ideal Records and moved the recording operation out of the house. The sisters continued to be the most popular act on the label and toured extensively, often performing with dance bands signed to the label, such as those of Beto Villa and Pedro Bugarín. In their hundreds of records for Ideal, they recorded with a variety of musicians, from orchestras to accordion conjuntos.
Rock 'n' Roll, Etc.: Janis, Marcia and Michelle
One of Texas' most famous musical performers of either sex was Janis Joplin, born in Port Arthur in 1943. Growing up, she was fascinated by black performers such as blues diva Bessie Smith and the music she heard in the nightclubs in neighboring Louisiana.
Attending the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960s, Joplin fell in with a crowd of folk musicians who gathered to sing at the gas station/beer joint of Ken Threadgill, who enjoyed singing Jimmie Rodgers songs. But, finding Texas too confining, Joplin moved to San Francisco, where she became a regular performer at such hippie venues as the Fillmore ballroom. Her performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival made her a national star.
Fame did nothing, however, to ease her personal insecurities, and she worked hard to maintain her tough, hard-living image. She died in 1970 of a drug overdose.
Pianist and singer Marcia Ball originally hails from Louisiana, but has been a fixture on the Austin music scene since the early 1970s, when she led a "progressive country" band called Freda and the Firedogs. She wore cowgirl outfits and sometimes yodeled Patsy Montana songs such as "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart."
But Ball found cosmic cowboy music too confining. Her influences range from singers Irma Thomas and Etta James to New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair.
These days, Ball's music is a rollicking, all-but-unclassifiable mixture of any number of influences, from country to blues, rock and zydeco.
Michelle Shocked, too, is tough to classify. Generally she's labeled a folk singer, but she combines her folk with a punk sensibility. Born in 1962 and raised in East Texas, Shocked burst on the scene in 1987 with the album Texas Campfire Tapes, which was recorded while she was singing offstage at the Kerrville Folk Festival.
Since then, Shocked has gone off in unexpected directions with an album of big-band swing and Arkansas Traveler, a collection of minstrel-show songs. She became quite involved in the study of this tradition and aroused controversy with her remarks about music and racism at a 1992 Austin music conference.
Jay Brakefield is co-author with Alan Govenar of Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (University of North Texas Press, 1998), a study of the Dallas neighborhood known for its contributions to blues and jazz.
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