Lubbock on Everything: the Evocation of Place in the Music of West Texas

02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:27 PM Page 255 16 Lubbock on Everything: The Evocation of Place in the Music of West Texas Blake Gumprecht The role of landscape and the importance of place in literature, poetry, the visual arts, even cinema and television are well established and have been widely discussed and written about. Think of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the New England poetry of Robert Frost, the regionalist paintings of John Steuart Curry, or, in a contemporary sense, the early movies of Barry Levinson, with their rich depictions of Baltimore. There are countless other examples. Texas could be considered a protagonist in the novels of Larry McMurtry. The American Southwest is central to the art of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York City acts as far more than just a setting for the films of Woody Allen. The creative arts have helped shape our views of such places, and the study of works in which particular places figure prominently can help us better understand those places and human perceptions of them.1 Place can also be important to music, yet this has been largely overlooked by scholars. The literature on the subject, in fact, is nearly nonexistent. A sim- ple search of a national library database, for example, retrieved 295 records under the subject heading “landscape in literature” and more than 1,000 under the heading “landscape in art,” but a similar search using the phrase “landscape in music” turned up nothing.2 This line of inquiry is so poorly de- veloped that no equivalent subject heading has been established. More ex- haustive searches, likewise, yielded almost no major studies in this area. John Reprinted by permission from Journal of Cultural Geography 18 (1998): 61–81. 255 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:27 PM Page 256 256 Part III, Chapter 16 Burke’s book Musical Landscapes, in which the author looks at the influence of the British landscape on the music of classical composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar, appears to be the only contemporary, English-language monograph of this sort.3 The influence of place on music has received little attention even within the growing subfield of music geography. Over the last three decades, cultural geographers have produced an increasingly diverse body of work on musical subjects; two separate book collections of such research have been published since 1994.4 But a closer examination of research on the geography of music reveals that the majority of published scholarship in this subfield has focused on the origins, diffusion, and distribution of musical styles, performers, and re- lated elements—subjects that are largely quantifiable or mapable. This has been especially true of geographic studies on popular music.5 Research seek- ing to examine the influence of place on popular music has been rare, and nearly all such studies produced have been so broad in geographic, thematic, or temporal scope that they have revealed little of what music can tell us about specific places.6 Others, too, have recognized the failure of cultural geographers to explore the linkages between music and place. Susan Smith, for example, has criti- cized geographers for privileging sight over hearing in landscape study and for neglecting “the extent to which sound generally, and music in particular, structures spaces and characterizes place.”7 In urging cultural geographers to pay greater attention to musical subjects, Lily Kong notes that music “can serve as useful primary source material to understand the character and iden- tity of places.”8 George Carney remarked in 1994 that “curiously, music geographers have completed little in the way of cultural landscape interpreta- tion, although the topic lends itself to this approach.” He added that “the possibilities for landscape analysis using music seem endless.”9 The annals of American popular music are filled with examples of artists whose work evokes a strong sense of place. With songs like “Tulare Dust” and “Kern River,” Merle Haggard has created an evolving portrait of life in Cali- fornia’s San Joaquin Valley. Bruce Springsteen so captured the feeling of growing up in and around Asbury Park, New Jersey, on his early albums that he will be forever linked with that place. The music of bands like the Beach Boys and the Eagles helped create an image of southern California that still defines the region in the eyes of many. More recently, “gangsta rap” artists like N.W.A. have painted a very different view of Los Angeles in their music. The ability of song to communicate a sense of place is more than just a function of lyrics, however. Lightnin’ Hop- kins, for instance, rarely sang about his hometown, but his lazy, acoustic blues nonetheless convey a strong sense of the Houston ghetto on a sultry summer 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:27 PM Page 257 Lubbock on Everything 257 day. Even when they sang about such universal subjects as love and redemp- tion, the bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers, as one critic has commented, re- mained “in tune with the mountains” of their southwest Virginia home.10 Regional themes may be most prevalent in the music of performers who are not commercially successful and, thus, may feel less constrained by the dic- tates of the marketplace and the preferences of radio promoters for songs that can play as easily in Boston as Biloxi. Bands like the Velvet Underground and Suicide provide the perfect soundtrack to the urban hell of New York. The music of artists like Professor Longhair and the Meters articulate the peculiar rhythm of life in New Orleans. To someone who has spent time in Kansas, Freedy Johnston’s album Can You Fly is simply imbued with a spirit of place. Musicians, too, realize that the influence of geography can be inescapable. David Thomas of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu, in trying to explain the postapocalyptic character of much of the music that emerged from that city in the 1970s remarked, “All I can say is whatever you feel from the music is what it feels like to be here.”11 Curt Kirkwood of the Phoenix band the Meat Puppets once said that “living here, the desert creeps into everything you do.”12 This chapter will use the case of three lesser-known performers from Lub- bock, Texas, as an example of the influence geography can have on music and the ways in which music can create strong images of place. Images of West Texas The land and culture of West Texas (figure 16-1) has left an indelible im- pression on the music of Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Terry Allen, three performers who play a uniquely Texas strain of music that falls somewhere between country, rock and folk, and who, despite their relative lack of national notoriety, are well known in their home state and have influenced a host of more famous musicians. All three grew up in Lubbock in the late 1950s and early 1960s and have been friends for years. But all three left the city the first chance they got because of its conservatism, the limited possibilities, and its distance from everything. Yet all agree that West Texas continues to hold a strange power over their lives and music. All three remain closely associated with Lubbock, even though none of them has actually lived there in more than twenty years. Ely, Hancock, and Allen are not the most famous musicians to come from West Texas. The area, in fact, has been a fertile breeding ground for future stars. Rock and roll legend Buddy Holly is from Lubbock. There is a bronze statue of him downtown. Singer and television star Mac Davis also grew up 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 258 258 Part III, Chapter 16 Figure 16-1. The landscape in and around Lubbock, Texas. Map by author in the city, but found Hollywood more to his liking (he once sang “happiness is Lubbock, Texas, in my rearview mirror”). Western swing pioneer Bob Wills was raised in the nearby town of Turkey. Waylon Jennings is from Littlefield and that fact is proudly proclaimed on the city’s water tower. But none of these performers evoke the spirit of West Texas in their music the way Ely, Hancock, and Allen do. This study concentrates on their earliest albums because it is on those recordings that the impress of place is greatest. Lubbock sits on the eastern edge of what has been called “one of the most perfect plains regions in the world.”13 The Llano Estacado forms a 200-mile-wide front porch to the mountains of New Mexico; the Caprock 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 259 Lubbock on Everything 259 Escarpment defines its abrupt eastern boundary. Unrelentingly flat and treeless except in the artificial oases of the towns and farmsteads, this is a region where the only features that interrupt the horizon are the results of human activity—oil wells (figure 16-2), windmills, center-pivot irrigation systems, the occasional forlorn farm house, a crossroads cotton gin, a country church (figure 16-3). Too far west to receive much moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, this is a land of little rain and frequent drought. Trees were so rare before settlement that one theory on the origin of the name Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, says that riders on horseback passing through the area had to drive stakes into the ground to tie up their horses. In such an environment, the sky is a dominant element. Distant features appear closer than they are.

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