Do you know the lyrics to our state song? Okay, let’s start with something more basic: Do you even know the name of our state song? Some of you wise-acres might be thinking, “Why, of course I do, you dang Yankee. Get back to New York.”
Truth is, I’m from Andrews, where pump jacks outnumber people and the air “smells like money.” I also know as well as any when to “get a rope.” And while I’m sure I learned the state song at some point growing up, I never gave it much thought, if any, until 2008. That’s the year I took a history class with Kent Finlay, the man responsible for Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos, which ultimately earned him the unofficial title Godfather of Texas Songwriters. George Strait, Terri Hendrix, Randy Rogers, James McMurtry and Todd Snider all cut their teeth at Cheatham.
I was a sophomore at Texas State University when I saw Finlay’s “History of Country Music” in the course catalog. Intrigued, I enrolled. The curriculum was a casserole of historical lectures, well-spun stories and old vinyl records played on a turntable for a small crowd of 20 or so students. My favorite part of class was when Kent (he was never Professor Finlay to us) would start talking about a piece of music and impulsively break into song, warbling a few lines like a singing encyclopedia before returning to the lecture as if nothing had happened.
During one class, his mood suddenly darkened when he cued up a particular song. His brow furrowed as an unfamiliar marching tune boomed through the speakers. It was a sharp departure from what we’d been listening to: there was nothing of the gritty West Texas wind in it, no pain of the blues, no swagger of the cowboy. Instead, the song seemed self-important and vacuous, a brassy alma mater affair. The words were a sugary concoction of obtuse patriotic sentiment and rubber-wristed backslapping, a mouthful of cotton candy.
“Texas has all this great music,” Finlay said, “and this is our state song?”
That was the first time I’d ever really listened to “Texas, Our Texas.” Before Finlay’s class, I didn’t care one way or the other about the tune. But Kent Finlay cared a whole heck of a lot. And I figured that meant that I should, too.
NO PLACE HUMS with music like Texas. Pull out a map and you can sing your way across the state, from the “West Texas town of El Paso” to “Galveston, oh, Galveston.” This sweeping canon springs from a cultural identity steeped in music. Early Spanish colonization would eventually lead to the ascension of Tex-Mex sounds like conjunto, norteño, mariachi and corridos. When the first Anglo Texians arrived in the 1800s, they brought British ballads and fiddle tunes from colonial America. Black slaves contributed their own distinctive call-and- response songs and spirituals. The Germans and Czechs who immigrated to the Hill Country introduced waltzes, polkas and, perhaps most important, the accordion, an instrument that would later be embraced by Tejano musicians. In Southeast Texas, French-speaking African Americans developed a style known as zydeco, a mishmash of Cajun sounds and popular music.
As the 20th century rocketed along, Texas became one of the most influential musical states in the country. Linden native Scott Joplin pioneered the ragtime piano that laid the framework for jazz. The first country recording was by Amarillo’s Eck Robertson, in 1922. The blues took hold here as strongly as it did in the Mississippi Delta, with giants like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly cultivating the sound in Dallas’ Deep Ellum and the Sugar Land penitentiary, respectively. During the ’30s in Fort Worth, Bob Wills and Milton Brown harmonized rural Texas-style fiddle and Big Band, big-city jazz, a fusion we now call Western swing. A decade later Ernest Tubb took the honky tonk sound from Texas beer joints to a national audience. In the ’50s, Buddy Holly became one of the world’s first real rock stars and made Lubbock a mecca for future British invaders. In the ’60s, Fort Worther Ornette Coleman blew his sax to experimental heights, while Roky Erickson and Janis Joplin got psychedelic in Austin. Willie and Waylon and the boys brought rednecks and hippies together and flipped a collective middle finger to Nashville in the ’70s. Stevie Ray transcended the electric blues in the ’80s. Selena broke cultural barriers in the ’90s and was poised to become the first Tejano crossover superstar. And that barely skims the surface.
No easily portable tome — much less a magazine article — can hope to throw its arms around the enormity of Texas music history. The point I’m trying to make is that our musical heritage is important. Above oil, cotton and big hair, it’s our greatest export, a source of pride that should make every Texan’s head swell a size bigger than it already is.
A state song is meant to celebrate the richness and diversity of a place’s musical heritage. It’s a song used to welcome foreign diplomats. One sung by those missing home. A state’s personality expressed in whole, half and quarter notes. Texas music is one instance where all our big talk is backed up, so there’s no excuse for this state, with all of its auditory flavors, to settle for the musical equivalent of dry toast.
Which leaves one asking, how did we getstuckwith“Texas,OurTexas”inthefirst place?
WHEN DESIGNATING state symbols, some come easy (state footwear: cowboy boot); some elicit impassioned arguments (state dish: chili [instead of barbecue? Heresy!]); and some are downright silly (state hashtag: #texas). Historically, “Texas, Our Texas” became the fourth such token to receive an honorary nod (after the bluebonnet, the mockingbird and the pecan tree), but a look back reveals that Texans have never fully embraced our state song.
In 1923 Pat M. Neff, the state’s 28th governor, decided that we needed an official song. He issued a statewide challenge: write an original piece of music about Texas. If it was chosen as the state song, a group of private donors would pay $1,000 (approximately $14,000 today) to the winner. The call was heard by patriots (or capitalists) far and wide: 286 songs were submitted, many from outside the state, with one entry arriving from Italy and another from Brazil. Neff had handpicked a committee of 16 “prominent Texans,” composed of both musically competent individuals and others who, as Neff put it, “weren’t supposed to know anything about any kind of music, but who knew a world of things about things generally, and knew how a state song ought to sound.”
One of those submissions was “Texas, Our Texas.” According to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the song was first conceived as a poem by Fort Worth native Gladys Yoakum Wright, in 1918. When the state song contest was announced, a friend urged her to share her patriotic verse with another Fort Worther, composer William J. Marsh. The two reworked Wright’s lyrics to fit an earlier piece of music written by Marsh, and finalized a draft in 1924.
To be fair to the melody’s originator, Marsh was no musical slouch. (Nor a native Texan. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1880, Marsh followed King Cotton to Fort Worth in 1904, becoming a naturalized citizen 13 years later.) A musician trained at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, England, Marsh served a long tenure as a professor of organ and theory at Texas Christian University. He published more than 100 works throughout his career, including Texas’ first opera, The Flower Fair at Peking. Marsh was also a faithful Catholic and drafted the official mass for the state’s centennial celebration, as well as a whole bevy of hymns and sacred music. This may account for the church-like solemnity of the state song’s sound and his attraction to Wright’s formal lyrics. (A sampling: “God bless you Texas! / And keep you brave and strong / That you may grow in power and worth / Throughout the ages long.”)
In December 1924, Neff’s group vetted the submissions over a two-day session in Austin, and “Texas, Our Texas” emerged victorious. (Well, not entirely — the second of three verses was rejected and had to be rewritten.) That, however, didn’t automatically catapult it to official state song status. Like anything trying to make its way through the bowels of the Texas legislative system, that process proved lengthy and arduous.
Five days before his term ended, in January 1925, Neff delivered an impassioned appeal to lawmakers to officially adopt “Texas, Our Texas.” His plea wasn’t met with the same enthusiasm. The unconvinced members of the 39th Legislature decided instead to form a joint committee of four representatives and three senators to stage two public hearings, where additional entries could be heard.
The decision dragged on into Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s term until, on March 18, 1925, the committee, “not being composed of experienced musicians,” reported that it could not agree on a clear winner and had selected the top six, including “Texas, Our Texas.” It was the committee’s recommendation that these six songs be sung by the public until the next legislative session “so that the people may be able to form an opinion as to which song should be adopted.”
Ferguson’s time in the pink dome was beset by controversy, so one might forgive her and her administration for failing to come to a resolution on this state song business. And so it fell to the desk of Gov. Dan Moody in 1927, who cranked up the efforts once again, appointing a new committee using the same 1925 formula of reps and senators. Senator Margie Neal, of Carthage, the group’s chairperson, staged yet another contest, requesting that each of the 31 senatorial districts form a subcommittee to screen entries from their constituents and select a winner from each district. These nominees were then added to the six songs that had been chosen in 1925. The final 37 were further whittled down by the seven committee members, until, for the second time, “Texas, Our Texas” was blue-ribboned.
The Legislature officially adopted “Texas, Our Texas” by concurrent resolution on May 23, 1929, stating that it “had been selected by the Legislative Committee twice, proving the song was meritorious to the extent that it ‘had sung itself into the hearts of the people.’”
The newly designated state song was “ably and appropriately” dedicated in the hall of the House of Representatives on the evening of Tuesday, March 11, 1930. Neff was on hand for the occasion, as were composers Marsh and Wright, who handed over the song’s copyright to the state and collected the $1,000 check. Three renditions of the song were performed that day: one by the legislators, another by respected vocalist Pearl Calhoun Davis and yet one more by the Wednesday Morning Music Club of Austin. (Apparently the Tuesday Evening Club was unavailable.)
The song’s only revision was prompted by Alaska’s annexation, in 1959. Marsh replaced the word “largest” with “boldest.” That same year, Gov. Price Daniel designated March 6 — the 123rd anniversary of the Alamo’s fall — State Song Day. To celebrate the occasion, Daniel arranged for a recording of the song to be broadcast on the radio and television, encouraged bands across the state to perform it, and required the in-session Senate to sing it.
Yet despite the protracted process and prolonged hype and promotion, the state anthem never quite managed to strike the right chord with Texans.
I DECIDED to conduct an experiment. Whenever I found myself in a gathering of native Texans, I asked if they could name the state song. Just about everyone had an answer, but few had the right one. And not a single person could lilt more than a lick of “Texas, Our Texas.”
At least one journalist predicted this scenario back in 1930. The Waxahachie Daily Light ran the following editorial: “The Legislature has paid out $1,000 of the dear peepul’s [sic] money to the composers of the state song. We’ll wager a pewterfied [sic] buffalo nickel against a rancid doughnut that ninety-nine out of every hundred native sons and daughters never memorize it beyond the first verse and chorus.” Sounds as though they had an oracle working in Waxahachie.
One by-product of my investigation was the discovery that Texas has at least three official unofficial state songs. The most common response to my poll was “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Not a bad answer; as one friend said, “The Yellow Rose” is embedded in the genetic makeup of Texans the way Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is in Detroiters. But the song has a checkered history. The lyrics originally contained racial slurs, and the tune was popular with both blackface minstrels and Confederate troops. The song’s reputation is further complicated by its association with the Texas legend of the Yellow Rose, a mixed-race woman named Emily West, who supposedly kept Santa Anna “occupied” while Sam Houston’s army launched its surprise attack at San Jacinto. With Virginia and Florida both retiring state songs with questionable racial references, it’s best that Texas leaves the “Yellow Rose” to Hollywood myth makers.
Other oft-guessed ditties were “The Eyes of Texas” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Both are songs that Texans grow up singing, like Christmas carols or “The Star- Spangled Banner.” They’re classics you’ve known for so long that you can’t recall the first time you heard them — their melo- dies buried somewhere deep inside — and occasionally you’ll catch yourself singing a refrain without meaning to, like when a line of “Jingle Bells” slips out in July.
The glaring problem with “The Eyes of Texas” is that Aggies and a certain border collie might keel over if we elevated the Longhorns’ anthem to official state song for official designation. Grade school music teachers drilled it into each of our heads to clap-clap-clap-clap after “big and bright,” and opportunities to show off this rhythmic feat are readily available at various events across Texas, from ball games to concerts. Drawbacks include the fact that the song wasn’t written by a Texan, nor was it originally sung by one. Perry Como recorded the first hit version two days after Pearl Harbor, and the jaunty ballad ended up becoming so popular that the BBC stopped playing it during work hours. Apparently, the chance of ammunition workers dropping their tools to clap was too risky. Today the song may feel a tad hokey, but when George Strait played it during his farewell tour in 2013 and ’14 , the stars did seem bigger and a little brighter.
Maybe it’s time to assemble the Fellowship of the Song, a meeting of the most talented Texas songsters, from indie rock’s Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) to Tejano legend Flaco Jiménez. If our best living maestros convened over a few cans of Lone Star, perhaps they could orchestrate a tune that might actually sing its way into the hearts of Texans.
