NOT FADE AWAY
Can Texas' music heritage be preserved? The Crossroads of Music Archive aims to try...
Written by Scott Slemmons
Can Texas' musical heritage be preserved? The Crossroads of Music Archive aims to try...
Tommy X Hancock is not the sort of musician whose work will ever be forgotten.
Born and raised in Lubbock, he learned how to play the violin classically, but after World War II he returned to Texas to play fiddle and guitar with a Western swing band called the Roadside Playboys. The group influenced future superstars like Buddy Holly, and fellow musicians began calling Hancock the godfather of West Texas music. With a career spanning almost 60 years, he’s one of Texas’ most revered musical masters.
In his youth, Hancock worried about whether his grandkids would ever know about his musical career, so he started keeping mementos of his life with his band—records, tapes, posters, newspaper clippings and more.
“I’ve kept an amateur archive all my life,” he says. “When I see something I think would be interesting for my grandchildren to read, I keep it. I didn’t have a grandfather of my own. All my life I’ve thought it would be nice to run into a box full of stuff that my grandfather thought was interesting.”
Long Live Texas Music!
The Crossroads of Music Archive at Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection is gathering music and personal effects of Texas musicians, especially aging ones. The collection is part of the Texas Tech Libraries system. The archive, now about four years old, seeks to build a collection of music, memorabilia and interviews.
Andy Wilkinson, artist-in-residence at the Southwest Collection and visiting assistant professor in the School of Music, says that music preservation is important both culturally and historically.
In his youth, Hancock worried about whether his grandkids would ever know about his musical career, so he started keeping mementos of his life with his band.“When the singer dies, the song dies with them, even though a version of it may continue, handed down in someone else’s voice or as part of another melody,” says Wilkinson. “Years or hundreds of years later, we can still infer something about it, but much is lost. Wouldn’t we prefer to hear the song itself in its original incarnation, and not just its barely audible ghost? Wouldn’t we be the wiser were we able to hear the exact rendition of ‘The Unfortunate Rake’ brought over by immigrants from the British Isles, than hear it change into ‘The Cowboy’s Lament’ as it crossed the Mississippi or ‘The Saint James Infirmary Blues’ as it drifted down to the delta?”
Performers who have donated materials or recorded interviews include Hancock, fiddle champion Jim Chancellor (Texas Shorty), bluegrass musicians Joe Carr and Alan Munde, guitarist Jesse “Guitar” Taylor, opera singer Mary Jane Johnson, and Virgil Johnson, founder and lead singer of The Velvets. Jesse Taylor died in March.
“We recently acquired the Don Caldwell Collection of over 5,000 reel-to-reel tapes that document over 30 years of influential musical recordings,” Wilkinson says. “And just this past fall, we began picking up and processing over 300 oral history interviews done by Dr. Kathleen Hudson at the Texas Heritage Music Foundation in Kerrville. She’s been interviewing Texas singer-songwriters since the 1980s – people like Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, Willie Nelson and others.”
The job is not easy. Many musicians never recorded their music, or their recordings may have been lost or degraded over time. But Wilkinson says the archive is doing everything possible to preserve old music before it disappears.
“In the last hundred-plus years there has been a revolution in music with the advent of various recording technologies, from Edison’s first wax cylinders to binary data stored on silicon chips,” Wilkinson says. “These recording media have differing degrees of stability. The old 78s and 45s and LPs are essentially permanent, though the discs themselves are breakable and flammable and the devices that can play them are, in many cases, becoming rare.”
Wilkinson says the archive will not limit itself to just musical recordings.
“We have some items that are rare artifacts, including rare books, as well as other items that are often called ephemera—posters, calendars, newspaper clippings and even business records,” says Wilkinson. “We also have oral history interviews that have been done for years and are now a big part of the Southwest Collection.”
Which musicians to include in the archive is an ongoing dilemma, but the preference is to err on the side of inclusiveness.
“An archive like this needs to be very broad and democratic,” says Wilkinson. “We can’t estimate its value today—it’s a hundred years from now that’s important. Who knows who will be considered an important influence then? So we want inclusiveness—we’d like to cover the spectrum of music in this area, which isn’t important just for rock and roll and Buddy Holly. It’s important for country music, like Waylon Jennings and others. It’s important for blues artists like Delbert McClinton, who lived in Littlefield. You have all the impact of Stubbs and all the people who came out of Stubbs’ place, like Jesse Taylor and Joe Ely. We have a terrific amount of conjunto music— there was a terrific impact of Mexican music on the music of Buddy Holly, Bob Wills, Roy Orbison—all the musicians that we’re familiar with in this area.”
Some of the most important inclusions in the archive are from people who weren’t well-known musicians.
“There’s the obvious interest in the famous people—the Mac Davises and the Buddy Hollys,” says Wilkinson. “But we also want to get what I call the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ people. There are a lot of folks who are an integral part of the history, but they’re not the famous part.”
Wilkinson is currently working with Dow Patterson in San Antonio. Patterson is an architect, but in the 1960s his band in Lubbock included a young John Denver, who at the time was trading under his birth name of John Deutchendorf.
“Then Dow went on to Austin and roomed with a guy named Jerry Jeff Walker,” Wilkinson says. “Dow also had recording equipment when he lived there, so he brought back the very first recording of ‘Mr. Bojangles’ when it was still being written.”
The Southwest Collection is in the process of converting many older recordings in the archive from analog tapes and records to a more permanent digital format.
“Once they’re converted to digital, they’ll be much more accessible to scholars,” says Wilkinson. “At some point we would like to see a completely digital archive environment. If you’re in London and you’re interested in Texas musicians like Buddy Holly or Jesse Taylor or Lloyd Maines, you can get on the Web and see what we have as far as interviews and other materials. It’ll be accessible over the Net, so people don’t have to get on an airplane and come to Lubbock to do research.”
Wilkinson is no stranger to the creative arts. A poet, songwriter, singer and playwright whose particular interest is the history and people of the Great Plains, he has recorded six albums of original music and poetry on the Grey Horse label. They include “Charlie Goodnight” in 1994, “The Road is Still the Road” in 1996, “Storyteller” in 1998 and “An Ordinary Christmas” in 2000.
Hancock says he’s glad to see that Texas Tech is keeping an archive of Texas music, since many musicians never had a chance to keep copies of their own.
“I kept recordings of our live performances, but a lot of other people didn’t because the technology wasn't really there yet,” says Hancock. “We had tape recorders but the old ones were a lot harder to use, and a lot of people didn’t use them. This is the kind of project I wish we’d had access to back then. Maybe we’d know more about the musicians who came before us …"
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The Southwest Collection is a leader in preserving the history of the Southwest with nearly 2,000 manuscripts and archival collections, more than a million photographs, 75,000 books, 4,000 oral histories and several thousand films.For more information, visit: www.swco.ttu.edu.
For more information on Tommy X Hancock and his family of musicians, go to: www.TommyXHancock.comStory by Scott Slemmons; Photography by Neal Hinkle; Illustration by Cory Chandler
Story produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing,
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Photos by Neal Hinkle and The Southwest Collection
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