The Texas Music Office provides an ongoing alphabetical list of “Texas Music Pioneers.” The list isn’t formatted properly, but it still helped answer my question: what cities do/did influential Texas musicians call home? I assumed (wrongly) that most would be based in Austin.
(Problems with this list include: no search options for particular Texas music pioneers, fonts and their styles and sizes vary, not all entries have photos and, if they do, they vary in sizes.)
I’ve completed my data analysis for those “Texas Music Pioneers” with A-M last names, and my graph will eventually include all of those listed on the Texas Music Office website. I will also eventually include the numbers of musicians for all cities, instead of just compiling them as “Other.”
My hypothesis that Austin would be the most popular “based in” city for Texas was proven wrong (so far); Dallas/Fort Worth, at least historically, is the most popular city, followed by Houston, Austin and San Antonio.
I even found one musician that had been based in my hometown of Seguin. Imagine that.
I’m now curious as to what makes a city a haven for Texas musicians. Is it the people? The landscape? The weather? Also, why are some cities popular only for a specific period of time and then go out of vogue?
One of the most notable “Texas Music Pioneers” is Woody Guthrie, who, according to the Texas Music Office website, followed his dad to be with relatives in Pampa, Texas. Here Guthrie recorded the song “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” as a response to the “great dust storm of April 14, 1935.”
I’d like to compile the script from the class’s graph assignment with open-source script I found through Google because I believe the latter’s presentation more effectively communicates my intentions.
