The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
My collection of albums, EPs, singles, and promotional discs from local and Texas-based artists numbers over 500 items as of this writing. While the majority of these run the gamut from average to ho-hum to downright awful, there are some gems sprinkled throughout that are worth having and worth listening to in 2024. Here are twenty-four of my favorites, albums I don't have just because I happened to pick them up in a secondhand store or acquire them at a show, but because they are genuinely good with a collection of good to great material.
I purchased this vintage photo from an online auction. The expression on this young lady's face is a bit inscrutable. Is she sassily hamming it up for the camera? Or is she about to eat the photographer? Her scary disposition makes this vintage photo a fun pick for this year's Halloween.
Blind Lemon circa 1926
During a recent trip to Houston, I made a detour off the interstate and headed toward the town of Wortham, Texas. This detour wasn't taken to skirt the endless traffic bottlenecks or the constantly recurring speed traps along I-45 between Ennis and Houston; it was to pay my respects to a true icon of Texas music. Hailing from Coutchman, Texas (now a ghost town) as the child of sharecroppers, Lemon Henry "Blind Lemon" Jefferson, along with Lead Belly and T-Bone Walker, was one of the pioneering forces in the development of the original Deep Ellum music scene during the 1920s and '30s. Beginning as a street musician in East Texas towns and later ending up in Dallas by (probably) 1917, Jefferson would go on to graduate from street busker to eventual successful recording artist courtesy of a contract with Paramount Records. Along with the aforementioned Lead Belly, Walker, and others, he became one of the progenitors of a long tradition of highly influential Texas musicians who put us on the map beginning in the late 1910s and continuing through to modern times.
This series of images presents a view of one portion of downtown Elm Street over a period of approximately 11 decades. The view is facing east in the general area of present-day Akard Street.
This first postcard, published by S.H. Kress & Co. around the early 1910s, shows Elm Street as it would have appeared circa 1911/1912. Kress was a five and dime chain of stores that once dotted the country, known for its distinctive architectural designs and, later, for its segregationist company policies. According to contemporary newspaper articles, the Kress store shown in the postcard was commissioned and built in 1911 for a cost of $38,000 (around $1.2 million in 2024 dollars). The Wilson Building, seen behind the W.A. Green & Company building, housed the Titche-Goettinger Department Store until the end of the 1920s. The vantage point of the artist is Scollard Court, or present-day Exchange Place, renamed to the latter following the 1916 construction of the Exchange National Bank. Today Exchange Place is little more than a narrow, alley-like walkway sandwiched between the one-time Exchange bank building and that of its rival Republic National Bank, long since christened "Money Alley" and designated as a historical landmark. Note the streetcar lines running down the center of Elm Street.
