Bleu Edmondson’s Southland didn’t walk into 2001 trying to quietly introduce itself. By the time of its release that year, these songs had already been living, breathing, and road tested across Texas for a while. They had been played in bars where the phrase dive was actually complement, in college towns where word of mouth mattered more than radio, and in rooms where if a song didn’t connect, you knew it immediately. That matters. Southland doesn’t feel like a studio creation. It feels like...

Wade Bowen had already stepped into the studio before The Blue Light Live, but this is the record that broke him. Not in a flash of overnight success, but in the way Texas Music has always worked when it is at its best. This one spread the right way. Recorded at The Blue Light in Lubbock, the album does more than capture a performance. It captures a place and a moment in time. That place and time was becoming something bigger than a bar. It was turning into a proving ground, a haven for...

There’s something about Texas, and in this case East Texas in particular, that keeps turning out artists who don’t just fit into country music...they bend it. These artists stretch the boundaries and sometimes flat out ignore them. Two of the best examples of that over the last quarter century are Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves. And I got lucky enough to see both of them before the rest of the world caught on. I've been lucky enough to catch dozens of stars on their way up to the sky...