Looking ahead to the Houston International Festival - never mind the SXSW bollocks - I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jody Nix and the Texas Cowboys will be playing on the Texas Stage at 6 p.m. on April 18. Not long ago in these cyberpages, we examined the gloom and doom that surrounds the musical art known as honky tonk. Well, these guys are as legit as it gets - so legit they were featured at last year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And looking at their schedule, they don't show an
As we reported some weeks ago in this column, if you're down with hardcore Western Swing twin fiddle dance music of the Bob Wills variety, you should be in heaven Saturday when Jody Nix and the Texas Cowboys make a rare Houston appearance on the iFest Texas Stage.
Nix is old-school, so old school he doesn't drink and the members of his band don't either, at least not when they're on the road with him. He harkens back to a more innocent time when the Saturday-night dance was what people look
Photo courtesy of Jody NixHoyle Nix (left) and Bob Wills, mid-1950sThere's an old saying in West Texas about Midland and Odessa, two oil towns only 20 miles apart in the middle of nowhere: raise your kids in Midland, raise hell in Odessa. True enough, Midland has all the soul of a loaf of Rainbow bread - come on, George W. Bush was raised there. Odessa, with its rows of bars up and down Highway 80 and the Andrews Highway, has always been thought of as a den of iniquity.
But in spite of all of Od
