Back in its heyday, the corner of Jensen Drive and Lyons Avenue was known as "Pearl Harbor, the Times Square of the Bloody Fifth." You wouldn't know it today - the entire area is a vast wasteland of tired and abandoned lots and boarded-up shacks, but for much of the 20th Century this area was the nexus of one of America's most musical neighborhoods.
It was Harlem in Heavenly Houston: Club Matinee - "the Cotton Club of the South" - was right around the corner, and right down the street from
[Note: Part 1 of The Nickel is here, and Part 2 is here.]
Almost as forgotten as Hersal Thomas, Goree Carter was a Fifth Ward guitarist who was credited by late New York Times pop critic Robert Palmer with being the creator of the very first rock and roll record. This was his obscure 1949 single "Rock Awhile," of which Palmer wrote:
"The clarion guitar intro differs hardly at all from some of the intros Chuck Berry would unleash on his own records after 1955; the guitar solo crac
Photo by photineIn our Best of Houston issue last year, we selected the scant few tables in front of La Carafe as the Best Place to Smoke and Drink in town. We loved the place for its "prime view of the skyline" and the fact that outside speakers allowed patrons to "bathe in the sweet sounds of the bar's award-winning jukebox."We also dug how you could "scope out the action in Market Square" and on Congress Street and ponder the history of your surroundings. Oddly for Houston, there's n
Of all the columnists in the history of Houston journalism, Sigman Byrd was easily the darkest and the most literary. From the late 1940s to the early '60s, Byrd wrote a column called The Stroller for the old daily Houston Press and later, briefly for the Chronicle. He always much favored the city's dark shadows, scruffy neighborhoods, and forgotten, often wrecked people over the big affairs of the day and Houston's high and mighty.As David Theis put it in his 1994 remembrance :
Byrd ranged
