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[MUSIC PLAYING]
My name is Jason Mellard and I'm an American Studies scholar who teaches a
Texas Music History class for the Odyssey program at UT.
I would really track my love, like so many people would, back to
their childhood and the kind of music that was in the home when you were growing up now for me
that was Texas country music. Willie Nelson, especially Willie and Family Live --the 1978
double album which is absolutely terrific. Johnny
Rodriguez was very common in the home --Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison.
That is the music that I came up with. That is the music that I fell in love with
but like a lot of other people too, there came a point in my life at which I decided that that
was hokey trash that I wanted to get away from. I was turning
away from that traditional music that I didn't want to hear it anymore
that I was a rock kid like everyone else. Everyone hits
the music of there own times which for me and being of my age
that was the grunge movement of the 1990s so that's how
I chose to define myself over and against this "Texan-ness" that I've been brought
up with. There's this journey that I think so many people go through where at some point
they recognize the value not only of the avant-garde
musics they've been following as an adolescent but those musics that were in the home when
they were growing up. That traditional music.
For me, a lot of it was about going away and coming
back and this is a common narrative for musicians, for artists,
for writers, and just for everyday people that
you almost have to leave Texas to appreciate some of its cultural
value and cultural traditions and for me that was a year I spent in
London where all of a sudden I recognized that
Texas was a distinctive kind of place and a community that
I belonged in and with that I had roots there
and so it was that point coming back and reevaluating, especially in the city of Austin,
these myths that had developed around the city itself and around its
civic identity. Especially on this kinda of hippy redneck narrative
that develops out of the 1970s. I wanted to fit that in the larger
narratives of American history. The 1960s and 1970s
had always been decades that I've been fascinated with but my fascination
was really about this kind of national moment
of sort of change, and reform, and revolution,
and not thinking of that as a very Texan development but then
coming home and recognizing that that happens here too. Coming back
to that Texas country music was really what spurred me to
study it as a vocation as well.