Texas Gerrymandering Divides, But Music Unites Lonestar State

Everything’s bigger in Texas.

Including, it seems, the state’s political hubris.

Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign a bill passed by state lawmakers that would extract five additional Republican representatives from its already gerrymandered districts. The move proved unpopular outside of its expansive borders, with 55% of Americans believing it’s bad for democracy, according to a Reuters poll. Even among the GOP, 46% agree with that statement, while only 27% disagree.

The truth is that even before redistricting, the Lone Star government was already at odds with its people.

“The way we look at it,” says Texas Regional Radio Report founder and president Dave Smith, “there’s politicians and then there’s Texans.”

With the new Asleep at the Wheel album — Riding High in Texas, released Aug. 12 on the band’s Bismeaux label — founder and frontman Ray Benson hopes to put a dent in the misunderstandings about the state, regardless of its leaders’ behaviors.

“There’s such a clichéd image of what a Texan is,” he suggests. “But Texas is so diverse. That’s why Texas is a whole ‘nother country, as we used to say.”

That diversity inhabits the core of Riding High, a collection of 10 songs about the Lone Star State. The music stretches from early-rock-era signature “Long Tall Texan” to funk-tinged “Texas Cookin’,” country/blues classic “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas),” shuffle “There’s Still a Lot of Love in San Antone” and Western-swing instrumental “Beaumont Rag.” It all fits together within The Wheel’s good-time disposition, just as the state has historically blended roots of multiple cultures: Native American, Mexican, Anglo-Saxon and African.

“It’s always been a state of immigrants and people fleeing places that did not give them opportunity,” Benson says. “That’s what I hope it continues to be, although it seems to be taking a different track these days.”

The real spirit of the state, one could argue, was exemplified by the music industry’s reaction to the Camp Mystic flood on the Fourth of July. The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, leading to more than 100 deaths, including 27 people who were swept away at Camp Mystic outside of Kerrville, Texas. Robert Earl Keen, who was scheduled to perform at Fourth on the River, could have been among the victims had he arrived at the venue earlier.

“All of the staging and a lot of the production and all of the vendors’ [equipment] were all washed away by six o’clock in the morning,” he says. “In years past, we’d parked the bus right there next to the stage. We would have been sleeping through that. Who knows what would have happened at that point?”

Keen pulled together an Aug. 28 benefit — Applause for the Cause, at the Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels, scheduled to livestream on Keen’s YouTube channel — with a long list of guests, including Tyler Childers, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall, Jack Ingram and Jamey Johnson. It’s just one of numerous flood benefits organized by Lambert and Parker McCollum, George Strait, Josh Weathers, Dale Watson, Lyle Lovett and Michael Martin Murphey, Koe Wetzel and Pat Green, who lost three relatives to the flood.

It’s a spirit one may not expect from the state, based on the cynicism of its legislature.

“People in Texas are for each other,” Smith says. “I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, or don’t give a hoot, you know. They take care of their own.”

Matching the state’s melting-pot history, Texas’ country music community has a reputation for bringing disparate segments of society together, most obviously through the cross-cultural appeal of Willie Nelson.

“Willie, who got me to Texas, really brought people together back in those days — the hippies and rednecks, basically,” says the Philadelphia-born Benson, who lived in San Francisco before relocating to Central Texas. “For a period of time, it really was pretty incredible in the ’70s that the people seem to come together over music and forget about their differences.”