“I didn’t do any research,” Luther Dickinson said with a grin as he opened the door to his room at the Washington Square Park Hotel. Dickinson was in New York for a show that evening at Rockwood Music Hall, and he had agreed to talk with me about a question I’d become obsessed with: Did blues slide guitar evolve from the Hawaiian steel guitar or from the African instrument usually claimed as its ancestor?

I often wonder what’s left for the Jews of the Deep South. How many of us have strength enough to love our God?

Los Angeles. Four weeks into book tour. I’ve hit the wall, lads. Eleven straight hours of sleep and eighty-two ounces of caffeine and a B12 shot from an alleged pharmacy and I’m still exhausted. Still madly editing the short story manuscript until a ninety-minute car ride to my event, followed by an early morning flight to Salt Lake. I’m still traumatized by those hookers banging on my door at 3 a.m. in San Francisco two nights ago. My belief is that the guy who showed up at my hotel door with the live goldfish sent them. Maybe it was some kind of code. You let the guy put the goldfish in your room means send hookers at 3 a.m.

I’m talking about Doug Sahm . . . the walking-est, talking-est, song-singing-est, guitar-playing-est personification of Texas music to ever pop a top off a Lone Star beer. 

His songs have been recorded by the Dead Milkmen, Yo La Tengo, Pearl Jam, Beck, and Tom Waits. Kurt Cobain was often photographed wearing one of his Hi, How Are You t-shirts. David Byrne sang his praises, Bill T. Jones choreographed a ballet to his music, and Matt Groening said he was his favorite songwriter. According to Bowie, “Daniel Johnston is an American treasure.”

Canvassing Texas for undocumented songs and sounds, Owens stumbled across the big secret: field recording is holy work, eavesdropping on the unsyndicated histories of the world.

He was a small man, 5'6" and about 160 pounds, a smoker in his mid-forties. His face was disfigured by a crushed nose that never properly healed. He had cut scars on his shoulder and right forearm. He was a Baptist and wore a size 7 shoe.

“Lesa is a muse, unquestionably,” Jim Dickinson, Chilton’s producer, once said. “Nearly every song on 3rd is about her. 

That would be Connie Smith, who has what sounds like a classically trained voice with uncanny properties of projection, clarity, and harmonic precision. 

There is a name buried deep inside the treasure troves of long-dormant record labels, a name that is whispered among soul music’s true believers: O. V. Wright. He sang like God was sitting on his shoulder, urging him to bear witness to the pain that comes with hardship.