Texas

So the other night it was pretty late and I was really missing home. When a bout of homesickness strikes, I usually turn to my guitar, and the music of Robert Earl Keen Jr., as Robert Earl and his music are pretty much as Texan as it gets. (I offer the following lyrics from his song Amarillo Highway as evidence.)

“I don’t wear no Steston
But I’m willing to bet son
That I’m a bigger Texan
Than you are.
There’s a girl in her bare feet
Asleep on the backseat
And that trunk’s fulla
Pearl Beer and Lone Star.”

I was blessed with an older sister who has (or at least had) good taste in music, and who introduced me to authentic Texas Hill Country music from an early age. Anyway, the other night I picked up the guitar and went to sit on the stairs, and commenced to playing the entire compendium of Robert Earl Keen Jr. music. Jennifer Johnson, Corpus Christi Bay, the Front Porch Song, The Road Goes on Forever, Don’t Turn Out the Light, Love’s a Word, Mariano, When I Start Giving In. The entire Robert Earl Songbook really. I was playing and singing for maybe 2 whole hours. Later, my fingers and voice both tired and cracked, I figured I’d finish off the evening with a cold beer from the MiniPrecio right next door. I put the guitar down and stepped out my front door…to find an audience. There were 4 or 5 people sitting on the steps of the MiniPrecio, 2 more with chairs right next to them, Sra. Herminha and her 2 sons were sitting upstairs on their roof, and there were 7 or 8 people just leaning against my house. They all stared. I was mortified, but they greeted me with warm smiles and a smattering of applause. Te and Nitoh insisted on buying me a beer apiece. I got all warm and fuzzy. (From the people, not the beers.) Of course, nobody understood a word of what I was singing, but they liked it anyway, and I spent the better part of the next hour answering questions about what the songs were about and whether I could play a particular one (Love’s a Word) again. It’s a sad one…reminiscent of the mourna music native to the islands of Cape Verde, and it turns out they understood the word “Love” over and over again, and Cape Verdians are suckers for a good love song.

Through the music of Robert Earl, I had a chance to sit and talk, and share some Texas (rather than American) culture for a change. One interesting thing I’ve found here…if you ask anyone to name a state in the US, Texas is ALWAYS the first one (and often the only one) that they know. (Unfortunately the second most common response to that question is: “Hollywood.”) People here, and people everywhere apparently, have heard of Texas, and everyone assumes that the usual archetypes are all true. Upon learning I hale from the Lone Star State, people extend their thumb and forefingers to form little pistols with their hands and say “Ahhhh…cowboys!” Then they ask if I have or have ever had an arma (gun…no), a caval (horse…yes), a chapeu grande (big hat…yes), botas (boots…yes), or a fivela (shiny buckle…no). In Cape Verde, Texas is known as the home of guns, George Bush, the San Antonio Spurs, horses and cowboys (though not the silver helmeted kind). They don’t know about longhorns, the Longhorns, Luckenbock, the Alamo, Shiner Beer, Austin City Limits, high school football, Bluebonnets, James and Larry McMurtry, Big Bend, Chili, Bar-B-Q and Tex-Mex, or toobing...which are my favorite things about Texas. They are also typically surprised to learn that we have UFOs in Marfa, the largest urban population in the United States, pine forests, swamps, lakes, rivers, mountains, desert, a coastline and islands, and a massive frontera (border) with Mexico. I love to tell them about William J. Travis, and that we are the only State ever to have been our own country. They are very surprised to learn that there are more people in my home city of Austin than there are Cape Verdians in the entire world. (The relative size and population of Texas, and the United States in general, is something that Cape Verdians have a hard time grasping.) Anyway, it ended up being a great night and I was happy to have entertained my neighbors for a while, and especially to have furthered the apparently already mythic status of my home state.