Ray Wylie Hubbard

RWH may be a Texas music icon, but he grew up in the little town of Hugo, Oklahoma. He moved to Dallas in 1954, where he eventually attended high school with Michael Martin Murphey. Hubbard graduated in 1965 and and started spending his summers in Red River, NM playing folk music and writing left-field songs like “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1973. Hubbard likes to rhyme words like mescaline with gasoline, so it’s perhaps not astonishing that his raw mix of outlaw country, literary folk and gritty blues would have a hard time finding an audience in the short run. Equally unsurprising is his success over time. His ability to segue seamlessly from primal exclamations of carnal lust into songs about salvation without pause or irony, to paint vivid portraits of characters both real and unreal, and to consistently evoke a sense of place that is larger than life but in no way made up has earned him a deep and widely held respect as as an elder statesman of Texas Music.