This Week in Texas Music History, we meet Houston’s “Swamp Boogie Queen.”
***This Week In Texas Music History is supported by Brane Audio***
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
On January 11, 1936, blues pianist Katie Webster was born in Houston. Her parents were both piano players, her father in the ragtime style, her mother in the classical. Try as they might to push Katie toward the latter, she was drawn to the sounds of Little Richard and Fats Domino on the airwaves and forged her own path. In her teens, she moved east to Beaumont, toward her “Swamp Boogie” destiny, and began to perform professionally even further east in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Local promoters heard her, and Webster became a successful session musician in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands, bringing her barrelhouse piano to hundreds of recordings with artists like Lazy Lester, Juke Boy Bonner, and Hop Wilson.
She joined Otis Redding’s touring band in 1964. She was so affected by his 1967 death that she wound down her musical career for a time, moving to Oakland to care for her aging parents. In the late Seventies, though, reissues of her older albums brought new attention, and Webster toured Europe for the first time in 1982, where she found adoring audiences she would return to again and again.
Webster’s Eighties revival also brought her greatest success as a solo recording artist, with two records from Arhoolie, You Know That’s Right of 1985 and I Know That’s Right of 1987, and a trio of albums on Alligator Records: The Swamp Boogie Queen in 1988, Two-Fisted Mama in 1990, and No Foolin’ in 1991, assisted by such high-profile guests as Robert Cray, Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and Bonnie Raitt. When she passed in 1999, it was as an artist who had delighted audiences anew in her last years, and whose art had been successfully documented for posterity.
Sources:
Alan Govenar. Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2008.
James Head in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Roger Wood. Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
