***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
This Week in Texas Music History, a Texas legend plays his ace in the hole in San Marcos.
On October 13, 1975, fifty years ago, George Strait and the Ace in the Hole Band played their first show at Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos. Kent Finlay and Jim Cunningham had opened the venue the year before. It’s a curious spot, Cheatham Street, an old warehouse along railroad tracks whose trains can still seem to make the building shake. Finlay shook things up, too, a visionary songwriter who saw Cheatham as a fulcrum of creativity like Hondo Crouch’s Luckenbach or Kenneth Threadgill’s Austin beer joint. Strait shuffled into the Ace in the Hole deck not too long before this night, joining Southwest Texas State students Ron Cabal, Mike Daily, Terry Hale, Ted Stubblefield, and soon Tommy Foote in their classic country band.
From that October, Ace in the Hole played Cheatham nearly every week through the latter half of the 1970s, a venue they shared with the likes of Asleep at the Wheel, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. In that crowd of itinerant Austinites, Ace in the Hole stood out for their back-to-basics traditionalism. While the progressive country wave cross-bred Texas country with countercultural flair, George Strait drew on older models of honky-tonk and western swing, nodding to the Austin scene’s revivalism without indulging its rock proclivities.
When the time came, Strait took the band with him to Nashville, and though the label made his debut album, 1981’s Strait Country, with studio musicians, his bandmates from those early San Marcos gigs remained with Strait all the way to superstardom and induction in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. And Finlay and Cheatham Street stayed vital, too, the venue now overseen by another Finlay protégé, country star Randy Rogers, and still hosting its weekly songwriter circles nurturing the next generation of Texas Music. George Strait, “Unwound” George Strait, “Ace in the Hole”
Sources:
Brian T. Atkinson and Jenni Finlay. Kent Finlay, Dreamer: The Musical Legacy Behind Cheatham Street Warehouse. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2016.
Grant Mazak 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.
