This Is An Honor

For el V, to be quoted in the Carnegie Hall program book for the concert celebration of this historic West Texas (Lubbock) music group, The Flatlanders,  (though I keep thinking their hearts must be breaking every minute they play from the absence of the late great Jesse Taylor, perhaps the greatest guitar player Texas ever produced -- and that's saying something:

Musicologist and historian Ned Sublette remembers Lubbock fondly in his recent book, The Year Before the Flood, about the vibrant musical culture in New Orleans just prior to Hurricane Katrina. During the author's adolescence in the '60s, his maternal grandmother lived in Lubbock in a house on 19th Street; his dad, also a scholar, had taken a job at a university in neighboring New Mexico, precipitating regular family sojourns east into Texas. "The drive from Portales to Lubbock was an endless two-hour trip," writes Sublette, "on two-lane state roads through mostly pure flatness, punctuated by a couple of gentle rises and falls that seemed breathtaking, especially if there had been a little rain in June and everything had briefly turned from its normal yellow-brown to a glorious green."