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Some time back I was honored to be roasted, along with the “sanctimonious Houston Press,” in Best In Texas music magazine for a review I had written about local songwriter Dan Crump’s album Truth Is.

In a rambling full-page editorial slyly couched in terms of his deceased mother’s instruction “if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all,” publisher Ed Shane (the Shane of Shane Media Services here in Houston) claimed I was “an insensitive writer” who “skewered” Crump in a “petty attack.” According to Mr. Shane, “no artist deserves the treatment the Houston Press imposed.”

Shane, who at least owned up to the fact that Crump is an advertiser in the magazine as well as “a good guy and a great conversationalist,” went on to say he thinks Crump is “pretty good.” By way of further establishing Crump’s artistic credentials, Shane opined that Crump can make “people notice the music, sing along if they’re so inclined and order another beer if they feel the music fills a hole in their psyche.”

More from Shane, wherein he waxes New Age:

In the wake of all the in-depth analysis on DC9 at Night about the burning question of whether Bruce Springsteen’s Dallas or Houston show was “better,” I now find myself lost in the fallout of Friday’s show by the southern Springsteen, Steve Earle.

Everyone is a music critic. Immediately after the show, my compadre who sat third row center said he thought the show was mediocre, that Earle “was just going through the motions.” A woman not that familiar with Earle’s catalog or career seeing him for the first time “loved it.” One of my running buddies said he “liked it, but the dj was a pointless addition except on a few songs.”

Steve clanged a guitar note or two and his voice isn’t what it once was, but I thought he brought the goods. No, he didn’t play the hits that most of the aging, balding boomers in attendance came to hear (probably so they could argue interminably about whether this show was better than the one in Dallas). No “Hillbilly Highway,” no “Guitar Town,” and in typical obstinate fuck-you Earle fashion, instead of pandering to the repeated screams for his Houston song “Telephone Road,” he gave it the night off.

With acts that have been around as long as Earle and Springsteen, there’s always a contingent that goes away angry because the band didn’t play the oldies (see Chris Henderson’s recent review of the Ministry concert). Earle quelled those people by opening his set with a string of acoustic deep tracks that recalled all of the older albums without giving in to a rote repetition of “the hits” like a trained seal hamming it up for a morsel of mullet.

My first inclination was to name this column “Lonesome Onry and Mean on the Heartworn Highway of Dust That Lefty Bit Down South.” In spite of its unwieldy length, that reference to two famous songs by godfathers of the Texas music movement plus the 1981 documentary on the infant Texas singer-songwriter movement coalescing in Viet Nashville encapsulates the idea behind this column fairly concisely. It covers sacred musical real estate and ties Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Townes van Zandt to the same musical Artesian spring. Houston and Texas music trails lead off in all directions.

While Waylon doesn’t have a glaring Houston connection, the trails from Waylon eventually lead to other legends and myths: to Steve Young, who went to school in Beaumont for a while, wrote Waylon’s signature hit “Lonesome, Onry and Mean” (no, it’s not the Dukes of Hazard theme, Goober), and was featured in Heartworn Highways; to Billie Joe Shaver, the quintessential Texan songwriter, performer and all-around character who authored Waylon’s huge hit “Honky Tonk Heroes,” which became the national anthem of the Outlaw Movement; to local hero Rodney Crowell, who wrote “Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This” (“grew up in Houston down on Wayside Drive”), who wrote Willie’s hit “Til I Gain Control Again,” and was also in the movie; and to Steve Earle, who wrote “Devil’s Right Hand,” which Waylon cut, “Telephone Road,” which Waylon didn’t cut, and was unbelievably young but hardly innocent when he appeared in the movie.