By all accounts, young Bill Owens was a natural song-catcher, trawling across Texas in the 1930s, the golden era of American field recording. Hayseed and handsome, he had an excellent ear, a big heart, and no hesitation about being the only Anglo in a room. He could hear a black man beating time with a broom on a wall in East Texas and trace that beat back to Congo Square. He was known to stop his car on the side of the road to clip cactus needles to use with his secondhand Vibromaster, obsolete the day he bought it.
Old grannies with Scots-Irish names were dying off, taking their Child ballads with them. Certain phrases lit up in Owens’s ear—gloves of Spanish leather—like colored tracers, back to America’s old insurrections. Deacons in black churches were laying aside old slave spirituals or embellishing them with Chicago jump blues or Hawaiian lap steel. In those days you could still find Mexican Americans singing corridos about Pancho Villa in the alleys near the Alamo in San Antonio. He wanted to understand the whole slow contretemps of Texas history.
History, it turned out, had other plans for him. If you ever find a field recording made by Owens after July 1942, nab it. It’s probably very valuable, since none made after that are known to have survived, and it could also be classified government property.
William A. Owens was born in 1905 in profound poverty on a farm in Pin Hook, a hundred or so miles northeast of Dallas, in a part of Texas already scraped clean of its best topsoil. He learned at an early age that if you listen outside the open windows of black people’s churches, you can eavesdrop on someplace bigger than your white world, hear all the way back to Africa. By the time he was a grad student at SMU in the early 1930s, Owens had the habit of wandering through Deep Ellum or east Dallas’s homeless enclaves at night, listening for the songs of transients and sometimes recording them. The songscape was already being purged of its old folklores by the peregrinations of territory bands like those fronted by Alphonso Trent out of Dallas’s Adolphus Hotel or San Antonio’s Troy Floyd in big venues like the Shadowland Ballroom or the Bagdad Supper Club.
In that decade, you could get the shit kicked out of you by Henry Ford’s goon squads up in Dallas just for talking to a union rep. If you were a Mexican female pecan-sheller in “Santonio,” you could be jailed or run out of town if you tried to organize. Owens frequented churches, pool halls, skating rinks, and front porches—anyplace where folk accustomed to hard work might congregate and make a joyful noise.