Across the Border and Back : Music in the Big Bend

In the vast, sparsely populated area of West Texas known as the Big Bend, life takes place on a different scale. The nearest neighbor can be forty miles away, perhaps located not just in another town but another country, the border historically less obvious than it is today. In the small-town, bicultural atmosphere of the Big Bend, musicians from both sides of the Rio Grande come together, creating music that spans genre, culture, and international borders.

From Ojinaga, Mexico, to Alpine, Texas, and most points in between, writer Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and photographer Bill Wright have gathered, through hours of interviews, a trove of anecdotes, images, and personal recollections that explore what makes music—and musicians—in the Big Bend slightly different from anything found elsewhere. Playing big band music one night for a dance at Marfa Army Air Field and border polkas the next evening at a quinceañera; playing traditional norteño and conjunto but throwing in the saxophone to change the dynamic; making a living with their music or keeping their day jobs and playing when they can: these are the stories that demonstrate the cultural and musical versatility required for musicians in the Big Bend.

From the porch at Terlingua’s Trading Post to the jukebox at Lajitas, Across the Border and Back: Music in the Big Bend features the people, the history, the local color, the venues, and, above all, the distinctive attitude that have defined music-making in this place, at once one of the most remote and most unique in the country. 

MARCIA HATFIELD DAUDISTEL is coauthor of Authentic Texas: People of the Big Bend and The Women of Smeltertown. She is also the editor of Grace and Gumption: The Women of El Paso and Literary El Paso and serves on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters. A longtime resident of El Paso, Texas, she now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. BILL WRIGHT, award-winning photographer, is author of several books, including The Whole Damn Cheese: Maggie Smith, Border Legend, The Texas Outback: Ranching on the Last Frontier, and Portraits from the Desert: Bill Wright’s Big Bend. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he resides in Abilene, Texas.