{"id":6921,"date":"2016-01-27T07:05:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T13:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/countrymusic\/?p=6921"},"modified":"2016-01-27T12:42:50","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T18:42:50","slug":"time-changes-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/countrymusic\/2016\/01\/27\/time-changes-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Changes Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Creedence<\/a>

Creedence Clearwater Revival<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

My roommates and I are all University of Texas students who live in a couple of old houses on a property in West Campus. Although my roommates are all from Dallas, I met them under different circumstances. I went to preschool with one, met another in little league baseball, was in a band in high school with two of them, and met the others in college.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Dallas, we were all force-fed country music either by our parents or by the environment itself. The first song I ever remember hearing was Patsy Cline\u2019s version of \u201cYou Belong To Me.\u201d When I was a kid, my dad played Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison<\/em> on the drive to preschool virtually every day. I hated it. If our parents weren\u2019t playing country music, we\u2019d hear it at school, at the baseball game, at the pool, pretty much everywhere we went. I rebelled against country\u2019s early incursions in my life, instead, alongside my peers, opting for The Rolling Stones and other harder hitting classic rock bands. This same story parallels my roommates\u2019 experiences growing up in Dallas. They were all brought up on Waylon and Willie but were instead drawn towards Hendrix and Clapton.<\/p>\n

In high school however, things began to change for us. Playing in classic rock bands, we started noticing similarities in sound between country and rock music. A lot of those classic rock stars actually grew up on country music. Jimi Hendrix consistently tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry as a child. When the Rolling Stones came to America to tour in the early 70\u2019s they stayed out on a ranch in West Texas to play out childhood fantasies playing slide guitar and sipping sweet tea on the porch, shaded from the sweltering Texas sun.<\/p>\n

My roommates\u2019 had this same musical epiphany. Eventually just like our musical tastes, the guys in my rock band and the bluegrass band I\u2019d joined fell in together. We went back and embraced the music we were given as kids. We\u2019d just as soon play Willie\u2019s \u201cWhiskey River\u201d as Grateful Dead\u2019s \u201cI Know You Rider\u201d and Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cSimple Man.\u201d Music wasn\u2019t really black and white anymore. The lines became blurred between Country, Blues,\u00a0Rock & Roll, and Rhythm & Blues. I found this change of outlook listening to Johnny Cash\u2019s train songs. One of my roommates found it through the bluegrass\u00a0music of Bill Monroe while another through Dwight Yoakum and the Texas Tornadoes.<\/p>\n

Country music brought us all back to our roots, which in turn led us to take a more open-minded approach to music.<\/p>\n