This Week in Texas Music History

This Week in Texas Music History: Paco Betancourt

September 3, 2012 5:00 am by: Haley Howle

This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll meet a man who proved “Ideal” for recording classic Texas-Mexican music. Paco Betancourt died on September 5, 1971. Born in Mexico in 1903, he and his family fled to Texas in 1910 during the Mexican Revolution. Betancourt went on to establish the Rio Grande Music Company in San Benito, Texas, and the Queen Theater in Brownsville, which is believed to be the first cinema in South Texas to show talking movies. In 1946, he joined producer Armando Marroquín to found Discos Ideal, also known as Ideal Records. It soon became the biggest label in Texas-Mexican music and helped launch the careers of numerous artists, including Beto Villa, Freddy Fender, and the popular duo...
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This Week in Texas Music History

This Week in Texas Music History: Texas Intl. Pop Festival

This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll commemorate the Lone Star State’s own version of the Woodstock Festival. From August 30th to September 1st, 1969, just two weeks after Woodstock, Angus Wynne III organized the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville, outside of Dallas. The festival attracted an audience of 150,000 to hear performances by Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Santana, B. B. King, Johnny Winter, and others. Local radio stations warned that the festival could attract thousands of pot-smoking hippies. However, the Lewisville chief of police praised the concertgoers for their peaceful behavior and asked only that they keep their clothes on while enjoying the music. Despite this request, the Texas summer heat proved to be too much for many in the crowd, so they stripped...
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