showcase" became a regular Thursday night performance with a hastily recruited band.
"I was very serious about rodeo," Ed says. "That's all I thought about. I rodeoed in high school. I was into it all through high school and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. I rode pro for three years, and then I started playing music.
"I rodeoed after [the injury], but when I was hurt was when I first really learned music. The knee injury laid me up. I'd been playing guitar and singing, but I hadn't written very many songs, so, when I was laid up, I started writing. When I had my knee injury, I started writing, and over time I got out of rodeos and into songwriting."
"Eddie has that knack," says his father. "You can't really tell him anything about what songs he ought to sing or what songs he ought to write. He's got to have a song in his head, whether it's an old one somebody else did or an idea that he's going to end up turning into a song himself."
"I don't try to write a family or a drinking song or any particular kind of song," says Ed Burleson. "I just try to write a song. I don't to do anything extra-ordinary [Burleson's pronunciation]; I just write what's on my mind. Sometimes it's a help, sometimes it's a hindrance. I just roll with the flow."
Burleson's career got a boost from a friendship with the late Doug Sahm, a musical wunderkind who once played onstage with Hank Williams at the age of eleven and also played with Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and Hank Thompson. Before his death at age fifty-eight, on November 18, 1999, Sahm would branch out in an almost endless array of musical genres. He fronted groups like the Pharaohs, the Dell-Kays, and the Markays, and his Sir Douglas Quintet produced a smash rock hit, "She's about a Mover," in 1965. Sahm lived in San Francisco for five years and spent most of two years in Europe before returning to Texas in 1988. In 1996 he teamed up with Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers to form the Texas Tornados. In these circles the reverence reserved for Sahm is almost messianic.
Sahm, in the final year of his life, produced Burleson's album My Perfect World . It was a bow to his own musical roots.
"He was crazy yet smart," says Burleson of Sahm. "One of a kind. One reason we got along so well is that he and my dad are a lot alike on musical influences, and they're a lot alike personally. I understood Doug real well. He used to scare a lot of people off. I just liked him. The first time we met, he asked me where I was from, and I said Lewisville, Texas. He was into pro wrestling, of all things, and he mentioned the Von Erichs [a wrestling family based in Lewisville]. That's how we got to talking. I gave him my album, and then he realized I played pretty much traditional country music, and we just got to be friends from there. He started coming over, and we started writing together, contriving different little songs together, and got to be good friends."
Yet Burleson is as simple and straightforward as Sahm was complex and relentless. Simple musings run through his titles and lines.
Another Texas songwriter, Chris Wall, once observed, "A bad songwriter can write a good song, but a good songwriter can't write a bad one."
Ed Burleson has an agreeable stubbornness about him. He plays to an audience varied in age but not attitude. They're as set in their ways as he is.
Don't ever change, Eddie .
"I'm sure I never will," he says. "It ain't in me."
Charlie Dunn, He's the Man to See
Gainesville, Texas I December 2004
In north Texas I've never ventured beyond Denton, and the first stop on the latest little informal Texas tour doesn't take me far beyond it. I drive up north from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to the most modest of locales. East of Gainesville, only a few yards past the Tabernacle Baptist Church and down a rutted dirt road, is Pawless Guitars. A red Ford Escape sits out front. There's a 1964 Ford Fairlane, waiting for restoration, nestled on the
"I was very serious about rodeo," Ed says. "That's all I thought about. I rodeoed in high school. I was into it all through high school and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. I rode pro for three years, and then I started playing music.
"I rodeoed after [the injury], but when I was hurt was when I first really learned music. The knee injury laid me up. I'd been playing guitar and singing, but I hadn't written very many songs, so, when I was laid up, I started writing. When I had my knee injury, I started writing, and over time I got out of rodeos and into songwriting."
"Eddie has that knack," says his father. "You can't really tell him anything about what songs he ought to sing or what songs he ought to write. He's got to have a song in his head, whether it's an old one somebody else did or an idea that he's going to end up turning into a song himself."
"I don't try to write a family or a drinking song or any particular kind of song," says Ed Burleson. "I just try to write a song. I don't to do anything extra-ordinary [Burleson's pronunciation]; I just write what's on my mind. Sometimes it's a help, sometimes it's a hindrance. I just roll with the flow."
Burleson's career got a boost from a friendship with the late Doug Sahm, a musical wunderkind who once played onstage with Hank Williams at the age of eleven and also played with Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and Hank Thompson. Before his death at age fifty-eight, on November 18, 1999, Sahm would branch out in an almost endless array of musical genres. He fronted groups like the Pharaohs, the Dell-Kays, and the Markays, and his Sir Douglas Quintet produced a smash rock hit, "She's about a Mover," in 1965. Sahm lived in San Francisco for five years and spent most of two years in Europe before returning to Texas in 1988. In 1996 he teamed up with Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers to form the Texas Tornados. In these circles the reverence reserved for Sahm is almost messianic.
Sahm, in the final year of his life, produced Burleson's album My Perfect World . It was a bow to his own musical roots.
"He was crazy yet smart," says Burleson of Sahm. "One of a kind. One reason we got along so well is that he and my dad are a lot alike on musical influences, and they're a lot alike personally. I understood Doug real well. He used to scare a lot of people off. I just liked him. The first time we met, he asked me where I was from, and I said Lewisville, Texas. He was into pro wrestling, of all things, and he mentioned the Von Erichs [a wrestling family based in Lewisville]. That's how we got to talking. I gave him my album, and then he realized I played pretty much traditional country music, and we just got to be friends from there. He started coming over, and we started writing together, contriving different little songs together, and got to be good friends."
Yet Burleson is as simple and straightforward as Sahm was complex and relentless. Simple musings run through his titles and lines.
Another Texas songwriter, Chris Wall, once observed, "A bad songwriter can write a good song, but a good songwriter can't write a bad one."
Ed Burleson has an agreeable stubbornness about him. He plays to an audience varied in age but not attitude. They're as set in their ways as he is.
Don't ever change, Eddie .
"I'm sure I never will," he says. "It ain't in me."
Charlie Dunn, He's the Man to See
Gainesville, Texas I December 2004
In north Texas I've never ventured beyond Denton, and the first stop on the latest little informal Texas tour doesn't take me far beyond it. I drive up north from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to the most modest of locales. East of Gainesville, only a few yards past the Tabernacle Baptist Church and down a rutted dirt road, is Pawless Guitars. A red Ford Escape sits out front. There's a 1964 Ford Fairlane, waiting for restoration, nestled on the
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