Just Say Ho

But as Miller quickly pointed out, after you did Lincoln, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C., and took your pick of the Jacksonvilles, you'd quickly run out of promising fodder. Take the major Texas cities, for example: Nobody is even sure who Dallas was named after -- it might have been James K. Polk's vice president, it might have been some other schmo, but in either case, the dude was a nonentity compared to Sam.

And trust me, as someone who was once assigned to read a biography of the man, I can tell you that Stephen F. Austin was an intensely boring dude, a run-of-the-mill commercial real estate broker in over his head among some of the most exciting times in American history. Were he alive today, you would find him flipping lofts in Midtown. "Yeah, you'd have to call the Stephen F. Austin album Location, Location, Location," Miller quipped into his whiskey.

San Antonio is named after St. Anthony of Padua, who is a bit livelier -- as the patron saint of lost objects, he mans the lost-and-found desk of the Catholic bureaucracy. He also had an odd habit of preaching to animals -- he once forced a mule to kneel in adoration before a communion wafer and later compelled some trout to listen to one of his sermons. (Evidently these were eared trout.)

Or so the Catholic Encyclopedia says, anyway, and just as we know that he was stubborn as a mule and drank like the fish Anthony preached to, we have much better evidence that Sam actually did the things the history books tell us he did. Which, in all cases, were exactly the things that Sam Houston told us he would do. As Miller puts it in "Say Ho," "Is there anyone still left so full of honor / that you trust everything you heard? / In Texas anywhere that you may wander / Sam Houston was the man that kept his word."

Scuttlebutt Caboose

Former Houstonian and Mercury Records recording artist Mary Cutrufello was back in town last week for a show at Rudyard's. Four years ago, with high hopes and nary a kind word for Houston's rock music infrastructure, she took her hard-core country/balls-out heartland-rock sound with her to Minneapolis. (Don't trip -- we don't have much good to say about our rock music infrastructure either.) There, she hoped to get her career, one that had once seemed headed for arena-sized levels, but had more lately slipped into a funk, back on track.

More and worse setbacks than mere inertia awaited, though. Not long after her move, her powerful voice was silenced -- her vocal cords had sprouted callus-like nodes. Game as ever, she posted graphic pictures of the little boogers on her Web site. "I got some very interesting e-mails from that," she jokes, but the nodes were no laughing matter. "I had to break up the band and I was just sort of casting about, you know?"

Things were looking pretty grim. Her money was running low, so she started calling her connections in Texas, hoping to find a gig as a guitarist. "I called some people in Austin to see if there was anything on the 'Have Tele, will travel' tip. The first guy to call me back was Mike Norton, who was putting together the Tish Hinojosa tour. So Tish and I went to Europe, just the two of us."

Like so many underappreciated American artists before her, Cutrufello was astounded by how much support she had across the ocean. "I found, to my amazement, and even though the tour wasn't billed as 'Tish Hinojosa and Mary Cutrufello,' that people were coming up to me with pictures from 15 years ago. And the Havoline Supremes cassette from 15 years ago...I was flabbergasted."

Based on her reception on the Hinojosa tour, it wasn't hard to envision a successful tour under her own banner. Late last year, she embarked on a Dutch-German-Swiss jaunt assembled by Norton. "Some of 'em were more rock gigs where I played my more recent stuff, but in Switzerland, for some reason they're just crazy for Dale Watson and people like that, so we honky-tonked it up. And that's great for me, because they are a fairly well-heeled country. So not only do they love that stuff, they're willing to put their money where their mouths are. They also come to the shows in full western regalia. They do line-dance, which is unfortunate, but they are doing the best they can for being as far away from here as they are."