CFRG would like to take this time to spotlight two of our oldest friends in the Music world. Bobby Bridger and Vince Bell. Both are renowned and well known musicians from Texas with very powerful tales to tell. CFRG highly recommends you visit these two incredible artists at their websites by clicking on the pictures. You will find two compelling stories and songs that will not disappoint you. We hope you get to know them as well as we have over the years.
Bobby Bridger
Bridger
An Autobiography
By Bobby Bridger
Renowned for A Ballad of the West, his epic trilogy about the American West from the era of mountain man Jim Bridger to the closing of the frontier, Bobby Bridger has had a career in show business that spans the rockabilly-to-”Music City, USA” era in Nashville, the cosmic cowboy scene in Austin, the flowering of folk music, and even Broadway theater. His multifaceted talents have found expression in singing, acting, writing, painting, and sculpting. In this engrossing account of the personal and artistic journey that led him to create a new American art form, the epic ballad, Bridger touches on almost every major musical, entertainment, and cultural movement of the second half of the twentieth century, with a cast of characters that reads like a “Who’s Who” of American popular culture.
Bridger’s story begins in a small town in northeast Louisiana, where he first experienced the twin attractions of painting and music. He recounts his early efforts to become a successful Nashville singer-songwriter and his growing awareness that the commercial music business would never support his evolving desire to become a historical balladeer. Bridger recalls how his interest in folk music and folk ballads fired his ambition to tell the story of the American West. He movingly describes how this dream eventually became A Ballad of the West, an epic trilogy about Jim Bridger, the Lakota Sioux, and Buffalo Bill that has taken form in an acclaimed cycle of songs, a one-man show, books, full-cast stage performances, and other media.
Included in the book is a DVD that offers songs from A Ballad of the West and a sample from the forthcoming documentary Quest of an Epic Balladeer, based on Bobby Bridger’s life and work.
In addition to his masterwork A Ballad of the West, which he performs in repertory across America, Bobby Bridger is the composer of “Heal in the Wisdom,” the anthem of the internationally famous Kerrville Folk Festival, and author of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West.
Vince Bell
Texas Songwriter Vince Bell
The University of North Texas Press has announced the publication of “One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell.” The book, a revised and greatly expanded edition of Bell’s acclaimed 1998 autobiography, is the latest in UNTP’s North Texas Lives of Musicians Series (previous volumes have been biographies of Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley).
In 1982, the promising singer/songwriter Vince Bell was broadsided by a drunk driver after he left the studio where he and Stevie Ray Vaughan had just recorded three of Bell’s songs. Bell spent a month in a coma and the next six years re-learning how to walk, talk, and play the guitar. Not only was his debut album waylaid for a dozen years, but his life would never be the same.
From the early Houston music scene and his first guitar, through 35 years and several recordings and tours later, the new book not only details his recovery from the accident and his roundabout climb back onstage, but shines a light in those dark corners of the music business that, for the lone musician whose success is measured not by the Top 40 but by nightly victories, usually fall outside of the spotlight. Bell’s prose is not unlike his lyrics: spare, beautiful, evocative, and often sneak-up-on-you funny. His chronicle of his own life and near death on the road reveals what it means to live for one’s art.
This is the story of a man and his instrument; of good times and bad, and the damage sustained and survived by both through decades of hard use.
—Richard Dobson
Vince Bell’s songs have been performed and recorded by such diverse talents as Little Feat, Lyle Lovett, and Nanci Griffith. In addition to releasing four critically acclaimed albums of his own, a ballet has been set to his work and his story turned into a musical. “Vince is a poet,” declared the late Townes Van Zandt.
Bell, who plays extensively in the U.S. and Europe, has appeared on such nationally broadcast television and radio programs as Austin City Limits, Mountain Stage, World Café, In the Prime, Morning Edition, and several other NPR programs.
