Fort Worth puts music history right under our noses—and right under our feet—at the Stockyards and at Evans Avenue Plaza. These plaques set in the sidewalk honor musicians who lived and/or performed in Fort Worth:
Watch Wills:
Watch Coleman:
Watch Autry:
Watch Edwards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpOwqfOnOUY
Watch Redman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksAxUVv2nnI
Watch Gimble:
Watch Ritter:
Watch Tubb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWmbFXJDHrM
Lee “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” Hazlewood produced Sharpe’s “Linda Lu” in 1959, and the song certainly has had legs, having been covered by a slew of folks, including Tom Jones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, Bobby Vee, Roy Clark, and the Rolling Stones.
Listen to Sharpe:
How can anyone with any sense of aesthetics listen to Ornette
Coleman and call it anything but noise. This guy is a con man, who faked his way to fame among people eager to say the emperor was wearing clothes. Not music.
Music means a lot of things to a lot of people. Jazz of any kind is not necessarily simple or easy to play or sing or dance to. Free jazz more so than others I would say. If Coleman was a fake, he was surely a talented one. His playing in “The Shape of Jazz to Come” does not sound fraudulent to me. You should give it a listen!
I am a Fort Worth native also. Love “Linda Lu”. Never knew much about Ray Sharpe but loved this piece of music. Do you know if he is still living? I did meet him at a funeral here in Fort Worth about 12 years ago. But have never heard about him since. Thanks for all the Fort Worth history. I really enjoy all the information you put on Facebook.
Thanks, Sylvia. As far as I know, Ray Sharpe is still alive. About seventy-seven now.
Thanks for this, again, bud. I had no idea about the Evans Ave Plaza memorials. Gotta check that out.
Thanks, Chuck. Looking down at the ground as I walk has finally paid off.
So are Jay Boy Adams, T-Bone Burnett, Kelly Clarkson, Van Cliburn, Kirk Franklin, Julius Hemphill, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Prince Lasha, and dozens of others musicians tied to Fort Worth also honored or just these four? I imagine that it is unlikely for honors to be there for Mark David Chapman or Big Lurch in any event. They even named a street for V C.
Steve, the Stockyards focuses on country and western performers; Evans Avenue Plaza on African-American artists, so a lot of genres and performers are not honored at these two locations that have in-ground plaques. And I generally run only four to six photos per post, so I usually can present only a sampling.