Mountain Home, at the intersection of State Highway 27 (which runs here along the Old Spanish Trail) and State Highway 41 in north central Kerr County, was settled about 1856.
The post office was established and named by H. Louis Nelson in 1879. The previous year four children of the Dowdy family, early settlers, had been killed here in the last Indian raid in Kerr County.
The town was called Eura for a brief period in the early twentieth century. It had a population of 150 in 1946.
In 1983 sixty people lived within a one-mile radius of the post office, which served 350 families. The community had a store, a motel, and a church.
Ranching has always been the principal business.
In 2000 the population was ninety-six.
Uvalde County is in southwest Texas, about 70 miles from Mexico.
Johnny Rodriguez grew up in Sabinal, Texas, a small town in Uvalde County.
Sometimes crime pays. How Johnny got his break in the music business:
1. Stole a goat
2. Barbecued it
3. Got arrested
4. Sang in jail
5. Texas Ranger who overheard him sing in jail, told music promoter about him
6. Promoter books a gig for him at Alamo Village (replica town built for filming of 1960 film The Alamo)
7. At gig, Tom T. Hall hears about him, hires him for his band
8. Hall gets him audition with Mercury Records
9. Rodriguez signed to Mercury Records
Albert E. Burmley wrote, “I’ll Fly Away,” the most recorded gospel music song, in 1929. He wrote more than 800 songs as a shape note gospel music composer and publisher.
He spent most of his early life chopping and picking cotton on his family’s farm in Spiro, Oklahoma.
Charley Pride of Sledge, Mississippi and his ten siblings also grew up picking cotton in their sharecropping family.
In his autobiography, Pride recalled telling his father. “I just don’t want to be a cotton picker, Daddy.” His father reportedly replied, “You don’t want to pick cotton? Well. What do you think you’re going to do?”
Aaron Thibeaux (T-Bone) Walker was a pioneer of the electric guitar who honed his craft in street-strolling stringbands of Dallas, Texas.
His 1929 recording debut (as Oak Cliff T-Bone) was a song called “Trinity River Blues” and later, in 1947, his biggest hit was “Call It Stormy Monday”. In this first recording, his distinctive solo style is played on acoustic guitar.
T-Bone was one of the first bluesmen to use electric guitar, and in the second performance, you can hear the amplified guitar solo style that inspired players around the world.
