Does Houston have a cohesive sonic identity?
In an international city, where one can hear an overwhelming number of equally wonderful styles of both traditional and forward-thinking music, it seems impossible to define the canonical “sound” of Houston.
But what if we shift the focus from a singular genre of music to a roll call of sounds one hears played in the Bayou City and along the Gulf Coast?
We might discover some surprising cultural connections, maybe even get a little bit closer to determining what the “sound” of Houston could be.
Doing so might get messy and congested, but hey, those are quintessentially Houston descriptors.
**The Accordion**
Houston’s Gold Star Studios.
Legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins sets aside his guitar and commandeers the studio’s organ to record an off-the-cuff tribute to a new style of music called zydeco.
This word is unfamiliar to the audio engineer, who misspells it as “Zolo Go” on the single’s record label.
“You know young and old likes dat!” says Hopkins at the start of the track, playing some proto–garage rock riffs emulating the sound of the accordion, zydeco’s signature instrument.
Listening to the track, one can visualize couples blowing off steam in Houston’s clubs and dance halls, where Hopkins most likely first heard this sound.
The arrival of the accordion from Europe to Texas can be traced back to the 1860s, when German, Czech, and Polish immigrants built railroad lines from central Texas to northern Mexico.
They brought the accordion with them to play their favorite polkas, and the instrument eventually found its way into Mexican string bands and mariachi combos.
Musicologists aren’t sure who brought the accordion next door to Louisiana, but they agree the instrument was first adopted in the late 1800s by Black Creole musicians, and the Cajuns after.
By the time of Lightnin’ Hopkins’s recording, the style of music had transformed into zydeco in such Houston venues as Fifth Ward’s Club Matinee and the Bronze Peacock, as well as Third Ward’s Eldorado Ballroom.
Meanwhile, in the Latin music scene, polka-influenced conjunto begat norteño.
This in turn led to Tejano, a complex, ever-changing alchemy of mariachi, rock and roll, jazz, polka, bolero, and other musical styles.
Accordions remained fundamental to the instrumentation.
**Texas Tenor Sound**
In the 1930s, at Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley high schools in Third and Fifth wards, respectively, student orchestras and marching bands developed a raucous style of jazz perfect for football games, street parades, and crowded ballrooms.
Celebrated jazz, swing, and blues musician Arnett Cobb originally joined the Wheatley band as a violinist in 1932 before switching to tenor saxophone, an instrument he practiced outdoors in a prairie near his home so he could play as loud as he wished.
Over time, Cobb’s style and showmanship would earn him the nickname “Wild Man of the Tenor Sax,” and his declamatory tone and sense of rock-style rhythms would distinguish the sound of Texas jazz.
Visual artist, historian, and DJ Tierney Malone first encountered that sound in 1989, when Cobb performed at an opening at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Hearing Cobb in person, and soon after meeting and beginning a years-long dialogue with Cobb’s daughter, Lizette, expanded Malone’s knowledge of and appreciation for the history of jazz in Houston, which profoundly impacted his own art.
He also came to understand that the musicians he revered were “everyday cats with unconventional occupations who were having to deal with the conventions of their reality,” he says.
Specifically, the daily humiliations and dangers of life in the Jim Crow South.
“Arnett Cobb’s daughter told me when she heard big band music, it was never ‘happy’ music to her,” Malone says.
“It was always angry music.”
The bandstand, he explains, was the only place where Black musicians could express their frustration with the world they lived in.
Over the years, Malone has made it his mission to celebrate the rich musical history of Houston through his popular KFPT show, Houston Jazz Spotlight.
At the start of each broadcast, you’ll hear Cobb’s big, soulful “Texas tenor” sound.
And with the high-profile success of such Houston musicians as pianists Jason Moran and Robert Glasper, as well as a new incoming generation of talented practitioners, the world beyond Texas’s borders is finally recognizing Houston’s historical and contemporary contributions to jazz.
**Metal**
Throughout the 1990s, the sound of Houston metal trended extremely dark, with the bands Dead Horse, Imprecation, and Crucifixion gaining audiences and acclaim outside of Texas.
This was the time Dobber Beverly, drummer and founder of Houston’s critically acclaimed prog-metal band Oceans of Slumber, made the pilgrimage at age 18 from the small town of Big Creek to Houston to carve his niche in the city’s underground metal scene.
“Everybody was trying to figure out how to make that sound,” says Beverly of that time.
“There were certain distortion pedals and the Ibanez RG series guitars that everybody played, but it had more to do with people trying to mix Crowbar and Slayer, who are polar opposites.”
While some may consider the intense, double kick drum blast beats and drop-tuned guitar sound of metal in all of its frightening incarnations diametrically opposed to that of zydeco or jazz, there is an intangible and mysterious quality to music one hears along the Gulf Coast.
For Beverly, who also drums in the metal bands Necrofier and Terror Corpse, Houston shares the same “charms” as these other cities, and a ritualistic and “bewitching” sound in its music, regardless of genre.
“We have a bit of the dark grit, a bit of the swampy soul,” Beverly says of Houston.
“It’s kind of infused in everybody and everything down here.
So the music has a little more soul to it, even metal.
The groove is still there!”
That “grit” and “soul,” along with a very Houstonian spirit of invention and willingness to bring all of one’s influences into the music, can be heard on Oceans of Slumber’s 2024 release “Where Gods Fear to Speak,” and in the spacious, Southern-goth sound of lead vocalist Cammie Gilbert’s solo album, House of Grief.
“There’s kind of like a tangy grit to this area,” Beverly says.
“And your influences aren’t just what you’re listening to.
It’s where you live.”
**Slowed and Throwed**
You can’t talk about Houston without acknowledging the “chopped and screwed” sound of the late, great Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw.
To create his immensely popular “Screwtapes”—cassette tapes he sold by the hundreds out of his home in South Park—Screw would record himself at two turntables, using his formidable DJ skills to stop, start, and otherwise “scratch” a second vinyl record against the first, then slow down or “screw” the performances to a final tape.
The process not only completely transforms the key of the music, but the entire emotional mood of the track.
Meanwhile, “chopped” or “throwed” refers to the repeated words and phrases Screw generated by stopping, reversing, and replaying vinyl in real time, riding the somnambulistic tempo of the music.
Screw, who studied classical piano as a kid, had a very eclectic taste in music, and his chopped and screwed mixes of Tupac (“So Many Tears”) and Phil Collins (“In the Air Tonight”) revealed new layers of meaning in what were already great hip-hop and pop song lyrics.
Much has been written about how the sedate, hallucinatory sound of these “Screwtapes” mirrors the intense heat and languid pace of life during Houston’s hottest months, with bass frequencies as deep and expansive as the rumble of thunder.
Screw’s mixes are also saturated with the “soul” and “tangy grit” Beverly speaks of thanks to the freestyle raps of members of DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click (S.U.C.), a formidable crew of MCs who included such legends as Big Hawk, Big Moe, E.S.G., Big Pokey, and Fat Pat.
Since his passing in 2000, DJ Screw continues to influence hip-hop producers across the Dirty South, as well as several Houston visual artists, including El Franco Lee II, Tay Butler, and Kaima Marie Akarue.
Lee’s monumental DJ Screw in Heaven 2 is a modern-day history painting, portraying a celestial vision of Screw in the afterlife, turntables at the ready, giving blessings to a crowd of family and friends either on their way to join him, or giving thanks for another day of life above ground.
**Sounds of Nature, Sounds of the City**
When Montreal-born interdisciplinary sound artist Lina Dib first arrived in Houston in 2005 to do her PhD in anthropology at Rice University, she was struck equally by both its sounds and near silences.
“Things just felt sort of sparse and spread out,” says Dib, who recalls standing at the corner of Washington and Montrose and wondering, “Where’s the city?”
Encouraged by her professors to, as she describes it, “push the boundaries of the discipline,” Dib began recording contrasting sounds, including Houston’s screeching birds and leaf blowers.
Murmurations, one of her earliest works, was installed in the stairwells of Lawndale Art Center and featured recordings of Houston traffic, construction, conversations in English and French, and a sample from Texas-born country blues singer-guitarist Henry Thomas.
“I can’t remember exactly how I discovered Henry Thomas’s music, but his song, ‘Texas Easy Street,’ stuck with me,” Dib says.
“I feel like his music embodies a mix of restlessness and homesickness all at once, and he still comes across as relaxed and happy.”
Her 2023 sound installation North to South and Back: Flights, Flood Fills and Sticks includes both bird sounds from species that migrate yearly throughout the region and bird sounds performed by Houston immigrants, including the half-Lebanese Dib.
“The world is beautiful, poetic, messy, and so interwoven and interconnected,” Dib says.
“Listening to other species and paying attention to the way the sounds around us are shifting can tell us a lot about those connections.”
**Interwoven and Interconnected**
image source from：https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2025/04/the-sound-of-houston
