He has also amassed a scholarly body of knowledge about honky-tonk music in general and shuffles in particular. “He’s a PH-fuckin’ D!” declares Trevino’s occasional bandleading boss Cornell Hurd, with his usual tasteful understatement. “Justin is like a 50-year-old guy in a 30-year-old body. He’s not trying to make Johnny Bush records, he’s trying to make a Justin Trevino record that sounds like he was living in 1964 and cutting records with the A-Team.”
No doubt about it, he’s hard to stump. Most folks, for example, think of Ray Price’s 1956 hit “Crazy Arms” as a classic example of a Texas shuffle. Out in the van, Trevino politely demurred, and spontaneously deconstructed the song to prove it: “‘Crazy Arms’ is an interesting example, because it was recorded before they had really perfected the Ray Price shuffle,” he pointed out. “There’s no drums on it, and that bass player is walkin’, but he’s not walking triads — he’s walking more like a swing player would play. A lot of guys will tell you that that recording is not a legitimate shuffle as opposed to what the Ray Price Shuffle sound became.”
In his agreeable, low-key way, Trevino concluded by adding an obscure lagniappe: Charlie Walker’s “Two Empty Arms”, the flip side of “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down”, might be a better contender for the first bona fide Texas shuffle, he asserted.
(An aside, Price once detailed the revolutionary trick of “Crazy Arms” to another writer: “We were having trouble getting a good clean bass sound, so instead of going with the standard 2/4 beat, I said, ‘Let’s try a 4/4 bass and a shuffle rhythm.’ And it cut — it cut clean through.”)
Trevino shrugs off his encyclopedic knowledge of his subject — “There’s some aspects of this that I probably take more seriously than your average honky-tonk picker,” he confesses — but he’s serious about doing his part to keep the flame alive and hand down the honky-tonk shuffle tradition to players-to-be.
“I don’t think it’s my role singlehandedly, but I hope that I’m playing a small part,” he says. “Without guys like me doing it, it will certainly die. There’s a guy up in Fort Worth named Jake Hooker who has also devoted himself to this kind of music, and we are the only two guys in our twenties that I can point to that do strictly what we do.”
The inescapable irony is that Trevino finds himself marginalized in an era in which supposed “Texas Music” is enjoying one of its periodic surges of national popularity. But like many another Texas musicians — a conjunto bandleader in Corpus Christi, for instance, or a black bluesman in inner-city Houston — Trevino finds himself on the sidelines watching the parade pass by. And he isn’t happy about it.
“I definitely feel like an outsider, if you’re talking about the Pat Greens and the Cory Morrows of the world,” he acknowledges, his body shifting restlessly in the van seat. “I don’t hang in that company, and when I am forced to be in situations where we’re on the same shows — I’ve been playing with Johnny Bush when he has done shows with Pat Green — those guys are always real complimentary of what we do, and I guess they like it, but it’s hard to say.
“For as long as I can remember, there’s been these singer-songwriter types laying claim to the term ‘Texas Music,’ and I’m going, wait a minute guys,” he continues. “I’m not trying to shut anybody out, but what about this ‘Texas Music’ over here? If Ernest Tubb ain’t Texas Music, I don’t know what in the hell is.”
He paused a moment and smiled wanly in the dark. “For a long time I’ve had that feeling, and it will get me going if I let it.”
In practical terms, of course, the current state of affairs means that Pat Green is playing the Cotton Bowl, while Justin Trevino is entertaining the Tuesday night crowd at Ginny’s Little Longhorn. Sighing with exasperation, he admits that he gets, well, frustrated on occasion. But at the same time, he has a realistic view of the marketplace.
“If the Texas Music format that they’re touting today, if they were to try to embrace me and Johnny and Ray Price and guys like us, I don’t know if their fans would be any more receptive to us than I am to that type of music,” he said.
“It makes me wonder, what do I call what I do? I guess it’s Texas music — it’s Texas country music. How’s that?”
John T. Davis lives and writes in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Austin City Limits: 25 Years Of American Music.
