Celebrating songwriting at Blanco’s Bar & Grill

By Paul T. Mueller

The musicians and industry pros might have outnumbered the ordinary fans at Houston’s Blanco’s Bar & Grill on the evening of July 9, but you didn’t have to be an insider to enjoy a full evening’s sampling of talented Texas singer-songwriters. The event, produced by the Houston chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), was the first installment of what’s intended to a monthly occasion at Blanco’s, a Texas roadhouse improbably tucked between glossy office towers to the south and Houston’s swanky River Oaks neighborhood to the north.

For this show, the chapter played host to nine singer-songwriters divided into three rounds, each round consisting of three songs by each of three performers. Fellow musicians, industry types and other fans were treated to a nice sampling of work from Leslie Krafka, James Sweat, Brian Kalinec, Matt Harlan, Brant Lee Croucher, Brad Boyer, Mark Beets, Jack Saunders and Connie Mims – all Texans by birth or choice, and most from the greater Houston area.

These are all working musicians, if not necessarily household names, so the quality of the music was high. Despite the honky-tonk setting and the “Nashville” in the group’s name, the show was not, as event coordinator Mims pointed out, just about country music. Most of the songs leaned toward the folky singer-songwriter part of the musical spectrum.

In the first round, dubbed “The H-Town Round,” Kalinec sang “The Fence,” a sunny ode to the value of good work and self-reliance, nicely accompanied by his accomplished picking. Krafka brought energy and a bigger-than-you’d-expect voice to “Whiskey High,” a tale of revelry and regret. Sweat, one of several Houston coordinators for NSAI, celebrated the brighter side of relationships with “Love in the Fun Lane.”

The second round was titled “The Bad Plaid Round,” but of the three participants, only Brad Boyer actually wore plaid. Fashion aside, all three offered fine examples of their work. Matt Harlan’s “Ravin Hotel” was a look at a life – or maybe two lives – that have gone off the tracks. Boyer sang a quietly powerful ballad titled “Too Cold to Cry” (co-written by Connie Mims), and Brant Lee Croucher performed “Theodora,” a sweet love song named for his grandmother and written at the request of his grandfather, in honor of their decades-long marriage.

The final round belonged to Mims, Mark Beets and Jack Saunders. Mims, another Houston chapter coordinator who is also a member of the longtime Houston pop-rock band Wheatfield, sang “Gettin’ There,” the upbeat title track from her upcoming CD. Beets offered “Come Down, Virginia,” a murder ballad with a twist at the end. Saunders, who in addition to his performing career is a producer and studio owner who has worked with several of the other artists on the bill, closed the show with his road song “This Highway.”

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