Doug Supernaw

In 1979, the teenager picked up a copy of Rolling Stone and a classified ad caught his eye. A “beach music” band on the South Atlantic coast needed a singer. Supernaw answered the ad and got the gig, trading in his faulty putter for a microphone as the front man for the Occasions. After two years plying the Georgia and Carolina coasts singing soul covers, Supernaw returned to Texas and gave school another chance, enrolling and flunking out of Texas Tech in short order. He hired on in the central Texas oil patch near Caldwell, and spent his nights there writing songs.

He married his first wife Trudy and adopted her two children in 1985, and returned to music and Houston in 1986, embarking on a music business crash course as the promoter and booker at the Arena Theater in Sharpstown. Later that year, the Arena shuttered for the first of several times, so Supernaw decided to make one last swipe at the brass ring. He would take his songs to Nashville, and it turned out they were worth something. He was able to land a coveted, if low-paying, job as a staff songwriter at one of the big publishing houses in Music City.

Justin White says that at that time there was no sign of trouble. “He knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it,” he says. “He was watching a lot of people that he was in the same boat with while he was living up in Nashville — the Joe Diffies and people like that. He saw them go from being staff writers to recording stars.”

By the beginning of 1993, he had completed his major label debut album Red and Rio Grande, there was a lucrative corporate sponsorship in place and his band — now renamed the Possum Eatin' Cowboys — was road-tested and tight. And thanks to Coors Light's largesse, he even had that tour bus.

“We called it ‘45 Feet of Texas,'” White says. “We were bringing 45 feet of Texas to every little town or state we went to. People ate it up.”

Especially within the state of Texas. Supernaw is an important link in the relatively new offshoot of country now known as Texas music, a conduit from guys like Robert Earl Keen and Jerry Jeff Walker and honky-tonkers like Gene Watson to today's stars like Kevin Fowler, Pat Green, Cory Morrow and Jack Ingram.

“During our shows, we would always play what was perceived to be Texas music,” White recalls. “I would sing ‘Merry Christmas from the Family' or ‘Redneck Mother' or ‘London Homesick Blues,' or we would do that old Charlie Daniels song ‘Texas.' And even our album Red and Rio Grande had a first line that went ‘Lone Star wavin' in the wind / a longhorn standin' proud behind a rusty barbed wire fence.'”

Supernaw helped continue the trend that Waylon and Willie had started back in the early '70s, and helped show a new generation of Texas artists that they didn't really need Nashville. Today, dozens of Texas artists are content to stay in Texas, or at least wait until they can approach Nashville with the sort of leverage a strong preexisting career can bring.

“I don't want to say we laid a blueprint for everybody, but I will say this: We heard more than once from people in Nashville that we were too Texas for Nashville, which we were proud of,” White says. “None of us ever wanted to move to Nashville. We loved it here, and we never wanted to go anywhere else.”

Not that there weren't some setbacks. In April of 1993, Supernaw wiped out surfing off the Mexican coast and cracked two vertebrae. A couple of months later, just after his neck brace was removed, he totaled a rental car in a Houston head-on collision. Not long after that, he was hospitalized after a bout of food poisoning in Virginia, and then some villainous denizen of Columbus, Ohio, invaded the tour bus and carried off all of the band's gear.

“About the only thing that hasn't happened to him is he hasn't been thrown in the penitentiary yet,” joked his then manager, former KIKK disc jockey Joe Ladd, in a Chronicle article. “You know, a country singer's got to spend a little time in jail.”

Set against all that tumult, Red and Rio Grande, the Richard Landis-produced debut album, rose and rose. Granted, “Honky Tonkin' Fool,” the album's first single, stiffed. Things turned around after that. Three months later BNA selected “Reno” as the second single and it shot all the way to No. 4 on the Billboard country charts, carrying the album with it to the top 30. (The album would eventually sell more than half a million copies and be certified gold.) The third single, “I Don't Call Him Daddy,” did even better, closing out 1993 and ringing in 1994 at the pinnacle of the country charts, thanks in no small part to a tear-jerking video in which a divorced man watches the birthday of his little boy (played by Supernaw's son Phillip) from afar.

“Here I am again starting over / Heartache to heartache / Lover to lover / Jukebox to jukebox / Lonely eyes to little games / Tryin' to start a fire in the rain”