Doug Supernaw

“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.'”

“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”

Yvette Tisdale met Supernaw just before most of the world did. In the early 1990s, as a rising star on the Texas honky-tonk circuit, Supernaw had just returned to his native state after an extended stay in Nashville. Now he was making a concerted effort to sing his own songs his own way. And once again, he was pressing forward to the head of the pack, headlining bigger beer joints like Mo's in Katy, which was where Tisdale first laid eyes on him.

“I was not gonna pursue a married man,” she says now. “I don't go that route. I just told him I thought he was really good and I hoped that he made it.”

Her time would come later, at a decidedly lower point in Supernaw's career. It was also a bleak period in Tisdale's life. She had no husband and no children, and she was about to lose her little spread in Magnolia and all of her horses and some of her dogs. In fact, she says that things were looking so grim she had decided to take her own life.

One night in 2005, she says, she was driving by Henry's Hideout, a rough-and-tumble roadhouse in the pine oak woods near Magnolia that is so full of trophy heads it is literally the “horniest bar in Texas.” The sign out front in the gravel parking lot said “Appearing tonight, Doug Supernaw.”

It wasn't one of Supernaw's better onstage performances. “Unfortunately, his so-called friends had gotten ahold of him,” Tisdale remembers. “He was at a benefit that day and they had gotten him drunk, and he was not good. He was angry, and he even told people he was drunk before he started singing and he was sorry about the show.”

After he got off the stage, though, sparks flew. Tisdale says that Supernaw listened when she talked, really listened, and he could tell that something was wrong with her. He could tell she was sinking, and he was able to pull her from the brink.