# 1 - 05/24/2023 Eilen Jewell - Get Behind the Wheel

Here’s a little series for you Spotify Users called Bands You Should Know: 13 Songs. The premise being, these artists/bands are the core that make up Alt. Country. The catalog, no matter how large, was crunched down to 13 songs worth checking out. We hope this encourages you to explore these bands catalogs further, but for now, here is a sampler of the finest Alt. Country has to offer. We’ll be posting another set to go along with these next week. Enjoy. 

John Nova Lomax, the longtime Houston-based journalist who captured the Bayou City’s cultural landscape for the Houston Press and Houstonia as well as the Lone Star state’s broad interests for Texas Monthly and Texas Highways, has died. He was fifty-three. Lomax was best known for uniquely extending his famous family’s legacy through music, crime and feature writing for more than twenty years, but his biography in Texas Monthly notes a colorful list of previous jobs: oyster shucker in Tennessee, landscape gardener, British Telecom mail clerk in Lancashire, and a field hand on a kibbutz in the Arava section of the Negev in Israel.

Lomax authored Houston’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Bayou City and co-authored Murder & Mayhem in Houston: Historic Bayou City Crime. “Houston is not as much fun today,” Texas author Joe Nick Patoski said on Monday. “John Nova Lomax, Godspeed.” “Count this among things I’ve most hated having to do,” Houston Chronicle writer Andrew Dansby said of writing Lomax’s obituary for the newspaper. “Goodbye to a friend, one of my all-time favorite writers and a guy who brilliantly reflected this city back to itself in his work.”

Lomax’s genes helped shape his path. He was the great-grandson of iconic folklorist John Avery Lomax and great-nephew of folklorists Alan Lomax and Bess Lomax Hawes. Grandfather John Lomax Jr. co-founded the Houston Folklore Society and longtime music industry veteran father John Lomax III managed legends such as Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle and Rocky Hill. John Nova Lomax his own indelible mark. “In a go-go town, Lomax covered a slower and reflective pace,” Dansby wrote in his Houston Chronicle obituary. “He told Houston stories that otherwise would have gone untold...His connection to the city felt natural, symbiotic and whole. He understood Houston’s history, its eccentricities, its excesses and its deficiencies.”

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