You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Friday on KXT and Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

• Click the player to listen to the podcast:

• Expanded online version:

Ernesto “Ernie” Caceres was born in Rockport, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1911. As a young man, he performed in San Antonio and throughout South Texas with his brother, Emilio Caceres, and his cousin, Johnny Gomez. The trio’s popularity earned the group an appearance on the Benny Goodman radio show in 1937. Soon, Ernie Caceres began playing the saxophone with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. Following a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II, Caceres went on to play with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars. Drawing from a broad range of musical influences, including Mexican-American, African-American and Anglo-American, Ernesto Caceres joined the many other talented artists from the Lone Star State who helped shape jazz music during the 20th century.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll celebrate a Texan who was born the son of a former slave but went on to become one of the most popular and influential songwriters in American history.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The new Legorreta + Legorreta-designed Fort Museum of Science and History is open — a major upgrade in the Cultural District. It features a new planetarium, dinosaur exhibitions and mini-museums devoted to cattle, Fort Worth history, energy (basically, the oil and gas industry) and even the science of CSI. We talk with vice president of development Carl Hamm about balancing education with entertainment in this episode of Think. Think airs Fridays at 7:30 p.m. on KERA (Channel 13).

• Click here to listen to the KERA radio report about the museum.
• Click here to read about the museum's innovative planetarium.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

A native of Peru, Fort Worth Symphony music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya has found a way to preserve and showcase the orchestral music of his country — and the other Latin American countries that were once part of the Incan Empire. He has started a series of concerts and recordings called Caminos del Inka — "Trails of the Incans." It features three centuries of music — from dance numbers written down by an 18th century Spanish cleric to Enrique Iturrigia's homage to Igor Stravinsky and contemporary Peruvian composers. The first CD was released earlier this year, titled Inti, the name of the sun in Quechua, the language of the Incans.

Harth-Bedoya has brought his multi-media presentation to other cities, including Chicago. But he returns to Bass Hall this weekend with the FWSO and a concert version.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

When Calvin Littlejohn came to Fort Worth in 1934, North Texas was still Jim Crow country. Newspapers wouldn't print photos of African-Americans — unless, says Bob Ray Sanders, they'd murdered a white man or raped a white woman. Yet such segregation proved to be something of an opportunity for Littlejohn: He became the unofficial chronicler of black, middle-class Fort Worth life. The high school graduations and football games, the funerals, weddings and barbershops: Everything the mainstream media neglected, Littlejohn documented until his death in 1993.

Journalist Bob Ray Sanders — columnist for the Fort  Worth Star-Telegram and frequent visitor to KERA — has written Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White, which features more than 150 photos by Littlejohn. Sanders spoke to Krys Boyd about his lifelong friend, about growing up in segregated Fort Worth, about how Littlejohn came to pick up a camera.

Today, North Texas gets a new public radio station. KXT 91.7 FM will play an eclectic mix of indie rock, alt country and other styles. The station is owned by KERA. So what can you expect to hear on KXT? KERA’s Stephen Becker reports:

Click the audio player to listen to the KERA radio story:

Visit kxt.org for searchable playlists, a live stream and a schedule of this week’s in-studio performances.

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

• Click the player to listen to the podcast:

• Expanded online version:

This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll remember an eclectic Texas musician who continues to defy categorization.

Doug Sahm was born Nov. 6, 1941, in San Antonio. He began performing on local radio at the age of 8. Although Sahm grew up listening to country, pop and rock and roll, he also was strongly influenced by R&B, jazz and conjunto. In 1964, Sahm formed the Sir Douglas Quintet. The group released several hit records, including “She’s About a Mover,” “Mendocino” and “Dynamite Woman.” The Sir Douglas Quintet was very much a rock and roll band, but it also incorporated other musical influences, such as conjunto, country, blues and R&B, to give it a distinctly Texas sound. Throughout the 1970s, Sahm continued forging a unique style that blended honky tonk, blues, conjunto, western swing, R&B and rock and roll. By the 1990s, Doug Sahm’s eclectic musical tastes helped form the foundation for his most successful group, the Grammy Award-winning Texas Tornados. Together with Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender, Sahm helped popularize the Tornados’ uniquely Texas sound throughout the world. Sahm died Nov. 18, 1999.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at a classic Texas dance hall that has become a world famous tourist destination.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The Undermain Theater opens its 26th season Nov. 14 with the Len Jenkin play, Port Twilight, or The History of Science. The Undermain is the only Deep Ellum stage company founded in the '80s that still survives — still in Deep Ellum.

We took the occasion to talk with Katherine Owens, one of the founding members and the company's artistic director. Owens has directed more than 60 stage productions, including ones in LA, Europe and off-Broadway. She spoke about the Undermain's intractable but invaluable basement space, the sci-fi future that exists in Port Twilight, choosing playwrights for their language and her company's own Campaign for the Future.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett created the Found Footage Festival in 1991 after coming across a McDonald's training video on custodial duties. They've taken the FFF to the South by Southwest Festival, the Late Show with David Letterman and your local online DVD store. Most recently, FFF appeared at the Lakewood Theatre.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Oscar Casares earned a bachelor's degree from UT-Austin. But he didn't start writing short stories about his life in the Rio Grande Valley until he was working in an advertising job in Minnesota. He earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and his first story collection, Brownsville, was released in 2003 — to great acclaim.

Casares has won a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His first novel, Amigoland, was published in August this year. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas.

Art&Seek presents This Week in Texas Music History. Every week, we’ll spotlight a different moment and the musician who made it. This week, Texas music scholar Gary Hartman looks at the life of Little Joe Hernández, the son of a sharecropper who began playing professionally at 16.

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

• Click the player to listen to the podcast:

• Expanded online version:

This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at a singer who grew up as a sharecropper but went on to become the first Tejano artist ever to win a Grammy.

Little Joe Hernández was born in Temple, on Oct. 17, 1940. His grandfather had been a colonel in Pancho Villa’s army, but his parents worked as sharecroppers near Temple. At the age of 16, Hernandez began playing with David Coronado and the Latinaires. When Coronado left the band, Hernandez changed the name to Little Joe and the Latinaires. At first, the Latinaires played mostly Top 40 pop songs. However, by the late 1960s, Hernández had become increasingly involved in the Chicano movement. He changed the band’s name to Little Joe y La Familia and began to shape a new sound and image that would reflect his ethnic roots and his growing social activism. His 1972 remake of the older tune “Las Nubes” became an anthem of sorts for the Chicano movement. Hernandez’s blending of traditional Mexican folk styles with blues and rock 'n' roll helped lay the foundation for the emergence of Tejano music in the 1980s. In 1992, Little Joe became the first Tejano artist ever to win a Grammy for his album Diez y Seis de Septiembre.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at an accomplished songwriter who is probably best remembered for his more humorous compositions.