Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
That music has the power to captivate the human imagination and propel individuals into new areas of research is beautifully illustrated by Craig D. Hillis's Texas Trilogy: Life in a Small Texas Town. Inspired by the content of three songs composed by folksinger Steven Fromholz, Hillis first interviewed Fromholz, then visited the small Texas town Fromholz immortalized in his "Texas Trilogy." What Hillis found in Kopperl, in Bosque County, Texas, was not some unique and special place, but rather the very bedrock of the American people and their dreams. Kopperl and its residents exemplify the quintessential small-town American experience. Like thousands of other small Great Plains towns, Kopperl depended on farming and ranching; the town thrived during the great cattle drives of the 1870s, fairly burst with possibilities when the railroad arrived in the 1880s, barely survived the Great Depression, and finally slipped into decline when the train no longer stopped there. But Kopperl and Bosque County, Texas, were saved from oblivion by a budding poet-composer, Steven Frumholz, who spent his summers there with his grandmother, and by historian, Craig D. Hillis, who heard Frumholz's songs and recognized a compelling subject for a book.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:1 (Winter 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.