About Me
Greetings from San Marcos, TX
My name is Terri Hendrix. No relation to that Hendrix, but I am the daughter of a man named Jim. I'm an Aquarius, born in 1968 in San Antonio, Texas. My father was a career military man, and for several years when I was a child, my family was stationed in Fort Clayton, Panama. After completing his service there, my father squeezed the family into a maroon van and drove us all the way back to Texas. My mother, who grew up in Cuba, translated from Spanish to English to Panamanian to Tex-Mex to Spanglish the whole trip, thus enabling us to communicate our way safely through the heart of guerilla warfare in South and Central America. After we settled back down in San Antonio, I noticed that I didn't quite fit in with the other kids my age. So I spent quite a bit of time making up songs on the guitar I'd borrowed (or stolen) from my sister the Christmas prior.
Upon graduation from high school, I received a classical music and voice scholarship to Hardin Simmons State University, a conservative Baptist College in Abilene, Texas. After two years of failing music theory, I switched majors and transferred to what's now known as Texas State University, in San Marcos. I waited tables to pay for school, and fumbled along aimlessly until I found an open-mic night at Cheatham Street Warehouse. Soon thereafter, I met a woman named Marion Williamson, who employed me to look after a few goats of her property, Wilory Farm. Within months I was bartering out my goat milkin' skills for guitar lessons, as I'd come to find out Marion was a great fingerpicker from the schools of Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Big Bill Broonzy.
With Marion's encouragement, by 1991 I was making demo tapes off her DAT machine and booking gigs around the Texas hill country. My tour bus was a green, beat-up 1991 Toyota pick-up with a camper shell and a big dent in the shape of a deer (or two). I carried my own PA system and landed a gig as my own personal "roadie." Later on, after I started playing tourist hot spots like the San Antonio Riverwalk and bars along the Port Aransas shoreline, I got a Web site and started a mailing list. Slowly but surely, my fanbase started to grow - as did my appreciation for the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Day, David Bromberg, Joe Ely, Terry Allen, Kris Kristofferson and the Indigo Girls, not to mention local heroes like Kent Finlay, Ike Eichenberg, Al Barlow and Stan Smith.
My label, Wilory Records, took root in 1996 by way of a rejection letter from a label (which shall remain nameless, though it's now out of business). I had friends to pay back who had already loaned me money for recording costs, so I released my first record, Two Dollar Shoes, on my own. Within six months or so, I'd paid everyone back and even made enough to start a new record. Everything was going great until my mentor and best friend Marion died suddenly in 1997. I was devastated. There's something to be said about miracles, though, as it was exactly one month after Marion's passing that I first met Lloyd Maines at South by Southwest in Austin. He had heard a cassette of my new songs, and we visited about what would later become my second record - and the first one he would produce for me. I named it after Marion's old place: Wilory Farm.
Lloyd and his wife moved from Lubbock, Texas to Austin in 1998. They both noticed my inability to balance a checkbook, and knew that I needed help running my label. We've been business partners ever since. We launched our own online E-Commerce store (that's funded every recording since) and updated my mailing list from names on scraps of typing paper to a physical list. Independent radio stations began playing my songs, and we soon started touring all over the United States and Europe behind subsequent albums Places in Between (2000), The Ring (2002) and The Art of Removing Wallpaper (2004). Marion's favorite goat from years past, Peggy Lee (named after the singer), became my label's mascot. In 2005, Peggy even got her own song - "Get Your Goat On" - on my first "kid's record," Celebrate the Difference.
The Spiritual Kind is the ninth record I've released independently. It was recorded with pretty much the same approach I've had on all my records (the kid's one included), in that I didn't worry about being too loud for folk, too pop for country, too country for jazz, or too this or too that for any other genre. It's a little more acoustic-driven, with a lot more harmonica (my three dogs like to hear me practice to Sonny Terry records). I just wrote what I felt like writing and sang how I felt like singing. I like all styles of music, and that's what we did on this album. The end result is what I'm calling a folk record. I figure I get to call it what I want, because I paid for it.
So here I am, about a decade and a half after Marion first took me under her wing, and I still choose to live in San Marcos and make music for my living. I'm now 14 years past the age I was told by a promoter (when I was 25) that you had to have "made it" by in order to "make it" in the music industry. And I'm nine records down the road from the point I was told I'd fail without national distribution. I'm not gonna lie: It's a hard gig, and I've seen this industry go through many changes in the decade since I started my label. But I've also found that the two things that first inspired me to follow this crazy path have stayed the same: namely, all the fans that support music because of their genuine love of the song, and the songwriters out there who continue to put what's in their soul to music. I called my record The Spiritual Kind as a tip of the hat to these folks that have been with me on my journey so far, and to all those I've yet to meet on the road still ahead of me. Where that road will ultimately lead to is anyone's guess. But I gotta say that, thanks to the "spiritual kind", it continues to be one great boogie ride.
Kind Regards,
Terri Hendrix
Terri's CDs — and soundbites — can be found at her e-commerce store on her Web site, www.terrihendrix.com. Her albums can also be purchased on iTunes and many more digital download stores.
Terri Hendrix: "The Ring"
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Terri Hendrix: "Breakdown"
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