ABSTRACT
These songs come from the plain of South Texas. This plain stretches away from the country of live oaks and limestone hills near San Antonio, east to the swampy coastal plain of the Gulf and south through the arid flat-land of mesquite and cactus to the warm and sluggish Rio Grande. This country was the cradle of the Western cattle industry, the Texas cowboy, and the famous Texas longhorn. It has been a land of many wars and much violence. It has been, and still is to some extent, a wild country. In speech, in culture, in way of life and, most of all, in music, it is strongly Mexican.
