Downtown Coors Light festival features live music, Texas flare
The first Coors Light Texas Music Festival will be a truly Texan event. The band Thriftstore Cowboys feature TCU student Jeff Dennis
on guitar.
BY MATT SIMPSON
Staff Writer

The old Santa Fe Depot warehouse still sits at 1401 Jones St. in the Convention Center district of downtown Fort Worth — only now it’s a major retail center, and it’s been renamed the Fort Worth Rail Market. This weekend the building is being used to host the inaugural Coors Light Texas Music Festival.

Sponsors claim that the Festival is “a Music Festival in Texas, not just Texas music!” Well, I guess so. Live is on the bill for 10 p.m. Friday, and they’re from Pennsylvania. But otherwise the Coors Light Texas Music Festival is just Texas music.

Still, Texas music isn’t too bad, especially when you consider a lineup this weekend that includes Vallejo, Soulhat, Darden Smith, Reverend Horton Heat, Jimmie Vaughan with Lou Ann Barton and Robert Earl Keen. There’s also the Thriftstore Cowboys, a fiddle-driven, six-piece band from the dusty prairie lands of West Texas. The Cowboys feature Jeff Dennis, a senior sociology major, on the guitar and play on the Texas stage at 6 p.m. Saturday.

And then, finally, the Flatlanders. After recording their debut album in 1972, the Flatlanders — Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock — split to explore solo careers. Of course they all succeeded: Ely led an alt-country revolution of sorts and even toured with the Clash in the late ‘70s; Hancock made solo albums and composed heart-breaking western ballads that provided material for Ely, Emmylou Harris and the Texas Tornadoes, among others; and Gilmore wrote simple country-folk songs and appeared as Smoky in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. But now, 30 years later, the band has reunited to record Now Again, an album that radio personality Don Imus has called “the best album I’ve heard since Paul Simon’s Graceland.” The Flatlanders will be playing on the Lone Star Stage at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

So if you feel like listening to some Texas music, or if it’s been a while since you last heard Live’s mid-’90s smash hit “Lightning Crashes,” it might be worth stopping by the Fort Worth Rail Market this weekend. Single day admission is $20 at the gate, and two-day passes are $30.