Texas music might mean frat-house anthems and dumbed-down country: twanged-up Hootie with "Shiner Bock" and "Hill Country" references. But that's Texas Music. Let's deal with music from Texas instead. That's glorious blues (Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb) or beautiful rock' 'n' boogie (Doug Sahm) or - in this particular case - luminous, literate (but not pretentiously "literary") acoustic music. This is the tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Vince Bell, Nanci Griffith, Eric Taylor and others. It's sad-eyed, sharp-edged stuff, and Denice Franke is out there doing it the right way.

The crazy thing is, Franke has been doing it the right way for upwards of 20 years and some supposed "connoisseurs" of this music still haven't heard of her. Jeez, dust off the record player and fire up the 1981 Beacon City Band LP she recorded with compadres Doug Hudson, David Wright and Roland Denney. The Beacon City Band played Austin, San Marcos, Gruene and places like that, and they charted a course for what is now called Americana Music (later on, others lost the map, then found the way on their own).

No record player? Pull out Nanci Griffith's One Fair Summer Evening disc and listen as Franke's harmonies enrich the proceedings. Griffith produced an album on the duo of Franke and Doug Hudson, but the album never came out and Franke is loath to make copies (dang).

Later on, Franke went on to sing on some Eric Taylor albums that rank with the best singer-songwriter stuff anyone has ever heard (Disbeliever? Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and others will tell you the same thing, and who are you to argue?). Taylor thinks Franke's great, and he ended up producing both of her solo albums - 1997's aptly titled You Don't Know Me and 2001's exemplary Comfort.

Each album is a showcase for Franke's voice, a low-pitched wonder that sounds kind of like a dust-bitten Sara Carter. But then Franke's voice has always been in favor, so the most important things revealed are Franke's songs. They're all solo-penned, and they're something else. They should be something else, if songs are born of experience, because Franke has lived a life: Degree in German; hung for a week with Aborigines; hung for two days with Nick Drake's parents in England; played the streets of Taiwan in 1987; played the Kennedy Center in Washington; played the Rattlesnake Saloon in Munich and the Sandwich Factory in Spartanburg, SC and the Bottom Line in New York.

She's got songs about German cowboys and about rotten Michigan nights, about crazed rovings and good friends and passionate homecomings. She covers someone else's gem every now and then (Taylor's "Blue Piano," David Olney's "Little Bit Of Poison," Vince Bell's "100 Miles From Mexico," etc.), but the heart of this whole deal is her own.That heart doesn't beat for college fraternity parties or "Hook 'em Horns" rallies, but then let's not get on the "Texas Music" ramble again. This is all simply to say that Denice Franke's music is worth hearing, and we haven't even talked about her strong guitar work or her sense of melody or her easy laugh or her way with an audience. You'll figure all that out for yourself, in time...

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