The Origin of Bluebonnet Road

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“Bluebonnet Road” Origin Story by Louise Richardson  It took me about 25 years to write and finalize my first musical, “Chanteuse”, about folksingers in the 1960s. I don't know why I thought I could do that, having written poems but not songs before. I tried to get theater companies interested in it for years with no luck. Not being a musician myself I struggled to create the music with a MIDI keyboard and a PC I bought for the purpose of writing the music. Every now and then I would throw a “message in a bottle” out into the universe for help in getting the show produced, as I had been able to have my play, “Hamlet the Dane” done in full production at Capital  City Playhouse in Austin in 1991. Finally, I put a notice in the Austin Chronicle for a music arranger and got a bite or two, one of them from Richard Paul Thomas (RpT) of Salado. He had enough faith in the project to produce a CD in 2011 with himself and two talented young women for the vocals, and RpT and Nelda Milligan arranging and playing the songs for and on guitar and piano, respectively. Richard also put me in contact with Granger Esch at the Silver Spur Theater in Salado and we were able to find a cast for a full production of the stage show, also in 2011. The music won an ASCAPlus Award that year as well. We had another production with a different cast at the City Theater in Austin in 2012.  Richard, Linda Griffith and I stayed in touch afterward and I visited them many times in Salado, finding a songwriting partner in the late great Scot Vaughan of Waco at intermission of one of Richard's house concerts. On attending a chocolate festival in Salado someone pointed out to me the dewberry plants along Salado Creek, and that took me back to my grandmother's dewberry cobbler, which I can still taste all of these decades later. The memories flooded back to me about stories of my mother's life growing up near Granger and Holland on a farm near a town called Friendship, which I think is now under Lake Granger. I also remember a trip to the family farm when I was about two-years-old playing in a pile of cottonseed.