Journal of Texas Music History | Volume 21

Rolando Duarte
is a teacher and Social Studies Department Chair at Stephen F. Austin High School and Dual Credit Professor of Government at Austin Community College. He is a graduate of the M.A. program in history at Texas State University.

Marguerite Gutierrez Hirsch
is a retired Registered Nurse who received her education at Dominican College in Houston and completed a Master’s degree in Health Education at the University of Houston. She is a fifth generation Tejano, whose ancestors were here as early as the 1700s. She currently lives in Austin. A lifelong interest in genealogy and Texas history led her to write about her family’s musical past.

Mary Manning
is the university archivist and curator of Performing Arts Research Collections at the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. She holds an M.A. in English focusing on American Literature and folklore and an MLIS focusing on archives. An original team member of Tejas Got Soul, Manning continues to collaborate with the project to preserve their content in the UH archives. Tejas Got Soul is a community documentation project that celebrates, documents, and preserves the history of Música Tejana in the Houston area.

Joe Specht
is former director of the Jay-Rollins Library at McMurray University in Abilene, Texas. He is co-editor of and a contributing author to The Roots of Texas Music (Texas A&M University Press, 2003), and he has authored numerous articles for The Handbook of Texas Music, The Journal of Texas Music History, The Encyclopedia of Country Music, and other publications.

Roger Wood
is the author of Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues (2003) and Texas Zydeco (2006). He co-authored House of Hits: The Story of Houston’s Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (2010, with Andy Bradley) and has contributed articles to numerous other books, reference sources, and periodicals.

Jaclyn M. Zapata
is a graduate student at Texas State University pursuing a Master’s in Public History. Her interests are on southern music and race, with a focus on Texas music figures. She is currently interning with the Austin Museum of Popular Culture. Ms. Zapata is from Poteet, Texas, and lives in Austin.