Bruce & Scrappy Jud this weekend at the Ranch

There's an old joke in Austin that I remember lovingly from my college days there.  It goes, "What do you call a musician who just broke up with his girlfriend?"  In Austin, you can't toss a pebble without hitting a musician or his/her guitar as they are walking down the street to their next gig. The joke implies the itinerant lifestyle and other less desirable traits of the tried and true musician.

So what do you call a musician that just broke up with his girlfriend, or boyfriend? Homeless.

The only reason Bruce Hughes and Scrappy Jud are homeless is because they are always on the road.  Bruce with Jason Mraz last year on his world tour and Scrappy Jud with everybody else.  For the last so many years they've been part of The Resentments, a South Austin super-group founded by the late Stephen Bruton.  No Depression magazine once said of the Resentments, "comparisons to everyone from Crosby, Stills, & Nash, to the Traveling Wilburys, the Texas Tornado, the official and unofficial versions of the Outlaws, and The Band can be justified."  The group that started out as a few musicians playing for the love of their craft became an Austin Sunday night staple.

Last May, Bob Livingston, singer-songwriter and Music Ambassador for the US State Department (no joke), played a show here at the Ranch and then stuck around for a few days to write songs and relax.  I found him one morning at the piano playing a melancholy tune.  "I've got to cut my visit short, get back to Austin," he said, "Stephen Bruton died today."  I searched my memory and it's limited knowledge of musicology for a Stephen Bruton. The name did not ring a bell.  If it rings a bell with you then I do not need to tell you the influence his life and his music made on cinema this year with the movie Crazy Heart.

This weekend -- Easter weekend --Bruce and Scrappy Jud will be here at the Ranch filling the Great Room with sumptuous melodies, musical notes will surely drift, like freed balloons, into the heavens and soothe the ears of angels and maybe even an old bandmate or two.  With Stephen gone, the Saxon Pub's Sunday night house band  may be feeling a little homeless.  Oh, that their music this weekend might mend the hearts of many a girlfriend who had to put up with lesser musicians.