From KUTX:
This Week In Texas Music History is supported by Brane Audio.
On Jan. 11, 1936, blues pianist Katie Webster was born in Houston. Her parents were both piano players, her father in the ragtime style, her mother in the classical. Try as they might to push Katie toward the latter, she was drawn to the sounds of Little Richard and Fats Domino on the airwaves and forged her own path.
In her teens, she moved east to Beaumont, toward her “Swamp Boogie” destiny, and began to perform professionally even further east in Lake Charles, La. Local promoters heard her, and Webster became a successful session musician in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands, bringing her barrelhouse piano to hundreds of recordings with artists like Lazy Lester, Juke Boy Bonner and Hop Wilson.
She joined Otis Redding’s touring band in 1964. She was so affected by his 1967 death that she wound down her musical career for a time, moving to Oakland to care for her aging parents. In the late ’70s, though, reissues of her older albums brought new attention, and Webster toured Europe for the first time in 1982, where she found adoring audiences she would return to again and again.
