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Terri Hendrix
Texas
In the 10 years since she self-released her debut CD, Terri Hendrix has bloomed from the Texas hill country’s best-kept secret into one of the folk world’s most endearing and original voices. And one of it’s most proudly independent, as shown by the song lyric she’s adopted as the slogan for her label, Wilory Records: “Own Your Own Universe.” By doing just that over the course of six studio CDs and three live discs, Terri has been able to achieve both financial and artistic freedom and cultivate a thriving grassroots following.
Along the way, she’s also charmed plenty of critics, too — though many still have a hard time summing her up. “It’s impossible to categorize the music of Terri Hendrix,” observed Country Music People. “She is completely her own person.” Texas Monthly called her a “singer-songwriter-entrepreneur-czarina,” while England’s Mojo, smitten with Hendrix’s 1998 album Wilory Farm, described her as a “scarifyingly breezy Texan cowgirl” who seemed “way too wholesome to have made an album as invigorating as this.” Perhaps RollingStone.com, reviewing her 2002 album, The Ring, put it best when it approvingly dubbed her a “Texan square peg.”
Clearly, there’s nothing ordinary about this San Antonio-born, San-Marcos-based songbird, who abandoned a college opera scholarship to milk goats for guitar lessons so she could hone her chops on the Texas songwriter circuit. With influences including Mississippi John Hurt, Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul Simon, and Ella Fitzgerald, she describes her unique stylistic mix of folk, roots-pop, country and scat-jazz as being “from another planet.” Her writing makes her stand out, too. “Hendrix writes lyrics that set her apart from many contemporary songwriters,” praised Philadelphia’s Local Daily News. “Her songs are rich with visual images, thought-provoking lyrics and undercurrents of non-conformity.” Dirty Linen noted that Terri is “well on her way to becoming the beat laureate of the folk world.”
  
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