During his teenage years, Roger Wallace rejected the country sounds his parents favored from Willie Nelson and Hank Williams, turning instead toward the blues. His mother and father had long foreseen his eventual path as a country performer, and that forecast proved accurate. Before the shift occurred, he devoted several years to blues while attending the University of Tennessee, where he hosted the campus radio station’s blues program and played in multiple local bands devoted to rockabilly and blues. Exposure came through a friend enamored with Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album, whose repeated listening sessions finally opened Wallace to the music his parents had championed.
The conversion from blues remained unfinished, however. Still drawn to that genre, he drove to Austin to hear its local blues acts and, during the journey, absorbed a borrowed cassette of Hank Williams that included “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The track’s emotional force struck him powerfully, yet blues continued to dominate his listening. After receiving his degree in 1994, he moved again to Austin to serve as a blues promoter for Antone’s Records, though the position ended quickly. He spent nearly every evening immersed in the city’s thriving music community, drawing inspiration from Junior Brown, Ted Roddy, Wayne Hancock, and others. Within a few years he signed with Antone’s sister label and began performing country music, just as his parents had predicted. His debut album, Hillbilly Heights, appeared in 1999.
