Marfa, Texas

Everything Marfa is known for

32 songs mention this city 0 artists from here

Music in Marfa

Songs About Marfa

Hotel Paisano
Carson Jeffrey
97%
"Well I'm sittin’ in the lobby of the Paisano"
Marfa
robert earl keen
90%
Marfa Lights
Kaitlin Butts
83%
"Like the Marfa lights"
marfa lights
doug moreland
83%
Moonlight in Marfa (feat. Josh Abbott Band, Flatland Cavalry, William Clark Green & John Baumann)
The Panhandlers
83%
"Moonlight in Marfa"
Marfa Skies
Pat Byrne
81%
"Marfa Skies"
Marfa, Tx (feat. Ben Bridwell)
SUSTO
80%
"Marfa, Tx"
One Night in Marfa
John Baumann
77%
"One Night in Marfa"
We Were Something
Shane Smith & the Saints
55%
"Beneath the Marfa Lights"
In Texas With A Band
Brennen Leigh
53%
"That stretch from Post to Marfa's"
Border Kid
Scott Ballew
52%
"Have you ever seen the Marfa lights"
Border Radio
John Baumann
51%
"Broken heart outside of Marfa, while a Spanish angel sang"
Marfa
Michael Dean Pierce
50%
Under the Texas Sky
Paige Lewis
50%
"Marfa in the moonlight"
Cold War
The Rocket Summer
50%
No Spare Parts
Rolling Stones
50%
Bonfire of the Inanities
Austin Lounge Lizards
50%
Midnight
Paul Cauthen
49%
"Our love was runnin' with the Marfa lights"
Abilene
Plains
40%
On Hold
The xx
40%

Showing top 20 of 32 songs

Artists From Marfa

No artists from Marfa in the database yet.

Rivers & Roads in Song near Marfa

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Marfa.

US Route 90 9 songs Rio Grande / Río Bravo 163 songs Rio Grande / Río Bravo 250 songs

Musical Heritage

Ballroom Marfa RoadyGoat

2003

The building that holds Ballroom Marfa has been a silent-movie house and a dance hall since the 1920s. Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn took it over in 2003 and turned it into a contemporary art space — one that commissions painters and musicians to make work out of the Big Bend country all around it. Way out here in Far West Texas, they've brought in Jeff Tweedy, Feist, At the Drive-In. Over twenty-some years they've worked with more than eight hundred and forty artists, writers, and thinkers. And every summer they run a DJ Camp, teaching Marfa kids to mix and scratch, ending with a dance party at Planet Marfa, the bar down the road. Twenty years in, the marquee still lights up out on the high desert.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

Flying Island music festival RoadyGoat

When the Trans-Pecos festival left a hole in Marfa's calendar, Matthew Bolick filled it. He put together the first Flying Island festival last October — four months of scrambling, twenty bands, and about six hundred people. He named it after a jazz fusion group his uncle played in back in the early seventies. This year it runs October twenty-third through the twenty-sixth: twenty bands across five venues around town, including a new one, the arena at the Chinati Foundation. The headliner is Tortoise, playing El Cosmico's small stage the day after their first album in nearly a decade drops. Out here, near the sky island of the Davis Mountains, Bolick says it takes either gumption or stupidity to throw a festival. Sounds like both, and it's working.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

Los Yonke Gallos de Marfa versus Texas Playboys RoadyGoat

Out on the east side of Marfa, at Vizcaino Park, they play sandlot baseball — real sandlot, two homegrown clubs that have been at it more than fifteen years: Los Yonke Gallos de Marfa and the Texas Playboys. And because it's Marfa, the roster runs strange. Saint Vincent sang the national anthem in 2014. Ben Kweller straps it on for the Playboys. In 2021, Carrie Brownstein — Sleater-Kinney, Portlandia — threw out the first pitch, and it landed in the glove of a guy named Michael Camacho. Camacho's the local soap opera: back in 2009 he jumped to the Gallos while still suiting up for the Playboys, and the fans around here have not entirely let that go. Rock stars in the dirt, a small-town grudge on the mound. That's a ballgame.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love at El Cosmico RoadyGoat

2006

A mile south of Marfa, out in the high desert, there's a music festival that started before there was even a hotel to host it. In 2006, Austin hotelier Liz Lambert threw a party on a property she was still building into El Cosmico — about four hundred people showed up. The singer-songwriter Tift Merritt helped hammer together the first stage, then rode a bike around town handing out flyers. One stage, five acts a night, and it grew to around eighteen hundred people on twenty-one acres. The wildest night came in 2011: Patty Griffin was on the poster, and her then-boyfriend was not. He walked out unannounced. It was Robert Plant. Out here, the surprise guest just might be Led Zeppelin.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

History of Marfa

The Mystery of the Marfa Lights RoadyGoat

Just east of town on Highway 90, you'll find an official viewing area dedicated to Marfa’s most famous and baffling phenomenon: the Marfa Lights. The first documented sighting was in 1883 by a young cowhand named Robert Ellison, who saw flickering lights and assumed they were Apache campfires. But there were no campfires. For over a century since, people have gathered here at dusk to watch for them. They appear as distant, mysterious orbs that can glow, hover, split apart, or dart across the horizon against the backdrop of the Chinati Mountains. Are they UFOs? Ghosts of Spanish conquistadors? Or something more mundane? Theories range from paranormal activity to atmospheric reflections of car headlights. Whatever they are, watching the sun set over the desert and waiting for them to appear is the essential Marfa experience.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

Donald Judd's Concrete Vision RoadyGoat

The Marfa you see today is largely the invention of one man: Donald Judd. A leading figure in minimalist art, Judd grew disillusioned with the New York art scene in the 1970s. He wanted a place where his work, and the work of his peers, could be installed permanently, in harmony with its surroundings. He found that place here. He began buying property, starting with two large hangars downtown, and eventually acquired the entirety of the decommissioned Fort D.A. Russell. He founded the Chinati Foundation on the fort's grounds, turning old barracks into galleries for massive, light-filled installations. His 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, housed in two former artillery sheds, and 15 outdoor concrete works are the heart of his vision—a radical idea that art, architecture, and the vast Texas landscape could be a single, unified experience.

RoadyGoat → · 3.7 mi away

Marfa, TX RoadyGoat

Before the railroad snaked its way through this high desert, this land belonged to others. For centuries, indigenous peoples knew these mountains and plains, long before the surveyors arrived. Then came the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway, a lifeline across the vastness. Marfa sprang to life as a water stop, a crucial point where steam engines could drink deep before pushing on through the arid landscape. It was the 1880s, and a railroad executive’s wife, taken by a character in a novel, gave the town its name. Marfa remained a small ranching community for decades, quiet and largely unchanged. The altitude, almost a mile high, kept things cooler here than in the scorching lowlands. Then, something remarkable happened. The stark beauty of the surrounding landscape, that palpable sense of artistic freedom and serene isolation, began to attract artists. Donald Judd, a visionary of minimalism, found a home here. His Chinati Foundation, with its monumental art installations, transformed Marfa, drawing people from across the world to experience art on a grand scale, set against the backdrop of the Texas desert. Even now, echoes of the past mingle with the present. You see it in the wide-open spaces, the enduring spirit of the people, and the legacy of those who found something unique in this remote corner of Texas.

3.7 mi away

Marfa Lights

1883

The Marfa lights are often visible on clear nights between Marfa and Paisano Pass in northeastern Presidio County as one faces the Chinati Mountains. At times they appear colored as they twinkle in the distance. They move about, split apart, melt together, disappear, and reappear. Presidio County residents have watched the lights for over a hundred years. The first historical record of them recalls that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians . He was told by other settlers that they often saw the lights, but when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite. Joe and Sally Humphreys, also early settlers, reported their first sighting of the lights in 1885. Cowboys herding cattle on the prairies noticed the lights and in the summer of 1919 rode over the mountains looking for the source, but found nothing. World War I observers feared that the lights were intended to guide an invasion. During World War II pilots training at the nearby Midland Army Air Field outside Marfa looked for the source of the elusive lights from the air, again with no success. Those who have viewed the lights over a long period personify them and insist that they are not only harmless but friendly. Mrs. W. T. Giddings, who grew up watching the lights and whose father claimed he was saved from a blizzard when the lights led him to the shelter of a cave, considers the lights to be curious observers, investigating things around them. Over the years many explanations for the lights have been offered, ranging from an electrostatic discharge, swamp gas, or moonlight shining on veins of mica, to ghosts of conquistadors looking for gold. The most plausible explanation is that the lights are an unusual phenomenon similar to a mirage, caused by an atmospheric condition produced by the interaction of cold and warm layers of air that bend light so that it is seen from a distance but not up close. In recent years the lights have become a tourist attraction. The Texas Department of Transportation constructed a roadside parking area nine miles east of Marfa on U.S. Highway 90 for motorists to view the curious phenomenon. The Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center was built at that site in 2003.

Tsha Handbook →

Blackwell School

1892

By 1886, three years after the founding of Marfa, Texas, the town had a hotel, general store, saloon, newspaper, multiple churches, and a schoolhouse. The small two-room adobe schoolhouse served Anglo students and students of Mexican descent. As Marfa grew, development sprawled north of the railroad tracks. In 1892 the Marfa Independent School District (MISD) built a new two-story brick school building on the north side of town, north of the railroad tracks, and only moved Anglo students to the new school. According to Paul Wright, who authored a study on the racial segregation of Marfa's neighboring towns, Alpine and Fort Davis, the railroad tracks running through Alpine served as a "barrier that kept non-Anglos" from moving north. It remains unknown why school officials chose to keep students of Mexican descent at the original adobe schoolhouse, as no policy or law required their segregation from Anglo students. Nonetheless, MISD officials adopted a policy of segregation, one that prioritized and benefited Marfa's Anglo students. The original adobe schoolhouse quickly came to be known as the "Mexican School." In 1909, the same year that the Texas legislature passed school reform to create new school districts, expand access to schools, and establish curriculum past the eighth grade, MISD officials voted to further segregate students of Mexican descent by purchasing five lots south of the railroad tracks for $150 to construct a new Mexican school. A former teacher described the new Mexican school, locally known as the Ward School, as being a "three-room, adobe-plastered house with a belfry, coal house, and two outside toilets." In 1922 Jesse Blackwell became the Ward School's new principal. Born in December 1871 in Rusk County, Texas, Blackwell, at the age of fourteen, took responsibility for maintaining his family's 500-acre farm. Nevertheless, he managed to attend college during the summertime and began teaching in 1890. Blackwell taught at several schools across Texas until his path led him to Marfa. When he arrived at the Ward School, the school consisted of only a single building that served 120 students from the first to the eighth grade. During the course of twenty years, Blackwell transformed and expanded the school to accommodate the growing student population. During his tenure as principal, he established a Spanish-speaking interscholastic league for Mexican schools in the area, and he increased the school's curriculum and academic standards. By 1947, when Blackwell retired, the Ward School expanded from a single schoolhouse to a five-acre, four-building campus, which served more than 600 students of Mexican descent. In 1940 MISD honored Blackwell for his dedication and accomplishments by renaming the Ward School to Blackwell Junior High School. The Blackwell School's student enrollment during Blackwell's tenure reflects the larger trend of Mexican student enrollment in Texas during the twentieth century. From 1900 until 1928, the percentage of Mexican school-aged children enrolled in school grew from 17.3 percent to 49 percent. By 1942 the percentage of Mexican school-aged children reached 53 percent. However, a contributor to the growing number of Mexican children enrolled in school was the growing number of segregated Mexican schools. By the 1940s more than 120 school districts across Texas operated segregated schools for students of Mexican descent (see MEXICAN AMERICANS AND EDUCATION ). Despite the 1948 ruling of Delgado V. Bastrop Independent School District , which deemed segregated education of students of Mexican descent as unconstitutional, many school districts across Texas, including MISD, continued to operate segregated schools. In 1965, eleven years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , MISD closed the Blackwell School and relocated students of Mexican descent to the Anglo school. Following the closure of the Blackwell School, MISD sold off or demolished the vacant school buildings. In 1969 MI

Tsha Handbook →

Marfa Lights Viewing Area

1883

Unexplained glowing orbs have been reported in the desert east of Marfa since 1883. No scientific explanation has been universally accepted.

Historical Marker → · 4.6 mi away

Building 98, Fort D.A. Russell

1943

Constructed in 1920, Building 98 housed the Officers Club and Bachelor Officers Quarters for Fort D.A. Russell. During the latter years of World War II, from 1943 to 1945, German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps were housed at the fort, and evidence of their ornate artwork can be found on the building's interior walls. Murals depict views from a courtyard and include scenes typical of west Texas. Constructed of adobe and concrete, Building 98 features a pebbledash finish and an A-shaped footprint, with one courtyard completely enclosed and another enclosed on three sides. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2004

Historical Marker →

Marfa Mystery Lights

1883

Unexplained lights observed near Marfa since at least 1883. Official viewing area located on US Highway 90 east of Marfa.

Historical Marker →

Things to Do in Marfa

quirky 0.3 mi away
The Marfa Mystery Lights

Out in the desert near Marfa since 1883 cowboys and ranchers have spotted strange glowing orbs dancing across the night sky. A young cowhand named Robert…
spooky 0.5 mi away
Marfa Ghost Lights

Mysterious lights have appeared in the desert outside Marfa since the 1880s. No one knows what causes them. Best seen from the official viewing platform on US…
quirky 0.6 mi away
Marfa Lights Viewing Area

Nobody knows what the Marfa Lights are. On dark nights mysterious glowing orbs appear over the desert south of Marfa hovering splitting merging and…
historical 20.8 mi away
Fort Davis and the Buffalo Soldiers

After the Civil War the Army garrisoned Fort Davis with Black troops the Comanche called Buffalo Soldiers. These men patrolled the most dangerous stretch of…
nature 21.8 mi away
Davis Mountains

The Davis Mountains are an eroded volcanic complex from thirty-five million years ago when this part of Texas was full of active calderas. The peaks are the…
quirky 21.9 mi away
The County Bigger Than Connecticut

Brewster County stretches across 6169 square miles of West Texas desert and mountain making it larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Alpine sits at its…
historical 22.0 mi away
Frank Hamer Started Here

Before Frank Hamer tracked down Bonnie and Clyde on a Louisiana backroad he was a young Texas Ranger stationed in Alpine. He joined the Rangers Alpine company…
historical 0.2 mi away
When Hollywood Took Over Marfa

In the summer of 1955 the biggest names in Hollywood descended on tiny Marfa to film Giant. James Dean Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson lived at the Hotel…
day trip
Day Trip to Marfa 🧑🏻‍🚀 (FULL EPISODE) S3 E9

Featured on The Daytripper — a full-episode local travel guide.

Everything Near Marfa

62 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Marfa on the Map
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