Vidor, Texas

Everything Vidor is known for

7 songs mention this city 5 artists from here

Vidor, a city in western Orange County, Texas, has a notable connection to the music world. The city, part of the Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan statistical area, is home to several artists and is mentioned in various songs.

Country music artists Tracy Byrd and Clay Walker both hail from Vidor. Additionally, songs like "Third Coast" by Teezo Touchdown and "The Truth About Men" by Tracy Byrd reference the city. Vidor was also designated a Music Friendly Community by the Texas Music Office.

Music in Vidor

Songs About Vidor

Third Coast
Teezo Touchdown
72%
"But, no, I'm not coming out to Vidor"
Hope I Don’t Get Sick-A-Dis
Devin the Dude
54%
"Even got bitches in Vidor"
Amarillo
Emmylou Harris
13%
"If someone hadn't played "The Window Up Above""
the ballad of lavern and captain flint
guy clark
10%
The Truth About Men
Tracy Byrd
8%
"Tell 'em how it is Tracy"
All My Heroes Have Halos
C.J. Garton
4%
"From Haggard to Prine to Jones"
Never Been to Texas
Mark Chesnutt
3%
"The kind that Jones and Hank are famous for"

Artists From Vidor

C
Clay Walker
country
T
Tracy Byrd
country
P
Purple
indie
D
Donice Morace
country
A
Andrew Mccabe
country

Rivers & Roads in Song near Vidor

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

US Route 90 9 songs Interstate 10 36 songs Neches River 2 songs Sabine River 13 songs

History of Vidor

Vidor, TX RoadyGoat

This Southeast Texas city has been home to a surprising array of notable individuals.

The Japanese Rice Colony Hidden Southeast of Town RoadyGoat

About seven miles southeast of Vidor, near the old community of Terry, a Japanese immigrant and Russo-Japanese War veteran named Kichimatsu Kishi founded an agricultural colony in 1907. At its height it included 32 men, 5 women, and 4 children, who built homes, a school, and a church and set out to create a permanent Japanese farming community on the Texas coastal plain. Rice was the first crop, but dredging of the Sabine-Neches waterway let saltwater push into Cow Bayou and ruin the colony's irrigation supply. The farmers adapted, moving into vegetables, cattle, and oil exploration and hiring Hispanic and Cajun laborers. When oil was struck on Kishi land around 1920 the venture briefly became extremely valuable, but depleted wells, debt, and the Great Depression eventually broke it. The story doesn't end there: Vidor-born engineer John Hirasaki, connected to the colony by family, went on to work for NASA and entered quarantine with the Apollo 11 astronauts and the first lunar samples. A Texas historical marker stands along FM 1135 near Kishi Road, with surviving camphor trees marking the settlement. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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The Public-Housing Battle That Exposed Vidor's Racial History RoadyGoat

This is hard history, and it deserves to be told straight. For generations Vidor was understood across Southeast Texas as a sundown town, a place where African Americans were not welcome, and discriminatory housing patterns reinforced that exclusion. In the early 1990s a federal desegregation order required public housing in Vidor to be opened to Black residents. The response was ugly: the Ku Klux Klan marched, Black residents received threats, and even white residents who supported integration were harassed. A later HUD administrative ruling documented the intimidation and racial abuse aimed at the residents of Vidor Village, and the pressure was severe enough that the first Black families who moved in eventually left. The record didn't stop in 1993. In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, local and regional organizers held a Peace March in Vidor. Some would-be participants feared the event might be a trap, a measure of how far the town's reputation still traveled, yet the march drew a racially mixed gathering of hundreds. The later chapter does not erase the earlier one, and the historical record should not be softened. (Source: HUD records; regional news reporting.)

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Zaharias, Babe Didrikson

1914

(June 26, 1914 - Sept. 27, 1956) At 18, set two world records in the 1932 Los angeles Olympic games-- in 80-meter hurdles and javelin throw. Excelling at all sports, became a professional athlete and won 5 major titles as a championship golfer. Was nicknamed after famous baseball player Geo. "Babe" Ruth. Married George Zaharias, 1938. Was voted Outstanding Woman Athlete of First Half of 20th Century by Associated Press, 1949. Outstanding Women of Texas Series, 1968. Incise in base: Erected by Bmt. C.C.W.G.A.

Historical Marker → · 5.0 mi away

Vidor, King Wallis

1915

King Vidor, film director, was born in Galveston, Texas, on February 8, 1894, the son of Charles Shelton and Katie Lee (Wallis) Vidor. His father was a lumber producer and merchant with the Miller-Vidor Lumber Company, which had headquarters in Galveston and owned land, mills, and lumber railroads in East Texas. The towns of Vidor and Milvid were named for him. King Vidor's grandfather, Charles Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49 who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s. King attended Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio in 1908–09. He left after only one year. One of his schoolmates there was Edward Sedgwick, later his partner in the film business. Vidor began his career in the cinema as a teenage movie projectionist at a local Galveston theater. He made an amateur movie based on the Galveston hurricane of 1900 and opened his first movie company, Hotex, in Houston in 1915; his father was vice president of that company, having fallen on hard times in the lumber business. After making a few amateur films on his own, Vidor struck out for Hollywood with his bride, Florence Arto, in 1915 at the age of twenty-one. He was determined to learn more about the art and technique of filmmaking. The career he found in Hollywood spanned the earliest days of silent filmmaking, when he shot two-reelers on a shoestring budget, to the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, marked by the spectacular cinematic productions of David O. Selznick, with whom Vidor made Duel in the Sun (1946). Throughout his long Hollywood career, Vidor's Texas roots remained apparent. He considered himself a southerner and made films that championed the poor and exposed racism and the horrors of war, yet also captured the adventures and action of a lively West. Among the many films to his credit are The Big Parade (1925), Billy the Kid (1930), Our Daily Bread (1934), The Texas Rangers (1936), Northwest Passage (1940), and The Fountainhead (1951). Though Vidor is probably best remembered for his collaboration with Selznick, which resulted in one of the top-grossing films in cinema history, he made most of his films not with Selznick but with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. M-G-M produced his first highly acclaimed film, The Big Parade , in 1925; it was hailed by critics as a powerful antiwar movie. Vidor made film history with the first all-black musical, Hallelujah! , in 1929. His Our Daily Bread won a League of Nations award "for its contribution to humanity" five years later. He also wrote two books, A Tree is a Tree (1953) and King Vidor on Filmmaking (1972). During the 1920s and 1930s, as his career was burgeoning, Vidor experienced a tumultuous personal period. He was divorced from Florence in 1924 and married Eleanor Boardman, from whom he was divorced in 1932. In that year he married his third wife, Elizabeth Hill. Vidor had a self-proclaimed sense of mission about his filmmaking, which was influenced by a Christian Scientist background. In 1920, at the outset of his successful career in Hollywood, he published a "creed" in Variety , in which he publicly announced his commitment to "the picture that will help humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it with iron chains." Such was the youthful idealism that gave birth to films like The Big Parade and Hallelujah! It was a sensitivity that remained with Vidor to the end of his long career. Though he was nominated five times for an Academy Award for best director, he never won. In 1978, however, the Motion Picture Academy awarded him an honorary Oscar in recognition of his contributions to filmmaking. After he retired from directing, Vidor taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California and at the University of California at Los Angeles. He died on November 1, 1982, at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a wealth of films noted for their realism, their powerful social comment, and their psychological complexities.

Tsha Handbook →

Site of Collier's Ferry

1750

Main crossing on Old Jasper Road and alternate crossing on Opelousas Trail from Liberty through Beaumont to Louisiana. Used as early as 1750, route followed Indian traces and was highway for explorer-settlers, priests, soldiers, traders from Spain, France and Anglo-America. Ferry's most important use was as cattle crossing on famous Opelousas Trail from 1820's to 1900. Herds came this way to bypass the streets of Beaumont. Although others ran it during 1831-1950 career, ferry took its name from John Collier family who operated it for 50 years. (1968)

Historical Marker → · 4.9 mi away

J.P. Richardson, Jr: The Big Bopper

1930

Jiles Perry "J.P." Richardson, Jr. was born on October 24, 1930 to Jiles and Elsie Bernice (Stalsby) Richardson in Sabine Pass (26 mi. SE); the family moved to Beaumont when he was six. As a teenager, Richardson began writing songs with country and western influences. Following graduation from Beaumont High School in 1947, he attended Lamar College, where he sang in the choir and played in the band. He also became a disc jockey for radio station KTRM. It was there he developed his "Big Bopper" character and his musical style shifted toward rockabilly, combining country and western with rock and roll. He served two years in the Army but returned to radio work in Beaumont, and as a DJ in 1957 Richardson raised money for charity by spinning records continuously for more than 122 hours. Around the same time, Mercury Records executive Shelby Singleton signed him to a contract, and the Big Bopper went on tour along the east coast. His recording Chantilly Lace was on the top of the charts for six weeks in 1958 and earned him a gold record after being listed among the Top 100 for 25 weeks. At the age of 28, married with two children, rock and roll star J.P. Richardson joined a group of young musicians on another national tour. Tragically, on February 3, 1959, their plane crashed in Iowa, killing him and fellow artists Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Richardson's body was returned here for burial. In addition to the 21 songs he recorded as the Big Bopper, he wrote many more, including Running Bear and White Lightnin', made popular by other singers. J.P. Richardson, Jr. is remembered for his musical talent as well as his larger-than-life persona as the Big Bopper. (2006)

Historical Marker → · 5.1 mi away

King, Richard

1850

Richard King, riverman, steamboat entrepreneur, livestock capitalist, and founder of the King Ranch , was born in New York City on July 10, 1824, to poor Irish parents. He was reared in Orange County, New York, until age nine, when he was indentured to a jeweler in Manhattan. He broke his apprenticeship in 1835 and shipped as a stowaway on the Desdemona for Mobile, Alabama. King was discovered, taken in as a "cabin cub," and schooled in the art of navigation by captains Hugh Monroe and Joe Holland. Between 1835 and 1841, with the exception of eight months of formal schooling with Holland's family in Connecticut, King pursued steamboating on Alabama rivers; he was a pilot by age sixteen. In 1842 he enlisted under Capt. Henry Penny for service in the Seminole War in Florida, where he met Mifflin Kenedy , who became his lifelong friend and business mentor. King plied the muddy waters of the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers until 1847, when he joined Kenedy on the Rio Grande for Mexican War service. Commanding the Colonel Cross, he served for the war's duration transporting troops and supplies. King remained on the border after the war and became a principal partner in the steamboat firms of M. Kenedy and Company (1850–66) and King, Kenedy and Company (1866–74). These firms dominated the Rio Grande trade on a nearly monopolistic scale for longer than two decades. By all accounts King was an experienced riverboatman and a hardy risk-taker, who thought that he could take a boat anywhere "a dry creek flows." He was also an innovator who designed specialty boats for the narrow bends and fast currents of the Rio Grande. Perhaps most of all, he was a hardened speculator, a businessman in the classic nineteenth-century mold; he saw business as having no social responsibilities, only profitable ones. As a result, he had his hand in many pies with as many different associates. And of course the big pie in South Texas in the early 1850s was undeveloped land. King began speculating in Cameron County lands and in lots in the new town of Brownsville soon after his arrival on the Rio Grande. As his cash flow increased from the success of his steamboat interests, he invested further in lands in the Nueces country. He learned early about the pitfalls of buying Spanish and Mexican titles by purchasing in 1852 what turned out to be a bogus claim to the southern half of Padre Island . From that time forward, he paid careful attention to the legality of land transactions, and almost all of his subsequent land acquisitions were made through his lawyers, Stephen Powers , James B. Wells , and Robert J. Kleberg . In several partnerships, King first bought land in the Nueces Strip in 1853, when he purchased the 15,500-acre Rincón de Santa Gertrudis grant from the heirs of Juan Mendiola, who held the land under an 1834 grant from the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. In 1854 he purchased the 53,000-acre Santa Gertrudis de la Garza grant from José Pérez Rey, who held title under an 1808 grant from the crown of Spain. These two irregularly shaped pieces of wilderness became the nucleus around which the King Ranch grew. By the time of his death in 1885, King had made over sixty major purchases of land and amassed some 614,000 acres. With partners James Walworth and Mifflin Kenedy, King established a livestock concern, R. King and Company, to manage the holdings, and he moved off the Rio Grande to the Nueces rancho in late 1860 to develop the ranching business. During the Civil War he and his partners entered into several contracts with the Confederate government to supply European buyers with cotton; in return they supplied the Confederates with beef, horses, imported munitions, medical supplies, clothing, and shoes. By placing their steamboat interests under Mexican registry and moving their operations into Matamoros, they for the most part successfully avoided the Union blockade and earned considerable fortunes. In an attempt to dampen this trade, Union for

Tsha Handbook → · 7.3 mi away

Things to Do in Vidor

historical 7.6 mi away
Spindletop

On January 10 1901 a well south of Beaumont blew its crown block clean off the derrick and started gushing oil a hundred and fifty feet in the air at nine…

Everything Near Vidor

547 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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