Doug Supernaw

It was all enough to persuade many observers that Supernaw was bound for superstardom. One such was Houston Chronicle music critic Rick Mitchell, who touted him as a next big thing in June of 1992. Mitchell wasn't blowing smoke. After a bidding war, Nashville label BNA, an offshoot of industry behemoth BMG, emerged as the winner in the Supernaw stakes. This was Nashville's “hat act” era, when male stars had to look good in cowboy duds, and Supernaw definitely fit that bill. BNA vice president of artists and repertoire Richard Landis was enthused about the tall, lantern-jawed, cleft-chinned baritone, to put it mildly. “I think he's got unlimited potential,” he told Mitchell in a Chronicle article. “He's got a look that I think will appeal to women and men. I see him as blue-collar country.”

“By the face you could never tell / That inside I'm hurtin' / I'm always on the move / But never gainin' groundÉ”

Douglas Anderson Supernaw's upbringing was anything but blue-collar, though at least one of his parents definitely qualifies. His father Irwin, an Oklahoma native, was a research scientist for Texaco, an excellent golfer and an opera buff. His mother Rosanne Tyner's background was more hardscrabble — she was the daughter of a southern Illinois coal miner and a country music fanatic from birth, a love she instilled in her son. (As he put it in one song, “Daddy Made the Dollars, Mama Made the Sense.”)

Perhaps because of his mother, Supernaw always liked his country straight with no chaser. While most kids his age were into the rowdy sounds of country-rock fusionists like Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr., he thrilled to the plaintive, cry-in-your-beer strains of pure honky-tonkers like Gene Watson, Vern Gosdin and George Jones.

Supernaw was born in Bryan and raised in the Inwood Forest section of northwest Houston. He attended Eisenhower High School and excelled in sports, particularly baseball and golf. In fact, his skills on the links were formidable enough to win him a golf scholarship to the University of St. Thomas in 1978.

Soon enough, he realized that his troublesome short game was barely up to the rigors of competitive college golf, much less the PGA tour he dreamed of joining. And in the classroom, the business major tuned out the droning professor in his economics class — instead, he found himself furiously filling his notebooks with song lyrics instead of lecture notes.

In 1979, the teenager picked up a copy of Rolling Stone and a classified ad caught his eye. A “beach music” band on the South Atlantic coast needed a singer. Supernaw answered the ad and got the gig, trading in his faulty putter for a microphone as the front man for the Occasions. After two years plying the Georgia and Carolina coasts singing soul covers, Supernaw returned to Texas and gave school another chance, enrolling and flunking out of Texas Tech in short order. He hired on in the central Texas oil patch near Caldwell, and spent his nights there writing songs.

He married his first wife Trudy and adopted her two children in 1985, and returned to music and Houston in 1986, embarking on a music business crash course as the promoter and booker at the Arena Theater in Sharpstown. Later that year, the Arena shuttered for the first of several times, so Supernaw decided to make one last swipe at the brass ring. He would take his songs to Nashville, and it turned out they were worth something. He was able to land a coveted, if low-paying, job as a staff songwriter at one of the big publishing houses in Music City.

Justin White says that at that time there was no sign of trouble. “He knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it,” he says. “He was watching a lot of people that he was in the same boat with while he was living up in Nashville — the Joe Diffies and people like that. He saw them go from being staff writers to recording stars.”

By the beginning of 1993, he had completed his major label debut album Red and Rio Grande, there was a lucrative corporate sponsorship in place and his band — now renamed the Possum Eatin' Cowboys — was road-tested and tight. And thanks to Coors Light's largesse, he even had that tour bus.

“We called it ‘45 Feet of Texas,'” White says. “We were bringing 45 feet of Texas to every little town or state we went to. People ate it up.”

Especially within the state of Texas. Supernaw is an important link in the relatively new offshoot of country now known as Texas music, a conduit from guys like Robert Earl Keen and Jerry Jeff Walker and honky-tonkers like Gene Watson to today's stars like Kevin Fowler, Pat Green, Cory Morrow and Jack Ingram.