Del Rio Natives Radney Foster, William Beckmann Win Big at Texas Music Awards

Radney Foster picked up a guitar at 12 in Del Rio, the second of four children of a local attorney who sang and played around the house. By 14 he was writing songs. On March 23 at Texas Live in Arlington, the Texas music industry gave that origin story a formal title: Living Legend.

Foster and fellow Del Rio native William Beckmann each claimed top honors at the 16th Annual Texas Regional Radio & Music Awards. While Foster received the program's signature Living Legend distinction, 28-year-old Beckmann won Album of the Year for "Whiskey, Lies & Alibis," his major-label debut on Warner Music Nashville. The double win marked a rare night when a single small border city held two of the ceremony's most prominent trophies.

The Living Legend award is designed specifically to spotlight artists who came up through Texas or Oklahoma and crossed into national recognition. Dave Smith, the owner, founder and president of the Texas Regional Radio Report, explained the rationale: "TRRMA likes to honor singer/songwriters that got their start in Texas/Oklahoma, and do this to not only give the artist their props, but also to show the younger generations in the region that they too can make their dreams happen." On choosing Foster, Smith said, "He came from small town Del Rio and made his way to national stardom and has always shown pride in his Texas roots and kept Texas music in his heart."

That education began at the Texas-Mexico border. Growing up in Del Rio, Foster absorbed local pop and traditional Mexican music during the day and the renegade country coming out of border station XERF at night, a frequency that blasted deep into Texas from across the Rio Grande. That layered sound saturated his 1992 solo debut, "Del Rio, TX 1959," which put the town on the national country map and established Foster as a writer of uncommon narrative specificity. Over three-plus decades he accumulated eight No. 1 singles, including "Nobody Wins," with cuts recorded by Keith Urban, The Chicks, and Marc Broussard. Before his solo career, he and partner Bill Lloyd formed Foster & Lloyd, the first duo in history to top the country charts with a debut single.

Beckmann's Del Rio roots run along a different but parallel track. He grew up on his family's cattle ranch on the border, raised on classic country alongside the mariachi and Norteño sounds drifting across from northern Mexico. He learned piano, guitar, and harmonica before he was a teenager, then played in a classic rock cover band through high school. "Whiskey, Lies & Alibis" channels those border-crossing influences into a mainstream country record, and the TRRMA judged it the region's best of the year.

The momentum accelerates this week. Beckmann is set to open for George Strait at Austin's Moody Center on April 9 and April 11, in-the-round shows at a 15,000-seat arena whose presale drew more than 135,000 people into online queues. For a 28-year-old whose first musical instincts were formed on a cattle ranch outside Del Rio, it is the kind of stage that rewrites a biography.

Foster spent three decades proving Del Rio's creative geography, its collision of West Texas ranching culture, Mexican border music, and outlaw country radio, is a legitimate origin for national stardom. Beckmann, carrying the same ZIP code in his résumé, is proving it again.