In the 1940s, collaborations between Mexican, Anglo, and Black musicians in San Antonio blurred the color lines between regional genres like jazz, blues, R&B, country and western, conjunto, and other local styles. This crossover created the diverse soundscapes of the West Side Sound, a distinctive genre innovated by Mexican American musicians and popularized by local music icon Doug Sahm. The West Side Sound charts a brand-new history of rock and roll told from the Spanish-speaking borderlands. Alex La Rotta presents San Antonio as a birthplace of Chicano rock and soul music, drawing on lost recordings, Tejano industry ephemera, and more than thirty original interviews across South Texas. San Antonio Latinos/as emerge as pioneers, not latecomers, in creating postwar popular music in a lively local scene. A captivating oral history of San Antonio's obscured multiracial musical scene, La Rotta offers the first in-depth history of San Antonio's doo-wop, R&B, soul, and early rock and roll groups of the mid-twentieth century. The West Side Sound captures the growth of a groundbreaking American music genre and its reverberations across communities of color.
