When the astronauts moved to Houston in 1962, their presence gave breath to what had seemed a fantasy to many Houstonians, who more than most Americans will experience vicariously the most extraordinary adventure in history. How far Houston has come since two New Yorkers paid $9,428 for a townsite and named it for the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto! The interval between that date and the arrival of the astronauts was but 125 years. What is Houston that it has become so much?

Beginning life three thousand years after Athens and two thousand after London, beginning two centuries after Boston and New York, fifty years after Los Angeles and at nearly the same time as Chicago, Houston suddenly joined the family of metropolises midway in the twentieth century. Its likeness in history, however, is to none of those cities, but to Carthage of North Africa, one of the most famous cities of antiquity, whose beginning preceded Houston’s by twenty-six centuries.

Carthage, like Houston, was above all a commercial city, its people vigorous, practical. At one time Carthage was famous for the great wealth of its leading families; Houston was once known as the Land of the Big Rich. And the sea, or access to it, was the key to the rise of both. As Carthage became the richest city of the western Mediterranean, Houston became the richest of the Gulf of Mexico. Carthage lived for fifteen centuries and died abruptly, disappearing from history.

The largest of twenty-one places named Houston in the United States, not counting Houston City and Houston Junction, both in Pennsylvania, Houston is the seventh American city in population and the second, after Los Angeles, in land area. But to call Houston the seventh city in population, though correct, is unrealistic. The true population of a modern city is shown not by the number of people living within its legal limits but by the number living within its metropolitan area, which for Houston is Harris County. By that measure, Houston ranks sixteenth in population.

Whatever its rank, Houston is often said to be a small town with an enormous population. Such a notion becomes increasingly hard to support except for one aspect, which was shown by B. D. (Mack) McCormick, a collector of folk music. He described the city in a pamphlet accompanying each of two recordings, produced in England in 1960, of the Houston area’s folk music.

Houston is “less a city than it is an amalgam of villages and townships surrounding a cluster of skyscrapers,” he wrote. “Each section of the city tends to reflect the region which it faces, usually being settled by people from that region. Thus the Louisiana French-speaking people are to be found in the northeast of Houston; the East Texas people in the northern fringe, which itself is the beginning of the Piney Woods; the German and Polish people are in the northwest Heights; and so on.... Each area surrounding the city has gathered its own, and each group has in turn established a community within the city.... And so the city, which in itself has no cultural traditions, is rich in those it has acquired.”

McCormick quoted Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins, a Negro folk singer, who spoke of a Houston unknown to many Houstonians: “The idea of it is that everybody ’round here plays music or makes songs or something. That’s white peoples, colored peoples, that’s them funny French-talking peoples, that’s everybody, what I mean. They all of ’em got music.” McCormick himself has said, “More Englishmen than Houstonians see Houston as a rich source of traditional lore, though otherwise the British think of Houston in clichÉs.”

Much of the area’s past is deep-etched in folk music. One song was sung by Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter, a Negro convict and perhaps the most famous of colored folk singers. The song, titled “The Midnight Special,” begins: