Found this in the archives recently — a newspaper clipping with the headline "Texas-Sized Sitar: Downtown Mesquite Hosts Unique Music Event." The photo credit reads Kenny Green/Staff Photo. The paper is yellowed at the edges. And looking at it now, it's hard not to think about how much of what came after started in that room.
The Night in Downtown Mesquite
It was the summer of 2007 — roughly — and the venue was McWhorter-Greenhaw Music Company in downtown Mesquite, Texas. The occasion was the inaugural Lone Star Sitar concert, a gathering that brought together an unlikely cast of musicians: Art Greenhaw on guitar, Neel Bhatt, Dr. Larry 'T-Byrd' Gordon, Dr. Carrie Gordon, and Nilendu Jani.
That night, among other pieces, I played the sitar while singing the Beatles' “Across the Universe” — a song that has always felt more Indian than British in spirit, its words borrowed directly from the Transcendental Meditation tradition: Jai Guru Deva Om. To play it on the sitar, in Texas, in a room that held both worlds, felt natural in a way that is hard to explain.
"Jai Guru Deva Om. Nothing's gonna change my world." — John Lennon, borrowing from India without fully knowing it.
What Lone Star Sitar Was About
The name said it all: the sitar, rooted in the courts of Mughal India, finding its footing in the soil of Texas. The project was never meant to be a novelty — it was a genuine musical conversation between the North Indian classical tradition and the American South. The sitar's capacity for long, singing melodic lines sits naturally alongside blues, gospel, and country; more naturally, sometimes, than alongside Western classical music.
Art Greenhaw understood this instinctively. A deeply respected name in Texas music, his approach to collaboration was never to flatten the differences but to let them speak. The inaugural concert was the first proof of concept — and it worked.
Where It Led
That summer night in Mesquite didn't end with the concert. The Lone Star Sitar project grew from it — evolving into a full album, a long-running musical partnership, and eventually a Grammy collaboration that would come years later. The Grammy connection through Art Greenhaw is one of the things I'm most proud of — not just as an accolade but as evidence that the music reached people far beyond the room it started in.
The Lone Star Sitar album is available now on Spotify and Apple Music. If you haven't heard it, start with “Paint It Black” — the Rolling Stones cover that asks what the song sounds like when it finally comes home to the sitar tradition it borrowed from.
And if you're ever curious about the sitar — how to play it, what it sounds like up close, or just what a lesson looks like — sitar classes are open in Dallas and online worldwide. The tradition that filled that Mesquite room in 2007 is still very much alive.