05/23/2026
Frost, Texas: What Endures
Part One — The Song
There’s more to this little town than most people passing through would ever guess. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share some of the stories these old downtown walls still hold. We’ll start with a song.
Did you know Frost, Texas has its own blues song?
On May 6, 1930, an F4 tornado tore through Frost with winds over 260 mph. In two to three minutes, the entire town was leveled. At least 22 people were killed here, with 41 total along the storm’s 35-mile path through Hill, Navarro, and Ellis Counties.
A few years later, in 1934, a blues singer named Alger “Texas” Alexander recorded a song about it — “Frost Texas Tornado Blues” — accompanied by the Mississippi Sheiks. Alexander was one of the most important early blues voices in America. He didn’t play an instrument. His power was entirely in his voice, which came straight from the cotton fields and work camps of East Texas.
His younger cousin? A kid named Sam Hopkins — who the world would come to know as Lightnin’ Hopkins, one of the greatest blues guitarists who ever lived. Lightnin’ learned his craft traveling with Texas Alexander through the juke joints and street corners of Texas in the late 1920s and ’30s.
That lineage — from the cotton fields to the recording studio, from Frost to Houston to the world — runs right through this little town.
The entire town was leveled that day. But the steel vault inside the Citizens State Bank held — people actually sheltered inside it during the storm. The bank rebuilt the town around that vault. And the building that stands on Garrity Street today was reconstructed on the same ground, in the same year, because the people of Frost refused to leave.
The song is still out there. Give it a listen.
[YouTube link: https://youtu.be/S8SkcFWCiVs]
Photo: Texas Alexander album cover (Texas Alexander & His Circle 1927–1951, JSP Records)