“Sometimes you just bash!”

Winter 2025
By Chuck Luce
Photos by Jeff Fitlow

In the expansive Texas music scene, if you need a drummer, you’d be fortunate indeed to convince Lisa Pankratz ’90 to play your gig. Country. Rock. Swing. Blues. Reggae. She can do it all. She is known as steady. Reliable. Dedicated to her craft. Tough, but nuanced. Not flashy, but she’s good — really good — which makes her exciting to watch.

That hardworking virtuosity was on full display at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle this summer when she performed with Dave Alvin, the poet laureate of American roots rock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the West Texas troubadour of sagebrush folk music. Alvin encourages improvisation and signals where he’s taking a song with telepathic hints. A glance. An almost imperceptible nod. A finger lift. But Pankratz was right there with him, keeping an eye on the neck of his Stratocaster and pounding emphatic punctuation to every musical phrase.

This knack for hearing, anticipating and executing began on her grandfather’s ranch in Dripping Springs, Texas. Pankratz’s dad picked up the sticks as a young teen, playing blues and other gigs while living in South Austin. From an early age, she was not only watching family members perform, but also playing with her dad at places like Liberty Lunch and the Continental Club. At 16, she performed on “Austin City Limits” in her Uncle Pat’s band, Greezy Wheels. Later, she played with rockabilly sensation Ronnie Dawson, aka The Blond Bomber, at Carnegie Hall and on “Light Night with Conan O’Brien.”

Alvin recalls first meeting Pankratz when she was playing with The Derailers, an Austin country-rock group. “I was knocked out by not only her musical chops but her wisdom, humor and willingness to try new things. When I formed an all-female group called The Guilty Women in 2009,” Alvin says, “she was the first person I called.”
 

That project eventually evolved into Alvin’s current band, The Guilty Ones, one of whose members is Pankratz’s husband of 21 years, bassist Brad Fordham.

Back in Dripping Springs, Pankratz was salutatorian of her high school class and enjoyed playing basketball and volleyball. She learned about Rice from a friend who was valedictorian and decided to head to Houston. Even though she was already a working musician by the time she matriculated, Pankratz chose English as her major. “I just knew that I liked music and I liked reading books,” she says. “I guess I should have concentrated more on music, but at the time, in my head, I considered school life and music life separate. I did, though, have my drums set up in the basement of Lovett College.”

At Rice, she also was a DJ at Rice’s KTRU radio station all four years. “At the station, I could explore all kinds of music,” Pankratz recalls. “In some cases, funnily enough, I wound up playing with some of those bands later, including X, the Knitters, the Blasters and others.” In the classroom, Pankratz recalls especially enjoying Dennis Huston’s Shakespeare course and classes she took with Terrence Doody. In retrospect, she has realized that studying literature and making music maybe wasn’t such an unlikely combination after all. “It’s an arc, a whole.”

In her current work with Alvin, she says, “there are themes both lyrical and musical that appear, reappear and crescendo. I feel that all the reading, writing and thinking that went into my English literature degree has been a bonus, in this outfit especially. Sometimes you think; sometimes you just bash!”

Dennis Huston is the the Gladys Louise Fox Professor Emeritus of English. Terrence Doody is professor emeritus of English.