In 2010, after well over 20 years of plying his trade in dive bars, listening rooms, theaters and festival stages across America and Europe, journeyman Texas songwriter and guitar player Michael O’Connor finally got his due. Or at the very least, a couple of very fine next best things: co-billing with one of his favorite fellow writers, Adam Carroll, on one of the best albums of both artists’ careers (the acclaimed Hard Times), and his very own star on the South Texas Music Walk of Fame — located right in O’Connor’s hometown of Corpus Christi. Along with fellow 2010 inductees like Terri Hendrix, Ponty Bone and Geronimo Trevino, O’Connor’s name is now part of the same Lone Star constellation as such Texas legends as Guy Clark, Kris Kristofferson, and the late Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender.

In his late teens and all through his twenties, O’Connor honed his chops playing blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll in the rough-and-tumble shrimper and biker bars of the Gulf Coast before  finding his way into the singer-songwriter and folk circles via studio and sideman gigs with friends like Terri Hendrix, Susan Gibson, Adam Carroll, Cary Swinney and the aforementioned Ray Wylie Hubbard.

Hubbard, who produced O’Connor’s 2000 debut, Green and Blue, approvingly notes that O’Connor “has the big four: tone, taste, groove and grit. He’s cool.”

Michael O’Connor will be performing in Paris at 'The Listening Room' March 24 at 6:30 p.m.