One of the South’s most respected voices is on a mission. You hear him on all those records droppin’ hot 16s. With Pimp C currently incarcerated, Bun B is keepin’ the UGK name alive until his partner’s release.

The ink was hardly dry on the paper. No, really. Like, if maybe they could have gone back into the conference room, rubbed their fingers over the signatures on the contract, smudged the writing, made it illegible, maybe it would have all turned out somehow different. Better.

But Chad Butler and Bernard Freeman were fresh off the boat. Can’t really blame ’em for not knowin’—a couple of hustlers-slash-rappers from Port Arthur, a modest city 90 minutes from downtown Houston, where the biggest trades going involved oil refining and narcotics. And all of a sudden: New York City, birthplace of rap music; Jive Records, big company, wanted to sign them. All they’d done was recast themselves as Pimp C and Bun B, sold 40,000 copies or so of a cassette-only EP, and here they were. Fame, money, hope—it was all just around the corner.

They wanted to scream, but they didn’t want to seem, you know, unprofessional in front of the new bosses. So they excused themselves and  stepped out into the garishly lit hallway. They gave each other a pound, a hug. This is it, they thought. We made it.

And then, there he was, Hip-Hop himself, bounding down the corridor, headed straight at his newest labelmates.

“Hey, KRS!” they said, geeked, eager to give dap to one of their key influences. “We’re UGK. We’re from Texas. We up here signing this contract…”

The Teacher interrupted them, “Did y’all sign already?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck!”

Doesn’t seem fair that you can’t go back, does it?

“If we had more patience, I probably would be a staple of hip-hop,” Bun B says today, seated at the glass kitchen table in his elegantly-appointed home in the southwest suburbs of Houston. At 31 years old, he’s got the reserved look of a man who’s been through a great deal, and has made peace with it: soft, expressive eyes paired with a hard jaw. “I’d have teddy bears and Todd McFarlane dolls. But c’est la fuckin’ vie. I’d probably be done, too, by the same token.”

Maybe so. UGK were one of the signature Southern rap groups before the industry became obsessed with what was going on south of the Mason-Dixon. Apart from the Geto Boys, who had demonstrated that rappers from down South could compete with the bad boys from New York and Los Angeles, none from the region had outgrown the status of regional phenomenon.

Nowadays that idea seems quaint. LaFace, No Limit and Cash Money turned the South into hip-hop’s financial and creative center in the late ’90s, a position it still holds. “Being a Southern rapper now is as good as being a NY rapper in ’89-’90,” Bun says. “Even more so because of the profitability, the ability to make money off it.”

That’s great news if you’re an 18-year-old with a hot tape and big dreams, but for a pair of 10-plus-year veterans on whom this new generation was reared, the prospects aren’t quite as sturdy. Sure, UGK have sold over two million albums during the course of their career, but still, their celebrity is fiercely regional. And apart from a brief surfacing on Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” four years ago, it’s pretty much stayed that way.