Waltz Across West Texas With Butch Hancock

 

1) The Great Mystery

 

Carl Sagan, the astronomer, has been going about making statements for an organization he belongs to and seems to represent. This organization exists, he tells us, to help separate scientific facts from pseudo-scientific and metaphysical garbage. Astrology is bullshit, he tells us – as are the Bermuda Triangle and flying saucers. He knows all this is bullshit because there’s no scientific evidence to support any of it.

 

I remember once reading someplace that the science fiction version of outer space people as monsters with two heads or whatever didn’t make sense because the human body has all these parts for obvious functional reasons and the same reasons would exist all over the universe. People need eyes, thumbs, etc., you see.

 

Years ago, I discovered nobody knows anything.

 

Science is the art of small minds (which are best suited to be technicians – and they should stick to that; we need technology). Most religions are built and maintained by fools who use small minds to try and explain visions far beyond their grasp.

 

I think the universe is too complicated and too beyond to comprehend. I suspect there is no such thing as dead outer space; no such thing as distance, or time; no such thing as life and death. I suspect that we are part of a great living universe of beings and dimensions, forces and physics far beyond Carl Sagan’s science or sick-eyed preacher’s visions. But don’t ask me to start any religions; I don’t understand at all. I just understand that I don’t understand.

 

The religion I respect most, that of the American Indian, generally refers to the mysterious and ungraspable Universe as the Great Mystery – not the Great Spirit the Christian translators would have us believe. The Great Mystery is recognised and respected but hardly ever dealt with. How can you deal with a Mystery?

 

But the American Indian does indeed deal with the living universe. They are a people of place, they live in the places they live. (This is not always where they stay; they may stay in Los Angeles, but they live in the place they came from and understand.) The white men in Washington, in their efforts to terminate the reservations and swallow up the Indian in that mythical and generally non-existent Mainstream, have little grasp of the concept of place. Though their ancestors once did, for the ancient holy places of Europe are built along strange lines of power, said then and said now by some, to be nerve lines in the living earth.

 

The Indian uses, as a main tenant and tool of his religion, beings – spirits, if you will, who live in this place or that. These spirits are not the Great Mystery, but a part of it. They inhabit real places where the Indian lives. There are many of them. Sometimes they assume the form of animals; sometimes they look human; usually they are unseen by human eyes. What are they? Perhaps, as my friend, the Crow, Pie Glenn, once suggested, they are an end result of progressive reincarnations – beings, like ourselves, who have reincarnated themselves beyond this form. Who knows what they are. They are part of the Great Mystery.

 

But they are here. Hundreds of generations spoke with them before the scientists and Christians came to this continent. I’m sure hundreds of generations spoke with them in Europe before the scientists and Christians forgot how; but I don’t know anything about Europe.

 

A man cannot understand the Great Mystery; he does well, very well indeed and much better than most, to try and understand the tiny portion of this planet which is his own place. I expect no man will ever understand even his own small piece of place, but it is the mark of a man with knowledge – probably the highest knowledge available to man – to try.

 

“There’s more to the country than the country can hold,” the West Texas poet Butch Hancock says.

 

2) West Texas

 

West Texas. Drop from Wichita Falls south (slightly by southwest), to Archer City, where Larry McMurtry grew up and set his “Last Picture Show” – and where, until recently, there’d been no rain for four years. Continue south through the ruins of Fort Belknap, one of the forts the army built to try and contain the Comanche and to administer to less warlike tribes. Drop still south to Ranger – Roaring Ranger of the ‘20s oilfields – and on south to Comanche where Wes Hardin killed the county sheriff once. From Comanche to San Saba, the county seat of San Saba County where my own great-great-grandfather settled in 1852 upon his arrival from Tennessee. San Saba County was long the furthest reach of the western Texas frontier; it was bloody ground of numerous Indian fights and a strange, not yet forgotten feud between two groups of white settlers. My great-grandfather left that country to escape the Mob War (it was called) and came to Coleman Country in 1900, bringing along my six-year-old grandfather. My roots are deep in San Saba country and many another West Texan can look back there, too, for it was a hardy breed of Indian country men there who moved as quickly as they could out into the Comanche land which became West Texas. From San Saba, veer a little west across the north and western side of the Hill Country, across rough wooded and fairly well-watered land where deer drink from shaded creeks and buzzards float high and lazily. Pass through Fredericksburg and on to Center Point, a tiny town on the Guadalupe River. It was here the Englishman Harry Rishworth, who married my great-great-Aunt Arizona Bomar, ranched after serving with the Texas Rangers. Here he founded a family which now all sleep with him in a quiet, dry cemetery (where it is said there are more ex-Rangers buried than in any other cemetery).

 

From Center Point, veer more westerly to Camp Verde, where Jefferson Davis, before he was President of the Confederacy – when he was the United States Secretary of War – introduced camels as a mode of transportation. Across the road from the ruins of Camp Verde, there is an old tombstone, alone and weathered, with a tiny metal banjo embedded in it.

 

Now strike straight for the Mexican Border at Eagle Pass. As you cross Bandera County, you’ll begin to lose the Hill Country and take up the brush country of South Texas. Dry, hot country with tangles of plants that cut and stick you, and insects and animals that sting and bite. Across Uvalde County where Pat Garrett lived for a while some years after he killed Billy the Kid, and across Maverick County, named for a famous Texas rancher who also gave his name to the wild and unclaimed cattle he collected at the beginning of his career – and from the cattle, the name spread to a type of wild and unclaimed man. At Eagle Pass, you encounter the Rio Grande – long and winding border with Mexico.

 

Now go upriver, northwest to Del Rio and its Mexican counterpart Ciudad Acuna – the City of Acuna, but still called village, Villa Acuna, by most West Texas folk. For several generations it has been a trip to the red-light district of Acuna – Boys’ Town it’s called – which has relieved the virginity of the adolescent boys of West Texas. Still follow the river northwest across the vast Amistad Reservoir, a magnet for people all over West Texas – like all the lakes there. A people born of arid land, they flock with their ski-boats to man-made lakes all across the area. Upriver from Amistad is Langtry, named by Judge Roy Bean for his idol, the English actress Lily Langtree. It was here Judge Roy Bean set up headquarters on the railroad to administer his Law West of Pecos.

 

From Langtry you’ll follow the river in a huge half circle of over a hundred miles without encountering another real town – and not even a real highway till you’re almost at the end. This is mysterious country even to most West Texans who rarely venture into it. Dry land, big ranches; a strong aftertaste of the Mexican Revolution.

 

Boquillas is a tiny Mexican town across the river from the Big Bend National Park. There is no bridge. Likely the river is low enough to ford; if not, the Mayor, David, will come for you or send someone for you in a rowboat. It is here that a second cousin of mine used to cross into Mexico to trade new .22 rifles for much older guns, relics of the revolution, which he repaired and collected. Now follow the river around the big bend which gives the Big Bend its name. This mountainous country, the Chisos Mountains, isolated mountains with stores of hidden Spanish treasure. The river passes through deep canyons.

 

After you’ve completed the big bend, you’re headed back northwest again. And that’s the direction you’ll take for damn near three hundred miles, headed straight for El Paso. El Paso del Norte. The pass of the north of Mexico to New Mexico. In terms of European occupation, this is a very old place, much older than the rest of Texas. While most of the state was still unexplored and unsettled wilderness, El Paso del Norte was along a well-travelled Spanish road. Now virtually one city with Juarez across the river, El Paso is a very large metropolitan area set down flat in the middle of nowhere.

 

Head a few miles upriver to Anthony, then take off due east. You aren’t going to run into too many people. But then, except for El Paso, you really haven’t seen anybody much since you left Del Rio. The western side of West Texas is still thinly settled.

 

A hundred miles out, you’ll cross Guadalupe National Park within sight of the highest mountain in Texas – 8751 ft. Guadalupe Peak. The next hundred miles you’ll be crossing the Trans Pecos, not Comanche country, but Apache country. My great-grandfather, the self-same one who left San Saba County to get away from the Mob, was once shot through the overcoat out here by an Apache Indian. He was a Ranger then. The bullet touched his flesh not at all. In later years, telling the story again to old Ranger friends, he would say he believed the Apache to be Geromino himself.

 

Some miles north of Wink, Roy Orbison’s hometown, take a right-angle turn left to go due north.

 

This is oil country. With the rising prices of petroleum, this area is growing very rich, very quickly. It is a dirty, windy, gritty country. You’ll pass within a few miles of Hobbs, New Mexico where my grandfather worked in the oil fields for a little while in the ‘20s. He didn’t like it there. It was too dirty and windy. You’ll pass close to Clovis, New Mexico, too, where Norman Petty recorded Buddy Holly. South of Clovis, you’ll begin to pick up irrigated farmland of the South Plains.

 

You’re on the Llano Estacado, the vast Staked Plains grasslands which stretches from the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico all the way across Kansas. Once the impenetrable fortress of the Comanche; the last stand of the Southern herd of buffalo – southern because the Union Pacific Railroad, hundreds of miles to the north, split the herd at its building. Once called the Great American Desert, this is now a fertile ranching and farming area.

 

West of Amarillo, you’ll cross Interstate 40, Old Route 66, the highway that took the Dustbowl refugees to California. Now you’re back in thinly settled ranch land.

 

Turn due east again at the northwest corner of the State of Texas. You’re on the line between the north side of the Texas panhandle. If this is a winter trip you’re taking, you’ll be cold. You’ve just missed Dalhart by thirty-odd miles and they say only a barbed wire fence separates Dalhart from the North Pole. A hundred and fifty miles from your last turn, take another right angle, this time to the south. Cross the Canadian River and Interstate 40 again and when you hit the Red River, turn to your left and follow its course.

 

You’ll pass Quanah, named for the last and greatest chief of the Comanche. The half-white son of a great war chief and a white captive mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah Parker was the last to give u. But when he saw only the white man’s road open, he took it well, becoming a rich man, and a friend to presidents. He brought peyote north from Mexico to the plains tribes.

 

And that’s Wichita Falls you can see over the horizon now. You’ve just circled West Texas.

 

What did you circle? Well, as your travel-weary bones might tell you, a hell of a lot of territory – an area close to five hundred miles wide by five hundred miles tall. By touring the outside perimeter, you’ve glimpsed a most little of everything you’ll find within. Most is ranch country, but very large areas are commercially farmed. It is oil country. The Permian Basin centered around Midland and Odessa began to be a major producing area after the war, settled down a bit during the sixties, and now is booming again. In fact, throughout the whole of West Texas you won’t travel for without coming upon active wells and new ones being drilled.

 

It is a country of incredibly hot summers and cold winters. There is little rainfall. Around the turn of the century, the railroads promoted West Texas as farm land – dry-land farm land. Needing to develop the area in order to make the lands profitable, they brought in countless small farmers. For eighty years, those farmers and their sons and grandsons have been drifting away – convinced finally it’s too dry to farm. Large areas of West Texas have, for the last eighty years actually lost population. It has taken this long because there is always enough rain to offer hope – and some years more than adequate rain. Most springs and summers, crashing thunderstorms will roll down the panhandle and across the south plains, bringing baseball-size hail to destroy crops and automobile finishes. Flooding rain will wash out fences and wash away crops. Tornados will dip down from the sky usually harmlessly twisting trees, but sometimes destroying houses and barns – and sometimes dealing destruction to the hearts of towns and cities.

 

Drier years, great sand-blasting winds will grind the paint from cars. The sky will be brown for days, the sun a pale dirty glow. Everything, inside buildings as well as without, will be coated with layers of dust.

 

But it is a beautiful land, too, of majestic vistas and enormous blue skies; of long quiet and lazy days; of promiseful mornings and peaceful evenings. It is not urban; its major cities are not large. Dirt is never very far away.

 

Midland and Odessa are oil towns; Abilene is a church town. San Angelo is the world capital of wool and mohair production and a real, old fashioned cow town. Amarillo sits in the midst of the old buffalo range and has its beginnings there with the hunters. Lubbock is the centre of South Plains irrigated farmland.

 

3) Tommy Hancock & The Cowboy

 

I live in Dallas now, which by my definition of West Texas, is over a hundred miles east of West Texas’ eastern border. Headed west on Interstate 20, I hit West Texas at Ranger. I do this once a month or so, headed home to where my parents live, south of Abilene. And I did it a month ago, going to Lubbock.

 

We had thought to go to Nashville that weekend, but time was too close and then an invitation came in the mail from Tommy Hancock to attend a show at the old Cotton Club on the Slaton highway out south of Lubbock. Tommy opened the Cotton Club years ago and ran it till he took a turn for the strange and left for New Mexico. I’d heard strange stories of him for a few months before I finally met him in '75. Most every musician I met from Lubbock (and there’s a bunch of them) would ask me if I knew him. Then they’d tell me a Tommy Hancock story:

 

Tommy and the Empty House – Tommy was a successful band leader and club operator with big cars and a big house. Not having seen him for a while, someone went to his house to find it totally empty of furniture and Tommy and his wife Charlene and the kids camped out in the empty house.

 

Tommy and the Hair Transplant – Tommy is a very big man with a movie-star – almost Paul Newmanish – look about him. His hair is a foot long or longer and usually tied back in a pony tail. He wears a cowboy hat most constantly onstage. When he takes off the hat you can see he’s not overloaded with hair on top of his head. According to one informant, he once started hair transplants, but quit with the explanation that holy men shouldn’t have hair transplants.

 

Tommy and the Pyramid – Tommy has a pyramid in his living room. He sits in it and hears the music of the cosmos.

 

Tommy removed himself and his family from Northern New Mexico about the time I met him. They moved to Denver where they were – and are – involved with Guru Maharaji, the teenaged East Indian who achieved some notoriety a few years ago. But the band – The Supernatural Family Band (his family and friends) – still plays Lubbock once in a while. Tommy still owns the Cotton Club and has a dance/party there every few months. I’d been hearing about these events for a while, but hadn’t been to one.

 

Patty wanted to go with us. She’d recently bought a used VW camper which she was planning to drive to Colorado and back within a few weeks; she wanted a shakedown cruise. We were well on the way to being messed-up by the time we hit Ranger and by Abilene, we were in a chemical state of increased color perception and subject to fits of uncontrolled giggles. We stopped in Abilene for gas; the gas station was a few blocks from the Southern Baptist university, Hardin Simmons, where I spent the spring of 1964 and learned I didn’t car for Abilene or church schools. The man at the truck stop – a fortyish retired military looking type (as well he may have been; Abilene has a big Air Force Base) watched me pump gas at the self-service pump. Actually he hovered, nervously smiling.

 

When I paid for the gas, he hustled me to stay and eat lunch in his already overcrowded restaurant. “Might as well stay and eat dinner with us.” Judy bought a tee shirt which said, across the front, Where the hell is Abilene?

 

We headed towards Sweetwater under heavy clouds. Texas had been in the grip of a bad drought for several years and this summer was the worst – no rain at all most places and record-breaking hot weather. (Two week later, fifty-odd people would die in the worst floods in Texas history; as much as 30 inches would fall in some places over a period of only a few hours.)

 

We left Interstate 20 just west of Sweetwater and aimed towards Snyder. By Snyder, splatters of rain had turned to hard thunderstorms. Snyder is the county seat of Scurry County. Scurry County is sparsely settled ranch country, liberally punched full of producing oil wells. The last white buffalo killed in Texas is memorialized there. We stopped at a truck stop for coffee.

 

Three or four middle-aged cowboys were hanging out, drinking coffee. A couple of baseball-capped guys were at another table. We were seized by a return of chemical giggles. Judy and Patty assaulted the juke box selector at the table; I spilled a glass of water. We were strangers (one of which, me, having hair a foot long) in a fairly isolated rural truck stop and we were acting strangely like everybody’s idea of drug-crazed hippies. I shut down my own noise-making and tried, with very little success, to quieten Judy and Patty. The waitress, however, had other ideas entirely. She thought we were the best thing she’d seen in a long time. She was probably forty-five – not, by anybody’s standards, good looking even misshapen in a way. She slid right into the middle of our carrying-on with a story of the night before, when she’d been at a dance and there was this guy giving her the eye, except he was with some other woman and although she – the waitress – was pretty proud of the whole situation, she wasn’t so sure he was exactly a model of propriety. “Well, you know,” Judy told her, “a man can own once car and still look at another one.”

 

Dark, swirling clouds covered the entire northern horizon when we left the truck stop. We drove straight into them. I was happy thinking about driving through such a mass of energy two hours into Lubbock. Twenty minutes out, right in the midst of a howling wind and drenching rain, a tire went flat.

 

I sat for a while thinking the rain might slow a little. It didn’t. And right in the middle of it, I broke the flimsy piece of metal VW pretends is a lug wrench. Setting on the highway in a broken van. Rain still fell fitfully. A cherry-red van came from toward Snyder. I stepped out and waved. It pulled over. I though maybe the driver might be some kind of a homegrown hippie – those 25 years-old side-burned dope smokers who work in the oilfields and spend more money on those fucking vans than they could possibly make in six months.

 

It was a stocky middle-aged rancher-looking type, wearing Levis and a dress shirt with tail out. Boots and an Open-Road-style Stetson, the kind Lyndon Johnson wore. He gave me a semi-concealed curious glance – checked out my hair and earrings. My hat was at least as conservative as his (except for the Navajo hat band). Dave Hickey used to say – and this was years ago – that probably long hair was actually an asset in rural West Texas – so long as you wore a hat and boots with it. Everybody would just figure you were home-grown crazy – and if you were crazy enough to wear hair that long, then you were probably dangerous enough to be left alone.

 

I told him the trouble and he rummaged around in the back of his van for a lug wrench which, naturally, wasn’t anywhere near Volkswagen size. He looked at the sky, scratched his head and mumbled. He glanced off towards Snyder. “Listen,” he said, in some West Texas version of Marlon Brando, “you know Snyder is dry and I was hurrying to get up to Post for a beer.” We all could tell he was offering to go back to Snyder for help. We all offered a beer – lots of beer – quickly.

 

Judy and Patty stayed in the van and I took off for Snyder with the Cowboy – I still didn’t know his name. He had three beers in tow. He wasn’t really a cowboy, but some kind of sales manager for some product he thought I’d know all about but had never heard of. He lived in Lubbock, had been down to Snyder breaking-in a new salesman and had spent more hours without liquor than he could comfortably handle. He ran a low-key rap about how much he hated towns where he couldn’t buy liquor and how Snyder was too damned close to Abilene – Snyder wasn’t anything but a goddam redneck town anyway. Hell, most places people would offer you a toke if you didn’t have any liquor. He had a girl friend in Odessa who always toked-up and usually left some smoke in the van, but he’d given it a good going-over and there wasn’t a sign of any. Normally he wasn’t much into dope, but hell, anything was better than sobriety.

 

I hadn’t been off the freeway and down into the actual town of Snyder since I was a kid. It was much smaller and ill-kept than I remembered, half cow-town and half oil-town. Many run-down, barn-like old buildings obviously dating from the ‘50s oil boom displayed oil field equipment sales signs. The cowboy kept muttering about damn redneck towns.

 

This was late in the afternoon on Saturday and the likelihood of finding anything I could use in Snyder, Texas at such a time wasn’t overwhelming. We pulled up in front of a tire store and the Cowboy asked me if I had the money. I thought he was making sure I wasn’t going to try to borrow it from him. I grinned and told him I had the money. The lone man in the store was closing; he had no tire tools at all. There was one auto supply store that might be open, he told us, but likely it wouldn’t have anything as exotic as a VW tire tool.

 

The Cowboy made contingency plans. As we drove to the auto supply, he thought of other tools we might buy to supplement the four-way tire tool we might find. He smiled slyly and explained he’d asked about the money because he thought maybe he’d be able to get more done if he did the buying and I kept my haircut out of sight. “Hell,” I told him, “I know West Texas. I was raised here.” He smiled and said no more.

 

The auto supply had a four-way that looked right. The Cowboy kept trying to buy other tools. I discouraged him. He said he’d pay for them himself. I told him the tire tool would do it if it was going to be done. Back out on the highway, we found the tire tool did indeed fit, but even so, the last lug would not budge. He applied all his considerable muscle and the tire tool itself began to bend – and this was a big, damn near truck-size tire tool. His face turned red and he huffed and puffed. Judy and Patty offered him a beer; he took it and stood back. “Give it a try,” he told me. I did. The lug came smoothly off. “Goddam,” he said with resignation and no little wonderment.

 

We changed the tire and he told us his name. Leland.

 

Leland said we obviously didn’t want to go back to that damn redneck town (which had treated both of us with extreme courtesy); he’d follow us to Lubbock and we could get the tire fixed there. Would one of the girls like to ride with him? The girls smiled and declined.

 

I took off at my usual five miles above the speed limit and Leland soon passed up, pointing to his CB. He meant he could keep a watch for the law ahead and to follow him. We followed at twenty miles an hour above the limit, stopping for a beer at Post (where Leland got himself a bottle to hide away in the van against dry-town trips) – up the caprock outside Post onto the Llano Estacado and into a blinding rainstorm which stopped everyone else, but hardly slowed old Leland. He stopped at the outskirts of Lubbock and I gave him great thanks and several tickets to Tommy’s show. He peered at the tickets with polite interest and obviously didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about.

 

We went to a motel where Judy and I had stayed several times on trips to and from New Mexico. We found it operated by East Indians wearing traditional East Indian dress and hardly speaking English. “How long are you staying?” the man asked me carefully and seriously. “Just tonight,” I told him. “Ah,” he said, “You are my short-time guests.”

 

We got to the Cotton Club near the end of The Supernatural Family Band’s first set. The Cotton Club is a big, old airplane hanger-looking building surrounded by fields; small, wounded houses; and fairly new trailer houses.

 

I’d heard that Tommy’s crowds – especially in Lubbock – tended to be strange mixtures. Perhaps the majority were young college or professional types; a great number were middle-aged country western types. Some bikers; some hard-core hippies. Cowboy hats covered bald and clipped heads, as well as Wild Bill Hickock-style heads. The tickets had stressed that dancing while wearing a hat would most definitely be permitted – which is usually not the case in standard country dance halls of that area.

 

Judy and Patty and I hung around a bar in the back and Judy and Patty helped Tommy’s mother and various daughters and helpers give away coke and ice. The cover charge was $3.50, but Tommy had bought a good deal of food and wine and cokes and ice to give away. One of his kids told me the cover charge likely wouldn’t cover costs. The cover charge was explained as a donation for the party, and it was.

 

Tommy is a great believer in dancing. He urges the audience to dance. He leads them in dances. He said that he and Charlene had invented a new dance; something like the funky-polka-bump (at least that’s what it looked like); then he and Charlene got down off stage and showed everybody how to do it.

 

A little later, he introduced the next piece as a Mexican Hat Dance. He explained how to do a Mexican Hat Dance. Then he said, “You can do it. You think you’re white people, but people are always reincarnated into the same area where they lived before. There didn’t used to be anybody here but Mexicans and Indians. You’re not white.”

 

4.) Butch Hancock – A Letter From Home

 

I called Jim Terr to find out if Butch Hancock is Tommy Hancock’s brother. I’d heard he was and I’d heard he wasn’t. Tommy had mentioned “brother Butch Hancock” onstage in Lubbock. But Tommy likely calls everyone brother. I met Tommy originally through Jim and Jim’s record company, Blue Canyon – then out of a garage in his parents’ backyard in Las Vegas, New Mexico – was the first to record a Butch Hancock song. It was a blue transparent 45 called “If I Were a Bluebird” sung by someone called J. Ben-Isaac.

 

No, Jim told me from L.A. where he has his record company now, they are no kin at all. Jim said that Butch had been part of the scene in Lubbock that Tommy had centered.

 

Butch has some songs on Joe Ely’s albums. Ely was also part of Tommy’s scene and he and Butch were once in a band called Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders. Jimmie Dale is Jimmie Gilmore, another of Tommy’s friends; he, too, later also moved to Denver to deal with the young Guru.

 

I heard that Butch had put out his own record, but it wasn’t for sale in Dallas and I’ve sort of quit buying records anyway. I was involved – at times heavily – in the music business for about four years – up until only a few months ago – and I’m mostly bored with the whole thing. Record companies used to send me stacks of albums to review; maybe one out of five was worth listening to. One in twenty-five might actually be good. I’ve been Roy Clarked/Glen Campelled and Red Clay Ramblered. I worked for David Allan Coe for a few months and travelled with Freddy Fender; I spent a lot of time in a lot of dance halls and bars and backstage at concerts. I was absolutely bored hearing the same thing night after night. God knows how boring it must be to the musician who has to perform the same shit night after night.

 

I finally heard Butch Hancock’s album at David Phillips’ house in Austin. He was playing it over and over again. I was surprised to find it sounded a lot like Woody Guthrie and early Bob Dylan. I never really listened to the songs and got away from Austin without getting a copy of the album. A few weeks later, back in Austin, I bought it. It absolutely knocked me out.

 

It’s called “West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes.”

 

Musically, it does resemble early Bob Dylan and Woody Gutherie. Lyrically, it’s more specific than Dylan and more literate than Gutherie. Of the two, it is much more like Gutherie – the songs are written from inside the scene. Instead of looking at West Texas it’s like being in West Texas and looking around.

 

Talk about a letter from home. For weeks now, I’ve been listening to little else.

 

Side One

 

Dry Land Farm

 

“There’s thunderstorms a-building up over on the county line…” Late of a lonesome, silent summer afternoon, when I was a kid, I used to sit in my backyard at the house in Talpa and look off to see thunderheads piled high in the western sky. I’d think maybe they were as far away as New Mexico where Billy the Kid had lived. But, of course, they were probably, at the most, only forty of fifty miles away. Maybe as far away as the mountains out north of San Angelo – ranch country mountains in a sparsely settled area where an almost-ghost town named Tennyson is just down the road from a town called Bronte. Skinny old men wear faded Levis out there, and pale blue western shirts; sweat-stained hats; well-worn boots. They drive old pickups with rifles stacked.

 

“…when the west wind comes a-blowin’, well the sand comes a-blowin’, too…” For seven years, in the mid-fifties, rain rarely fell. Grass was gone and stockwater was gone. Ranchers mounted butane tanks on their pickups to fuel flame throwers with which they burned the thorns off prickly-pear cactus for cows to eat. Weekly, wind would come screaming in, carrying sand. I remember being eight or ten years old and walking to school looking up at a pale brown sun.

 

“…yeah things are cool for everybody but the man on a dryland farm…” My grandfather kept a few cows and most years, he’d buy some calves at the auction in Coleman. The auction is an integral part of the small stockman’s economic system; that’s where he buys new stock and that’s where he sell to make his profit. It’s also a social event with neighbors drinking coffee together in the coffee shop and smoking together in the parking lot. My grandfather would raise the calves – that’s basically the wrong term; more like, he’d allow the calves to raise themselves – then he’d take them back to sell. In all the years I was growing up, that’s really the only way I ever saw him make much of a profit. He also kept a few scraggly sheep that he usually never got round to marking (castrating and removing tails). He fooled with them only at shearing time. I spent two or three day every year chasing the dumb bastards to get them penned for shearing. I swear the sheep have some psychic power to know what a human wants and then the instinct to do the exact opposite. But my grandfather’s real love seemed to be dryland farming. He had a hundred acres in fields and year after year, rain or no rain (and it was usually no rain) he’d be on the tractor (or about one-third of the time, working on the tractor to keep it going), huge straw hat to attempt sun protection, mouth full of chewing tobacco, his hands bleeding from working on the plow or cultivator or whatever. You could see him down in the field, his progress slowly marked by either the lessening or increasing of the loudness of the motor noise – as he moved further from the house or closer. He’d come in for dinner (that’s lunch) with a thick, even layer of yellowish brown dust totally covering him. He’d sleep away the hottest hours and his morning’s exhaustion, stretched out on the concrete front porch. Then he’d be back in the field till sundown. For years, he planted cotton and even if it did rain, he’d likely lose money because cotton prices were so low. The years he raised hay or grain, he at least had feed for his cows. It was likely the dryland farming that killed him. The sunbelt leads to a world in skin cancer and Texas is worst of all. It is likely the sunlight he took in riding that tractor gave him skin cancer in the first place. And even after he’d been operated on several times, his face scarred and disfigured, one eye virtually gone, he’d be back on the tractor, exposing the not-even-yet-healed wounds to the sun and the dust.

 

Where the West Wind Has Blown

 

“…farmers all know what dirt’s all about. But a man from the city, well, he has to be told, there’s more to the country, than the country can hold…” I’ve lived mostly in cities for fifteen years now. I do will in cities, I suppose; I haven’t starved and I haven’t had to do much I didn’t want to do. I’ve made friends of intellectuals and topless dancers, small time criminals and college professors, artists and writers and hookers. I’ve been in city scenes from ‘60s San Francisco to ‘70s Austin. Yet, always in my most lucid and drunken moments (and the two are more often than not, the same), I find the same wide gulf between these city people and myself. The responsible among them are concerned with zoning and voting and economics and those things, to me, are like the wind and the rain – if those things bother me, I just move out of the way. Perhaps I’m closer to the irresponsible – the hookers and the topless dancers and such because they live their lives closer to the essentials. Their police harassment might be something like my sand storms.

 

“…if you’re dreaming of faraway places and towns, the price can be heavy for hanging around…” I decided by the time I was fifteen or sixteen that I wanted to be a writer – not just write – but to be a “writer.” In those times I had some idea formed from Kerouac and Hemingway, I suppose, of literary conversations in Tangiers and Havana. Of long drunken nights in Paris or New York. Later, in San Francisco, hanging out with successful and semi-successful writers, I came to understand the value of literary connections. And having lived on the edge of literary life for these years since, I have come to know that the heavy connections have to be in California or, preferably still, New York. But, my God, I usually can’t stand the writers I find living in Albuquerque or Dallas. And those coastal cities are too far way for me to live there and drive to West Texas every month or so. Faulkner long ago replaced Kerouac and Hemingway as my model of “a writer.” Of course, he drank himself to death at home in Oxford – but, then, Hemingway and Kerouac seem to have died of the same malady in their own exiles.

 

You’ve Never Seen Me Cry

 

“…the windshield and the radio play sadly through the night; and a crazy, blazing falling star just passed me on the right; taillights down the highway fade low and out of sight…” I’ve been down that highway. From the first I remember – as a little kid in the backseat of my parents’ car, driving through Friday nights to Amarillo to visit my uncle and aunt; to a teenager driving to San Angelo for God-knows-whatever teenage needs – to last month driving home to Coleman Country. There’s a lot of long, lonesome highway in West Texas. When you’re tired of WBAP out of Fort Worth, then you search your dial – mostly in vain – for another station. You’ll end up with signals from Des Moines, Oklahoma City and New Orleans. Sometimes L.A. and Utah. The stations will fade in and out, but after awhile, it doesn’t matter. It’s just noise to keep out the silence.

 

I Wish I Was Only Workin’

 

“…I been here before, I been thinking, and I’ll be here again…” I have lived most of my life, child and adult, going back and forth, from the past to the future, from standing still, to flying and back again…away from West Texas and back and on and on. I wrote a novel once – a highly autobiographical novel – named after a line from an old Hank Snow song: “I’ve Been Before and I’ll Tavel Again.”

 

Dirt Road Song

 

“…and if you ain’t been down a dirt road on your own feet, there’s little common ground between me and you…”

 

West Texas Waltz

 

“…I like to dance the dickens to the West Texas Waltz…” Though it’s changing now – with more and more areas going wet – in the old days, most people lived in areas of West Texas where they couldn’t buy liquor. In those days a whole county had to vote wet or dry. So when a county voted wet, numerous honky tonks would spring up along the county line where dry counties joined. The term county line literally came to mean a place to buy liquor. If somebody said, “I’m going to the county line,” it meant he was going for liquor. Not all, but many of those honky tonks were dance halls and the West Texas dance hall is still an institution. With the coming of Willie and Waylon and the honky tonk heroes, dance halls have multiplied with people who might work in hardware stores of for the highway department, dressing to the hilt in cowboy clothes, come night, and heading off to dance the night away. My parents will drive for hours to get to their favorite dance places, their big Cadillac gliding, air-conditioned and self-contained, down the highway. Myself, I’ve waltzed some miles in actual fact – and being a great believer in The Dance as opposed to dancing, I’ve spend my life, I expect, dancing truly like the dickens to the West Texas Waltz.

 

Side Two

 

They Say It’s a Good Land

 

“…they say it’s a good land and I guess I’ll agree…we cleared off this land so many years ago…we ploughed behind mules and milked many a cow, but it’s a fine brick home on the range we got now…” I worked for the Agriculture Department one summer in the mid ‘60s surveying land to make sure farmers and ranchers were living up to their end of various land-use payments they were getting from the government. To cut down surpluses and supposedly raise prices, subsidies were paid not to plant acres of certain crops. Subsidies were paid in a soil-ban program not to use land for any agricultural projects. So, every summer they sent out crews of surveyors to check. I was a teenager and homefolks, and however much the farmers and ranchers might resent this intrusion by the Feds, they were always nice to me, taking me into the house when I filled out my reports, offering me ice tea and pieces of pie. For a while I worked in a farming community west of Ballinger, just south of the San Angelo highway. The people there are of Czech and other Central European descent. Many still speak English with a heave accent. In those days it was common to hear some Germanic foreign language being spoken in the stores in Ballinger. They are very good farmers – an island farm in the midst of miles of ranchland. There was an old story that they might live in shacks, but they’d have the biggest, fanciest barns around. That was, perhaps, true forty or fifty years ago, but by the mid ‘60s, most of them had houses to match.

 

Their houses reflected their property, big and usually brick, but with almost no identifiable style – except perhaps city suburban. There were hardly any windows; the widespread use of air-conditioners had convinced West Texas folk that they had no use for windows. Tile on the kitchen and bathroom floors; carpet in the other rooms. If the furniture had any particular style it would likely be western – the couch arms and bedsteads shaped like wagon wheels – the upholstery, imitation leather with embossed brands or cow or horse heads. When my grandfather used to come in from ploughing, covered with dirt, he looked well enough in place in the old house where they lived – that house dating from the turn of the century – without indoor plumbing. Those farmers always looked out of place to me in their new brick houses. Carpets are no place to take off shoes full of dirt. With no windows, how could they even see the dirt outside. But I realised well enough then, and have become more convinced since, that likely most of the world doesn’t dance to my tune anyway and all those farmers were probably blissfully happy to be out of the shacks of their childhoods and into what they considered nice houses. I know well enough my grandparents would have loved it.

 

I Grew to Be a Stranger

 

“…I left my home to ramble and I rambled east and west…I come back to my hometown; everybody acted like I’d always been around…” The editor of a magazine in New York called me and asked me to do a story on boots. He thought western wear was maybe where it was at – and boots especially. I’ve still got the first pair of boots I ever owned; I must have been about three when I got them because my own kid wore them when he was three. They were well-worn when I got through with them; by the time he got through with them, I think it’s assumed they won’t make it to my grandson. They were shopmade by a man named Mike who had a shop on the main street in Coleman. He’s been gone a long time. When I was in junior high and high school, my boots were made by a man named Tex Robbins. Tex rented the front of Nance’ Saddle Shop down near the courthouse. It was always dark and it smelled of leather. Mr. Nance worked on saddles by a big open door in the back. Old men sat with the back of their chairs leaned against the alley walls and told stories while he worked. Tex worked in the front, his hands shaking as he cut his leather; he already suffered from the drinking that would help kill him.

 

I’d heard that his son, Tex Robbins Jr., was still making boots in Coleman – once of the few real bootmakers left in the state – one of the few who still operated a one-man shop and built boots with no assembly line at all. So I went to see Tex Robbins Jr. Tex was a stocky, very quiet young man. His shop was in a brick building across from a car agency; I’d remembered the building as a barbeque place. I explained what I was up to and told him I’d thought of him because his father used to make my boots. He took me back into his shop and immediately started looking for my last – the form his father would have used to build my boots. I spent a couple of hours talking to him and learned more about how to build boots that I would have ever guessed I’d come to learn. Every once in a while, he’d drift back over to the cabinet where all his father’s old lasts were stored and rummage through, hunting mine.

 

Texas Air

 

“…leave my spirit on the prairie…” My God, I used to be afraid of dying. I used to wonder which day of the week would see my death…which day, according to my thinking at the time, would be the before-the-first anniversary of my death. I dreaded the cessation of this particular consciousness I considered myself. I don’t think that way much anymore. For a while now I’ve been leading myself into disbelief of death. Tommy Hancock in seriousness or jest, may have given me a final hint when he did his riff about reincarnation. Maybe, indeed, I’ve always lived on these prairies and maybe I will, for centuries to come.

 

Little Coyote Waltz

 

“Little coyote, little coyote, you better run far and fast. There’s some mighty mad ranchers and they’re hot on your trail. They got long barreled guns; you better head for high grass, or they’ll shoot you and hang you from a fence by your tail…” Coyotes have made an amazing comeback throughout the west. The wily coyote it’s called, and that’s not a bad description. A trickster of Indian mythology, the coyote has a way of tricking his enemies – of just slipping out of trouble. For years sheep and cattle ranchers slaughtered the coyote with poison, traps, guns – and a strange device called a cyanide gun, which is actually a specially made .38 gun, set in a trap to fire off a cyanide charge into a coyote’s mouth when it tugs at an attached piece of meat. Such pressure might have made extinct a lesser breed (and, in fact, has largely done so with the coyote’s cousin wolf) – but with the coyote, it just kept numbers down. And, in fact, it might have made the breed even wilier; apparently, by some kind of quick natural selection, we now have a breed of coyote which is smarter in dealing with mankind than ever before. Then, over the last ten years, many of the old ways of hunting the coyote have been made illegal. So the coyote is not only smarter, but much more numerous. The ranchers – especially the sheep ranchers – are screaming for blood. Sheepmen say coyotes kill lambs and even grown sheep. The defenders of the coyote, which are many, say the coyote only eats dead or dying animals – that the coyote is needed to keep down other nuisance populations – like jackrabbits. I don’t know the truth. Like most truths, the real thing probably lies somewhere in between the two points of view. But I’m still for the coyote. I guess if I was a sheep rancher I might not be. But there’s no way I’d make a living raising sheep…and if there’s any justice, then any animal as willfully stupid as a sheep deserves to be eaten by an animal as wise as the coyote.

 

Just One Thunderstorm

 

“The ground turned white for miles around and all the farmers cried; the hailstones killed a flock of birds that found no place to hide…There’s nothing left of Grandma’s garden but a few tears and some talk; the hail tore almost every leaf off almost every stalk…The rain and hail fell like somebody pulled out all the stops. The careless weeds make it through, but it wiped out all the crops. If filled the lake up to the brim. It rained so hard, a soul could hardly see. The wind blew out some windows. A downtown drugstore’s plate glass window scattered near and far…” Blue thunderstorm clouds – the line of storm – are called a bank. I don’t know why. “There’s a bank coming up,” means you better be more or less on your toes. It’s likely going to rain; the wind is likely going to blow; hail just might fall. Nobody would be surprised if a tornado came rumbling. During the spring and summer, and to a lesser extent, the fall, when cold fronts roll in from the north to meet hot moist air coming up from the Gulf, lightning flashes in the sky most every night. Sometimes far away, sometimes over your head with crashing thunder.

 

The centre of Texas is the southern end of the midwestern plains area called Tornado Alley. Everybody in West Texas has seen a tornado. People in San Angelo and Lubbock have seen major portions of their towns blown away. In the old days – especially in the country – everybody had a storm cellar. The kids would go to bed with Mama and Daddy still watching the clouds. About midnight, they would be awakened and herded to the cellar. Sometimes they’d sleep the night there, strange shadows playing on the wall from a coal oil lamp. Sometimes they’d come out to find their house and bard and chicken-house spread helter-skelter over acres of mesquite.

 

And hail. About 1961 or ’52, I was caught inside a brand-new Studebaker in downtown Coleman when the worst hailstorm anybody could remember came howling in. It was on a Saturday, and in those days, Saturday was still the big day for rural people to congregate in Coleman. An empty parking place wouldn’t be found.

 

Certain communities would park together; the street beside the Owl Drug was called Leaday Avenue because folks from the Leaday area all parked there. Neighbors, relatives, and total strangers would gather in large groups on this sidewalk to talk. Sometimes the sidewalks would be so crowded, it would be virtually impossible to pass. Others would take to parked cars and while away the afternoon talking and watching the sidewalk parade.

 

Such a Saturday afternoon it was when the hailstorm hit, with me being six or seven, and in my parents’ brand-new car. Hail clouds are usually green and everyone was watching the massive green cloud. They weren’t disappointed. Not a car window was left unbroken, not a roof undamaged. The noise inside the car was incredible. Baseball-size hail left pockmarks covering cars and busted plate glass. When it was over, everyone emerged slowly and quietly from the doorways and cars. They examined the damage, shook their heads, laughed a little and went home to eat supper.

 

5.) I’ve Been Before…

 

We were camped on the northern slope of the hill that dominates my grandmother’s pasture – the land I’ll own someday; camped at the place where we’ll build a house – where we’ve already started building using, using lumber from the house on the other side of the hill that my great-grandfather built in 1900. Judy and I were camped there with our eight-year-old son, J.C.

 

We had though to go back to Montana for a couple of weeks – back to the Fort Belknap Reservation, where we lived once, to visit with John and Minerva. John is Tribal Chairman up there, and Minerva, a member of a powerful medicine family, is the most powerful person I know.

 

But our time was short and the trip didn’t feel right for the time being. So we had camped instead. My hair was braided. I wore long silver Kiowa Comanche earrings Judy had bought me at a Pow-Wow a couple of weeks before. We were covered with knives and guns, wearing the knives and a pistol at our belts. Long guns were scattered about. Mornings and evenings, hawks – which I have come to know as special things – came and floated overhead, shrilly crying down at us. Foxes barked on the hilltop and one evening, just at the end of sunlight, an owl hooted to the north, then came to sit silhouetted on a mesquite bush to the east, where he watched us.

 

(First published in Omaha Rainbow 19 – Winter 1978)