In the summer of 1973, the US country singer Jerry Jeff Walker was in the middle of nowhere, recording his soon-to-be-classic album ¡Viva Terlingua!. A crowd was packed to the rafters in an old dancehall 70 miles west of Austin, in Luckenbach, Texas. An extension lead ran from the hall to a recording truck outside.
After everyone had gone home that night, Walker stood in the street and said to Hondo Crouch, Luckenbach’s self-appointed mayor: “I wonder what we just did.” When Crouch had bought the town two years prior, its population was just three people – and according to the most recent census in 2021, it’s back at the same number. But in the 1970s, this ramshackle town thrived as Walker and his peers headed there, and Luckenbach became one of the most improbable yet important centres for country music. Hondo Crouch, who died 50 years ago this month, was a goat-rancher, writer and champion swimmer.
A contradiction of white hair and a mischievous, boyish face he’d sing Mexican rancheras – ranch songs – wherever he went. His business card read “Imagineer, authorised distributor”. In 1971, he clubbed together with two friends to buy Luckenbach, which had become a ghost town since its creation in the late 1800s and its population high in 1904.
They paid $30,000 for an old dancehall, general store, bar and a few outhouses. With Crouch as the town’s self-appointed mayor, the Luckenbach Dance Hall became a gathering place for outlaw country musicians; a freer, rural alternative to Nashville. Country star Gary P Nunn remembers him as a “pied piper”, leading musicians and eccentrics to a simpler life.
In Walker’s case, Crouch’s daughter Becky Patterson met him at an open-mic night, and brought him back to the family ranch. He was starving!’” At the time, Nashville’s country industry was chasing the urbane, pop-friendly sound of countrypolitan, heard in stars like Patsy Cline and Charlie Rich. Musicians like Walker and Willie Nelson were tired of being told to clean the rust out of their music, and wanted their steel guitars and fiddles back.
Going up into the country, they found Luckenbach, Texas. Away from the eye of studio producers, ¡Viva Terlingua! sounded like the communal, unpolished life it celebrated. Gary P Nunn’s song London Homesick Blues appears on the record and Nunn spent that summer in Luckenbach sleeping in a teepee with his wife and baby.
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