Writer, historian, Texan
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Every Saturday nite, yours truly hosts the Texas Music Hour of Power, showcasing all kinds of Texas sounds created over the past century of recorded music. The show runs two hours because Texas spans two time zones and frankly, the music is too dang big to limit it to one hour.
Joe Ely died the other day. He was a big part of my musical life. There’s more to say, and I’ll say more sooner or later, but here’s what I wrote when I learned that he had passed. Vaya con Dios
Thinking a few things about Speedy Sparks….
Four years ago, I contributed the “Guad Is Great” essay about the Upper Guadalupe River for the book Viva Texas Rivers: Adventures, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways, edited by Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester (Texas A&M Press). The book was selected by the Texas State Library as the Texas Great Read 2025 Adult Selection https://www.tsl.texas.gov/greatreadtexas/tgradultselection2025
Here’s an excerpt of my essay describing the area that got hit by flash flooding – before the flood.
Schumacher Crossing
The river insinuates itself into the rocky oak-and-cedar scrub landscape of western Kerr County very subtly. There are no specific headwaters, no gushing artesian spring. Dry washes and gullies gradually collecti enough moisture from small springs to hold water in pools that stretch longer and longer until a steady, shallow stream trickles over a hard limestone bed and then tumbles out of the craggy hills toward the sea more than two hundred miles away.
At Boneyard Draw, on Farm-to-Market 1340, a sheer sixty-foot limestone bluff in the distance marks a bend in the drainage, the first hint of canyons to come. Just below the crossing is the turnoff to Kerr Wildlife Management Area, where the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has been testing cedar (Ashe juniper) eradication, brush clearing, and other water-saving land management strategies. In addition to being a center of white-tailed deer research, this WMA holds one of the greatest concentrations of wild turkey in the state.
Less than a mile down the road, I detour down a county road, toward Cherry Springs Ranch, Guadalupe Bluffs Ranch, and Price’s Joy Spring Ranch Bed & Breakfast. At a low-water crossing, I find the river, sparkling in the sun the palest of greens with a slight tinge of blue, scooting over the hard rock bed.
A mile farther, the river is moving full tilt and roaring to life, with a deeper blue tint, a ribbon of sustenance snaking along a narrow alley guarded by soaring cypress trees and flanked by high bluffs, some rising one hundred feet above the water surface. Turkey buzzards politely wait on a fence poist while I pass before resuming cleanup duty on a mangled piece of roadkill.
A slide leading directly into the water on the banks of Mo Ranch Camp marks the beginning of the “camp run,” consisting of Camp Waldemar and Camp Stewart on the North Fork and Camp Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills Camp, and Camp Arrowhead on the South Fork. Crider’s Rodeo and Dancehall is also on the South Fork. There are not too many places in this world where a couple can two-step under the summer stars to the sounds of western swing fiddles and the steady rush of the river.
The Guadalupe widens, narrow, and spills from limestone shelf to limestone shelf as it moves past patios, swings, and ornate rockwork of dream ranches owned by CEOs, corporations, and churches. In one field by the river, scale replicas of Stonehenge and two thirteen-foot-high Easter Island statues have been erected.
The North Fork and the South Fork join just below the Hunt Store, a community gathering spot for vacationers, hunters, fishermen, swimmers, and visitors for more than eighty years. Several generations of the wealthiest, most influential Texans have spent the summers of their youth on this part of the river, learning the basics of life and being exposed to a wilder, more untamed version of the natural world than exists near the cities where they came from. Small wonder riverfront property here has been the most coveted real estate in the Hill Country for decades.
Anyone can glean a semblance of that experience by passing a night at an old-fashioned resort such at the Waltonia Lodges on the Guadalupe River, or jumping in and cooling off at Schumacher’s Crossing, the first significant swimming hole with easy public access on the river.
The bluffs fade farther into the background from the river as it flows between Hunt and Ingram. Ingram Dam creates enough large pools to support a bass board or a one-man sailboat and offers younger river rats the pleasure of dam sliding.
Parks become more plentiful farther downstream: Louise Hays Park on the south bank through most of Kerrville and Kerrville-Schreiner Park east of town. In both parks, people are disc throwing, fishing, and hanging out. The river gains stature but loses a bit of its curb appeal as it flows past Kerrville, Center Point, and Comfort, the bluffs considerably diminished, most of the cypress logged out long ago….
I keep looking for the right superlative to describe the upper Guadalupe’s blend of wilderness and playground and one remark sticks in my mind. At Kerr WMA, I stumbled upon Anthony Glorioso, a fresh-faced, curly-headed college student from Poughkeepsie, New York, who was working as a field assistant on a study of wild turkeys by radiotelemetry. Glorioso had never been to this part of the world, he said.
Asked about his first impressions, he it up.
“It’s like Africa!”
The New Yorker got it. The Guadalupe is that special.
and here’s what I wrote for texashighways.com following the July 4 2025 flood:
In the June issue of Texas Highways, I wrote about the Lower Guadalupe River below Canyon Lake as a vacation and recreation destination. I half-apologized for the extended drought that had impacted the river, assuring readers that despite low flows, fun could still be had.
On July 4, on that same stretch of river, RVs and campers had to be evacuated due to flash flooding. That week, floods impacted the Colorado, Llano, San Gabriel, Frio, and Nueces rivers and Big Sandy Creek in the Texas Hill Country. They also affected the Concho River by San Angelo, and in the Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas, waterfalls poured over Santa Elena Canyon for the first time in decades.
One hundred and twenty-five miles upstream from Canyon Lake, a cluster of thunderstorms infused with tropical moisture stalled over the upper Guadalupe River and its headwaters. As copious amounts of rain poured, the river and surrounding creeks swelled out of their banks. The water unleashed death and destruction as it ripped through summer camps, RV parks, cabins, homes, resorts, and campgrounds around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville. The deluge took the lives of people who were doing what Texans love to do in the summer: hang out by the water, swim, float, fish, paddle, and play on what is the prettiest stretch of river you’ll find in these parts.
Spring-fed, clear-running, and cool even in 100-degree heat, Hill Country rivers renew, replenish, and refresh in ways other rivers do not. A big part of their appeal is the rocky limestone topography they pass through on their way to the coast. That same landscape has earned its reputation as Flash Flood Alley. With little topsoil, hard rains quickly run off into creeks, streams, and rivers and turn waterways into raging, unforgiving torrents.
Ten years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, a destructive flash flood swelled the Blanco River, which rose 40 feet and swept through the town of Wimberley, killing 10 people. Property damage was severe. I cried seeing the cypress trees by my stretch of the river gone. We helped friends recover, while hearing harrowing stories of escape. The people of Wimberley, their neighbors, and strangers all converged along the river, rolled up their sleeves and started the arduous task of cleaning up and building back, just as Texans and people from all over the world are doing around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville, and in all the other parts of Texas impacted by flash floods.
It’s what Texans do.
The businesses along the lower Guadalupe below Canyon Dam have reopened and river lovers have returned. The healing for those around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville will not be so swift. The recovery is going to take months. The rebuild will take years. Some scars are permanent; the loss of life cannot be undone. But 10 years down the line, I can tell you there is hope. The Blanco remains the shining jewel of Wimberley, the main attraction for the hundreds of thousands who visit the community every year. Blue Hole is booked weeks in advance. Jacob’s Well is flowing again. Down by the river, young cypress trees have popped up where giant cypresses had been swept away by floodwaters. But across the river, where a stand of tall cypress survived, I can gaze up high into their branches and see debris from the flood of 10 years ago, a remnant and reminder of when this river ran too wild.
There will come a time when the upper Guadalupe is once again the Hill Country river of summer dreams, where the sounds of children learning life lessons at summer camps and vacationers kicking back to enjoy the natural world mixes with the soothing sound of flowing water. Until then, we grieve. We pitch in and help our neighbors. It’s what Texans do.
https://www.texasobserver.org/forgotten-crossings-el-paso/
For years, one of my favorite places to visit in El Paso was the crossing where the Spanish conquistador Don Juan Onate and several hundred Spanish, mestizo, and Indigenous settlers crossed the Rio Grande/Río Bravo—El Paso del Norte—in 1598 on their expedition from Mexico to northern New Mexico.
The spot has all kinds of significance. The first Europeans entered present-day Texas here. It’s where the expansion of the Spanish empire to California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas began. The El Camino Real trail to Santa Fe and Taos runs through here.
Part of the site’s appeal is how it has been ignored and willfully hidden. The four-acre site is a little sliver of forgotten territory squeezed between the 15-foot border fence and the channeled river to the west and Paisano Drive, the CanAm Highway, railroad tracks, and Interstate 10 to the east. It’s hard to get to and maybe too close to the border for the Border Patrol’s liking, I guess.
For years, I’d take a meal at La Hacienda Mexican restaurant in the old house built in the 1850s by Simeon Hart, who operated El Paso’s first mill, so I could get a close up view of the crossing. Even when the restaurant was open, the area felt deserted. On one afternoon visit, I watched three teenage males emerge from the brush by the border fence and make haste toward Paisano Drive, having made their own crossing.
Just beyond the restaurant’s parking lot is a paved semi-circular plaza consisting of four markers along with a fountain that no longer flows, a mere stone’s throw from the fence and the miserable channel that passes for the Rio Grande. The markers commemorate the place as the major east-west link for telegraph lines and railroads in the United States and James Magoffin and Simeon Hart, portrayed as civic leaders and agents of the Confederacy during the Civil War who helped thwart Union soldiers from taking El Paso.
Since the closing of La Hacienda, access to the crossing has been blocked by a chain-link fence.
Behind La Hacienda is the pocket-sized Doniphan Park with a small playscape and half court, plus the original Fort Bliss, a two-story adobe that was long forgotten since the military installation relocated east of Mount Franklin long ago.
I was always puzzled why the site was willfully forgotten, as if it was a history city and state leaders didn’t want you to know about.
The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story is the title of Richard Parker’s new rich cultural and political history of El Paso. By virtue of the book being about El Paso, it’s an adventure into the Other Texas. El Paso has never really belonged to the Lone Star State. It’s in a different time zone. The landscape is sprawling desert pocked with dry mountain ranges, far from forests, lakes, and anything green. It’s dry and dusty, the antithesis of Texas alongside and east of Interstate 35, where most of the population lives. El Paso is the American West, geographically closer to Los Angeles than to Orange, Texas.
Parker writes about the tribes and traders who lived and traveled through the region before the Europeans arrived, and he makes the case that agriculture was practiced in the Lower Valley of El Paso before just about anywhere else on the continent. Even after the arrival of Juan Onate, Parker writes, the different folks who passed through El Paso generally got along—excepting the fierce Apache people—until the arrival of Anglos, the United States, and Texas.
As part of New Spain, then Mexico, El Paso prospered as a trading center and commercial hub where many cultures mixed and mingled. The troubles started, according to this telling, at the end of the Mexican War in 1848 when the Rio Grande was declared the international boundary and Mexico ceded all claims to Texas and the Southwest.
The new immigrants arriving in El Paso came mostly from the east, not the south, and included all kinds of outlaws, hustlers, and rapscallions, leading to a half-century of bloodshed (Cormac McCarthy’s sweet spot) and El Paso’s reputation as the Gunfighter Capital of the World. This mythic Marty Robbins-and-Felina-at-Rosa’s-Cantina version of El Paso has substance: Plaques on downtown streets identify where John Wesley Hardin was killed and where four men were shot dead in five seconds.
Parker profiles a very different Pancho Villa from the one portrayed in legend, and he cites Villa’s numerous ties to the city.
Mexican Americans suffered discrimination from “Juan Crow” segregation laws in Texas, often forced to attend separate schools and routinely refused service in restaurants and public facilities, even lynched because of the color of their skin. Efforts to delouse Mexican immigrants who commuted to and worked in El Paso with poison gas in the 1930s were successfully stopped, although the method caught the eye of German Nazi scientists, who employed a similar method in their concentration camps.
Parker also writes of tolerance and progress, such as when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to make inroads in El Paso in the 1920s and was rebuffed; of Company E and the Texas Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division and other uncredited Mexican-American heroes of World War Two; the Bracero program that admitted farmworkers from Mexico; the election of Raymond Telles as the first Hispanic mayor of a major city in the United States when he was picked to lead El Paso in 1957; and the Texas Western College Miners winning the NCAA basketball championship in 1966 with its starting lineup of all-African-American players beating the all-White University of Kentucky Wildcats.
He writes of the military, immigration, the drug war—elements that define life in the borderlands—and of the Guggenheim-owned ASARCO copper smelter smokestack, the tallest in the world when it was built, and its history as a spewing font of noxious lead, arsenic, and cadmium.
The negative Anglo/U.S./Texas influence culminates in the murder of 23 shoppers at an El Paso Wal-Mart by a 21-year-old racist from the Dallas area in 2019. Parker makes clear the killings were the end product of the hate-spewing, Mexico-bashing U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Parker’s manuscript could have used a more thorough edit. He sometimes tries to connect the dots between dates and events to make a point but doesn’t always hit the mark, particularly when breaking down the dynamics between Indigenous tribes in the region and delving into details of the Mexican Revolution.
A photograph caption reads: “A view of contemporary El Paso’s East Side, with the Franklin Mountains, rising to seven thousand feet above sea level, in the background.” But the actual image, taken from the top of the Doubletree Hotel downtown, is of El Paso’s Westside, along with Juárez, with the Juárez mountains in the background.
But The Crossing brims with El Paso pride, citing elements that give El Paso its character, teasing out the small stuff that makes it unique and unlike the rest of Texas, to the point that Parker suggests El Paso secede from Texas and join New Mexico because they’re more aligned culturally, socially, and politically, as well as geographically.
Parker tells his own story, too, growing up on El Paso’s Westside, i.e. the more prosperous side. His Arkansas-born Anglo father managed a maquiladora across the river in Juárez. His Hispanic mother came from Monterrey. Parker has been a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, an opinion writer for The Atlantic and the New York Times, and an instructor at the University of Texas and Texas State University. His previous book Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America suggested Texas portends where the United States is headed.
Halfway through the book, I started wondering how Parker was going to frame his storytelling for Texas media at book events, whether he’d pull punches or be as blunt as he is in print. Then, days after publication, Parker was found dead in his residence.
Two years ago, a non-profit called Abara House announced plans to restore Hart’s Mill/La Hacienda restaurant and repurpose the site as a multi-use borderlands center. A master plan has been designed, but to realize the project funds have to be raised.
For now, the crossing is closed to people like you and me. The best I can recommend is to Google 1720 Paisano, and when you get there, drive real slow and peer through the chain-links and the brush, and you might catch a glimpse of the four historic markers and forlorn fountain in the grassy clearing.
With Parker’s passing, The Crossing becomes a coda for his relationship to the borderlands, a place he portrays as a model of different cultures working together, tolerance, and understanding—a few things, he contends, the rest of Texas could learn from.
https://texashighways.com/culture/a-new-book-looks-at-100-years-of-austin-music/
Austin Music is A Scene Not a Sound is one of the clunkiest book titles I’ve come across in quite a while. But after reading Michael Corcoran’s 150-year history of Austin music, the title makes perfect sense.
Music has always been a participatory exchange between performer and audience when you think about it, even if the communication goes no further than the sound of hands clapping. In Austin, where the oldest business in the city (and the whole state) is Scholz Garden, a beer hall founded by a singing club, the scene makes the music. Dancing remains a deep tradition, and more recent physical expressions such as slam dancing, mixing it up in the mosh pit, and stage diving have carved their own niches.
Corcoran, a writer for this magazine, has a long history as a smart-ass music columnist for the Austin Chronicle (and as their sports columnist who called himself Red Corcoran), the country music critic for the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American-Statesman gossip columnist, stringer for the National Enquirer. One of his finest missives about Austin was a 2012 blog headlined “Welcome to Mediocre, Texas,” teasing the music scene’s inflated sense of itself, observing that “in nearly 50 years as a hotbed, Austin has not produced a single Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee. Timbuk 3 ain’t gonna make it, folks. Rock stars aren’t launched here, they go to Austin to retire, work the steps, and wait for their Margaret Moser profile.”
Corcoran is also a serious music historian who shined a light on the blind gospel singer and pianist Arizona Dranes, settled some doubts about where deep blues master Blind Willie Johnson died, and documented Washington Phillips and his unusual stringed instrument, the manzarene. He’s the star of the film documentary about the Jones Family Singers gospel group, whom he “discovered.” He also wrote two very good history books about Texas music, All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music and [Ghost Notes] Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music.
Both of Corcoran’s roles come through in his latest book, which was released by TCU Press at the end of January. The historian emerges early, citing the German community for institutionalizing music in Austin, not at Scholz, but at Turner Hall, built in 1872, which he called Austin’s first dedicated music venue. He introduces ensembles such as Steve Gardner and His Hokum Kings, the all-female Texettes, and George Corley and His Royal Aces, a nine-piece “colored orchestra.”
Austin music, the way Corcoran writes it, isn’t a sound so much as an attitude and permission to cut loose with music. Local music hubs are detailed: Sixth Street long before Dirty Sixth, Red River when it was part of what was known as The Dogleg, the Drag by UT Austin, and East Eleventh and East Twelfth where most of the Black clubs were.
So are eras: post-war country, early rock and roll, folk revivals, the birth of the Cosmic Cowboy, and hardcore punk. The Armadillo World Headquarters, Split Rail, Broken Spoke, and Soap Creek Saloon and Continental Club get their due as significant venues, as do lesser-known joints like Henry’s, the Back Room, Charlie’s Playhouse, the Skyline, Mother Earth, and the Victory Grill.
Radio is recognized mainly through the influence of KOKE FM Super Roper Radio disc jockey and newspaper columnist Joe Gracey, a major player in 1970s Austin, along with the Black disc jockeys at KVET and Tony Von at KTAE in Taylor. Inner Sanctum and Waterloo Records get props as critical community hubs that built scenes.
The fun is in the details. I personally knew old-timers cited, including Robert Shaw, the Grey Ghost, Gene Snowden, and Ray Campi. But I didn’t know Charlie Giddens, and that he owned both Charlie’s Playhouse in East Austin, home of HL Hubbard and the Jets, and Ernie’s Chicken Shack, an afterhours joint at the end of Webberville Road with gambling in the back (the writer Nick Tosches showed up at my door at 5 a.m. one morning saying the 50 bucks he lost shooting craps at Ernie’s was the best money he’d ever spent).
Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughan are celebrated, but what makes the scene are the less-well-known characters such as Smokey Rhodes the dancer, Western band Dolores and the Bluebonnet Boys, gospel entrepreneur Junior Franklin, singer-songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Daniel Johnston, and glam blues rockers Krackerjack.
Once the storytelling gets to the early 1980s, Corcoran the historian yields to Corky, the redheaded punk with the pointed pen. That’s when Corcoran, who grew up in Honolulu, hit town with his friend the tattoo artist Rollo Banks and set up shop on The Drag just down the block from Raul’s.
His personal recall of nights at the Beach, the Black Cat, and Liberty Lunch is laced with snark, mean-girl jabs, and speed, which kind of disrupts the historical flow, but is so enthusiastic and heartfelt—sentimental, even—that I can’t think of a better way to explain Austin music’s appeal. On a good night, in the right club, with the right band hitting the note, even the crankiest hardass can turn into a slobbering fanboy.
Corcoran and I were on a weekly Zoom call that started before the pandemic. We talked about this book a lot. He supported himself during the writing process by posting segments on Substack, promising subscribers AMIASNAS when it was published.
Last July, after edits, arguments, and back-and-forths about the title and the cover, and other conundrums that go with making a book, he finally declared himself done.
His history of Austin ends in the late 1980s with the birth of South By Southwest. Some of the chronology is picked up in a companion memoir Corcoran also finished, titled Overserved. He was pushing himself, he said, because he wanted to leave a legacy. Now he was ready for a break.
There would be more books, he hoped. He’d spent time last spring at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington at the invitation of John Troutman, curator of music and musical instruments at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He came back saying there were three books he needed to write, starting with a biography of the Texas blues pioneer Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Two days after I left for vacation in New Mexico last July, I got the call. Michael had died. It’s been a gut check ever since. No one I know was into Austin music like he was, and no one was as acerbic, witty, funny and insightful in writing about it. I enjoyed reading him no matter if I liked the music he was writing about or not (eg. Oasis). I eagerly anticipated the Zoom calls to hear what kind of dirt Corcoran had dug up, or hear his opinion of the latest new shiny thing. The sadness of his passing is tempered by the arrival of this book with the long title.
As for that legacy he was after, I know Austin music pretty well—well enough to have reminded Corcoran many times that he got to Austin 10 years too late, which is what older Austin folks like me like to tell younger Austin folks like him. Knowing what I know, I’d say that this book is all the legacy he could have wished for.
https://landreport.com/water-wars-dell-city-el-paso
My story in The Land Report about water, springs, aquifers, Dell City, El Paso, Fort Stockton and Far West Texas.
RULE OF CAPTURE. The protracted legal battle over monetizing water rights in the Dell Valley hinged on age-old British common law.
It’s a familiar story: Big city needs water and is willing to pay for it. Property owners with extensive landholdings and abundant groundwater want to sell their water. Billionaires swoop in and buy surrounding acreage. Then, the local groundwater district redraws key boundaries restricting landowners’ ability to sell their water. Lawyers descend. Court battles ensue.
That’s the gist of the documentary film Water Wars, which has been screening at film festivals after debuting at the 2024 Dallas International Film Festival, where it won a grand jury prize. Directed by Mario Mattei, Water Wars is an engaging tale about an extremely complex issue.
Rule of Capture is a property right in Texas. If you own the land, you also own the water under your land. The landowner is able to capture all the water under their property. It’s theirs to do with as they please. That’s the theory, at least. But in Texas, a state that champions property rights, those rights are not as absolute as some landowners might think, and they come with all kinds of restrictions and limitations.
PIONEERING RANCHERS. Phil Guitar’s family began ranching in the Dell Valley long before its prodigious water resources were identified.
Water Wars tells the story of Phil Guitar, a rancher whose properties are spread out across West Texas, including more than 30,000 acres in the Dell Valley. The valley surrounds Dell City, an isolated town of 245 that’s less than a square mile in size and is distinguished by the prettiest view of the Guadalupe Mountains, the highest range in Texas, as they rise majestically from the snow-white salt flats at their base. The view is especially scenic in the fall, with fields of red chiles ripening in the foreground.
That mountain range is now part of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Similarly, Dell City and Dell Valley have changed over the years. Phil Guitar’s granddaddy started ranching in this high plain in the Chihuahuan Desert after buying up part of the historic Figure 2 Ranch during the Great Depression. He was an entrepreneur who recognized value in owning land. The expanse included a watering stop for the old Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach service, which implied that a steady supply of water was available. Someday, there might be value in that, he thought.
The Lynch family, ably represented in the film by Laura Lynch, was a part of the next wave of immigrants to the Dell Valley: The farmers who moved in after geologists searching for oil found water instead in 1948. The Bone Spring-Victorio Peak Aquifer, 50 to 100 feet below the dry, rocky surface, contained a huge pool of water, most of it runoff from the Sacramento Mountains 100 miles north in southern New Mexico. So much water existed below the surface that when tapped, a well could produce more than 3,000 gallons a minute. With that much water, farmers could irrigate fields and grow crops, and the aquifer would recharge, filling up all over again.
In 1948, an ocean of water was discovered beneath the Chihuahuan Desert.
Promoters declared Dell City “The Valley of the Hidden Waters,” and an influx of farmers responded. During the 1950s, enough cotton was farmed to keep six local cotton gins busy, including those owned by the Guitar family, who also had cottonseed oil mills and compresses. Alfalfa, chiles, melons, and onions were also cultivated.
Even with this sea of water, farming in the desert was a hit-or-miss proposition. In 1964, the end of the Bracero Program, which had brought millions of Mexican guest workers into the US labor pool, put many farmers out of business. In 1966, a torrential flood inundated Dell Valley, washing away crops and causing an estimated $4.3 million in damages. By the 1990s, Dell City had dwindled to just two cafes, a convenience store, a hardware store, and a bar. Ninety percent of the valley’s 40,000 acres of cropland was water-intensive alfalfa.
Meanwhile, approximately 90 miles west of the Dell Valley, the population of the El Paso-Juarez metropolitan area, which relies on the Rio Grande and the Hueco-Mesilla Bolsons Aquifer for drinking water, was approaching 2 million. A city utility, El Paso Water, went on the prowl for more dependable water and saw Dell Valley as a potential source.
The mission of the El Paso Water forced the agency to look far and wide for dependable water sources.
For all their concerns that their big-city neighbor was out to steal their water, large Dell Valley landowners eventually reached a consensus: Pumping and shipping water to El Paso was potentially a lot more profitable than pumping water to their alfalfa and pepper fields.
On the other end of the proposition, Woody Hunt, El Paso’s most prominent developer, whose interests included pipeline construction, saw the writing on the wall and purchased 5,000 acres of farmland in the Dell Valley. Philip Anschutz, who ranks No. 88 on the 2024 Land Report 100, also started buying farmland in the Dell Valley. As a major investor in Union Pacific Railroad, Anschutz controlled a right-of-way crucial to the construction of a pipeline.
With the specter of a big water play, the board of Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District No. 1 voted that in order to determine how much water a landowner could export without impacting the aquifer, a landowner must have irrigated his acreage during a 10-year historical-use period from 1992 through 2002. Land that was not irrigated did not qualify. That restricted the Lynch family, who had put significant acreage into a government conservation program. It set up a classic battle pitting farmers against ranchers. Farmers pumped as much water as necessary to water their crops. Ranchers were far more conservative in their water use, utilizing stock tanks to provide water for their livestock, eschewing irrigation pumps. The district had effectively limited the Guitars’ and the Lynches’ opportunities to sell groundwater.
“Five percent of the property gets 95 percent of the water rights,” is how Jim Lynch put it.
The phrase water wars has a long history in the annals of the American West concurrent with its settlement by European immigrants two centuries ago. No matter where you go out West, water remains a contentious subject. There’s never enough.
As I watched the documentary film, I felt like the past 30 years of my life as a journalist were passing in front of me. I knew Dell City and the story of the Valley of the Hidden Waters and its future as a source of fresh water for the people of El Paso, 75 miles west. I recognized many of the characters in the film. And I knew about Rule of Capture.
My interest dated back to the mid-1980s, after I had become an avid swimmer at Barton Springs, a natural pool in Austin fed by artesian springs. I was visiting my friend Kirby Warnock at the Warnock homestead five miles east of Fort Stockton, a West Texas town that is a popular gas and rest stop along Interstate 10. On our way into Fort Stockton on a back road, I noticed sluice gates in the sandy scrub, concrete embankments, what appeared to be canals, and faint remnants of crop rows. What was up?
“There were 200 small truck farms out this way,” Kirby explained to me. “They were fed by Comanche Springs in town,” he said, referring to a historic gathering spot for Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and pioneering settlers that comprised the largest complex of artesian spring water in West Texas.
In 1955, landowners west of town, including Clayton Williams Sr., one of West Texas’s most distinguished civic leaders, drilled wells and installed diesel pumps to feed their crops and newly planted pecan orchards. After the irrigation got up to full speed, the springs stopped flowing for the first time in recorded history. The motorized pumps flooding alfalfa fields and pecan orchards were intercepting groundwater flowing from the Glass Mountains south of Fort Stockton toward Comanche Springs.
The truck farms east of town, and Fort Stockton’s biggest tourist attraction, the Comanche Springs swimming pool, soon dried up. Smaller landowners sued the irrigating farmers, but the Texas Supreme Court upheld Williams, et al’s rights to pump all the water they cared to pump, citing Rule of Capture. In Texas under Rule of Capture, the landowner owns the water under the surface. If the landowner can capture the water, they may do what they wish with it. Groundwater, the court ruled, was too “secret, occult, and concealed” to regulate.
Rule of Capture was established in England and adopted by Texas when it became a state back in the mid-19th century, when much of the Lone Star State meant the eastern, wetter half of present-day Texas. In the 21st century, Texas remains the only western state where Rule of Capture is a property right.
It seemed other greedy landowners could do what the pumpers did to Comanche Springs because groundwater transcended property lines.
In 1995, I attended a community meeting at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Fort Davis, a historic Texas mountain town, to gauge the potential impact. The small gathering included prominent area ranchers who had come to learn more about El Paso Water’s recent purchase of the 25,000-acre Antelope Valley Ranch between Marfa and Valentine. If El Paso was to continue growing, the city needed that groundwater.
There was a palpable fear among the ranchers at the Fort Davis meeting that El Paso Water threatened to drain them. Austin developer and attorney Richard Suttle explained what recourse they had, which wasn’t a whole lot.
“Up until tonight, I believed that the right to capture groundwater was an inalienable right,” a neighboring rancher, Chile Ridley, told me for a story I wrote for Texas Monthly. “But I have never been faced with this prospect. When something your neighbor does affects you, I say maybe we should look at the way things are currently designed. As property owners, we’re caretakers and stewards of the land. El Paso wouldn’t conserve it. I’m not at all clear what is the right thing. I’m just concerned about waking up some morning and not having water to drink.”
Another rancher close to Antelope Valley, Lynn Crittendon, added, “As a neighbor, I hope they act responsibly.”
In I997, I drove to Pecos to visit Judge Lucius Bunton. Four years earlier, Bunton made an exception to Rule of Capture in a decision that protected endangered species. Bunton mandated limits to how much water could be taken from the Edwards Aquifer, a vast groundwater complex that has long sustained San Antonio and surrounding communities.
Bunton’s decision led to the creation of the Edwards Aquifer Authority by the Texas Legislature and, indirectly, to Texas’s first comprehensive water plan.
“I’m not going to take credit for that,” Judge Bunton told me for a profile I wrote for Texas Monthly, “But I encouraged some years ago, long before this water bill and the aquifer authority, that the legislature do something. The state of Texas ought to do something. This is a step in the right direction.”
Bunton grew up on a hardscrabble Presidio County ranch located between Marfa and Presidio not far from the old Shafter silver mine. The judge allowed how Rule of Capture worked pretty well in the eastern half of the state. But in the part of Texas where he grew up, Rule of Capture was a direct threat: The biggest pump rules.
I had already visited Dell City, identified by a weathered billboard as The Valley of the Hidden Waters, where the shadow of El Paso loomed large.
The Hudspeth County Herald had been covering the rural versus urban water issues extensively. One of Laura Lynch’s uncles, Jim Lynch, had been farming in the Dell Valley since 1950. He was a major landowner, and he was also in charge of the weekly Herald.
“My thinking is, if we have to give up our water, all of us should share in the money,” he told me. “If a few farmers sell out, they’ll make money, the water will diminish, and everyone else will have to go out of business without compensation.”
Lynch understood the dynamic well. “We all know El Paso is bigger than any of us, and if they choose to take this water, we don’t have the money collectively to fight them. Phil Anschutz is one of the wealthiest men in America. If he’s together with Hunt, there’s no stopping them,” Lynch said. The Lynch family eventually entered into a partnership with Anschutz.
In 1997, the Texas Legislature, under the direction of Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, enacted Senate Bill 1, a 50-year “ground up” plan to provide for water in anticipation of Texas’s projected growth. The State Water Plan avoided directly addressing Rule of Capture — legislators and state leadership regarded the property right as sacrosanct and too hot to handle — and instead established 16 regional planning areas, each region charged with balancing rural and urban needs while championing creation of groundwater districts that could restrict water use in order to preserve the resource, subject to voter approval. The rub was that since the state did not provide budgets for the districts that were being created, most districts would be understaffed and underfinanced. A single lawsuit could gobble up a district’s annual budget.
Today in Texas, regardless of Rule of Capture, if the land you own is within a groundwater district, your groundwater use may be restricted (although that has rarely been the case). If the land you own is outside a groundwater district, you can use as much water as you can pump. And so can your neighbor, who may or may not have a bigger pump or intentions similar to yours.
Despite those efforts by the state, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the right of Ozarka, the bottled-water company, to mine a spring in East Texas for commercial purposes, even though the mining caused neighbors’ wells to go dry.
Kinney County, about 125 miles west of San Antonio, was a vivid example of a local groundwater district trying to do the right thing minus finances. The district was challenged by a handful of landowners who wanted to sell and ship their groundwater to San Antonio, an idea that generated pushbacks from farmers and ranchers who wanted to continue to use their groundwater locally and feared a few greedy landowners would dry their wells.
Water marketers, legislators, attorneys, and lobbyists joined the fray, arguing over how much (if any) water could be pumped and sold outside the county without impacting springs, creeks, and streams inside the county. The argument led to accusations of mismanagement, ballooning legal fees, and groundwater district meetings being videotaped by landowners who wanted to sell water.
“Eight-tenths of one percent of county property is irrigated,” Kinney County judge Tully Shahan said, “and the irrigators are trying to tell us what to do with 100 percent of the water.” Darlene Shahan, Tully’s wife, was the general manager of the groundwater district.
T. Boone Pickens saw the potential in water as a commodity made possible by Rule of Capture. He organized landowners in the vicinity of his 65,000-acre Mesa Vista Ranch near Pampa in the Texas Panhandle to form a compact to sell water to thirsty cities. If landowners organized, they could avoid the contentious infighting in Kinney County.
I visited Pickens’ Mesa Vista Ranch, studied his plans, and wrote an article for Texas Monthly titled “Boone Pickens Wants to Sell You His Water.” Even though the amount of water that had already been pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer made irrigated farming no longer feasible in the Texas Panhandle, Pickens and his allies perceived value in pumping and shipping the precious commodity.
Ten years later, I ran into Pickens at an event in Dallas and reintroduced myself. His eyes narrowed in recognition.
“You cost me a lot of money,” he said acidly. “What happened?” I asked.
He told me how the compact he’d organized ended up having to sell its groundwater not to Dallas or to Fort Worth but to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority that serves Amarillo, Lubbock, and other communities in the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains.
“At least you sold it to your neighbors,” I said, congratulating Pickens on doing the right thing.
In 2001, I spent a day in El Paso driving around the city with a water cop, looking for telltale signs of water spilling over the curbs of residences and businesses around town. I also took a meeting with Ed Archuleta, the longtime general manager of El Paso Water. Archuleta did his best to make the case that when it came to water, El Paso was the most conservation-focused city in the entire state.
Archuleta cited El Paso Water’s 50-year plan designed to meet the projected needs of 1.3 million people. Eight million gallons of treated wastewater were being recycled into El Paso’s Hueco-Mesilla Bolsons Aquifer each and every day. Rationing ordinances and rate increases had reduced overall demand by 20 percent. In addition, El Paso Water had a desalination plant that treated and cleaned 29 million gallons of brackish and otherwise undrinkable groundwater every day.
El Paso Water intended to secure its water responsibly. This wasn’t going to be another Chinatown where Noah Cross and other power players engineered the theft of water rights from Owens Valley farmers to build a new and better Los Angeles. If El Paso Water purchased faraway land for future use of the water beneath it, then it was imperative to continue farming on that ground as long as it was economically feasible.
Dell Valley landowners did their homework and got on the same page. The science was clear. Fifty-thousand acre-feet of water could be pumped annually, and the aquifer could still fully recharge.
Unlike most modern water stories, this one had a happy ending for the landowners — with a couple of caveats.
Phil Guitar, whose right to use the water beneath his property had been restricted by the board of Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District No. 1, appealed his case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court — and won. Guitar’s argument boiled down to the definition of the word “use.”
Then Guitar met with the ground-water district and helped rewrite its rules. He was then able to drill test wells on his land to prove up the groundwater so a deal with El Paso Water could be cut to the satisfaction of both parties.
The Lynches, who were also fighting the groundwater district, sold their 26,470-acre CL Ranch for $50 million in 2016. Phil Anschutz and Woody Hunt got a healthy return on investment when Anschutz’s 16,000-acre CLM Ranch also sold in 2016 for $66 million.
El Paso Water has spent more than $222 million buying 20 properties and now owns 70,000 acres of the Dell Valley, along with necessary permits to pump the water. The requisite pipeline due west to El Paso has yet to be constructed. Meanwhile, the utility has sustained the farming tradition in the Dell Valley, leasing 50,000 acres to farmers growing alfalfa and chiles. A young farmer can now break into the business in Dell Valley without owning any land.
El Paso Water’s deal with Dell Valley landowners led to the sale of the 40,000-acre Antelope Valley Ranch between Valentine and Marfa for $6 million in 2024, a tidy profit from the initial $1.5 million investment in 1995, according to Denise Parra of El Paso Water. The 150-mile pipeline from Antelope Valley to El Paso was projected to cost at least $470 million, far too expensive for the utility.
Keep an eye out for Water Wars in 2025. Think of it as a direct descendant of Jack Schaefer’s classic Shane, pitting farmers against ranchers in the New West. After screening Water Wars, I called Philip Guitar, one of the film’s producers and the son of the plaintiff in the aforementioned Texas Supreme Court case. One of my principal questions revolved around the standard story structure of a Western: Who wore the white hats and who wore the black hats?
MAKING A SPLASH. In April 2024, Water Wars won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Texas Feature at the Dallas International Film Festival.
“This is lined up for the viewer to determine who the bad guy is,” Philip said. “I’m not saying who the antagonist is. I’m not saying who the protagonist is. We are putting it out there for you to determine what you think. You figure out who you think it is. Maybe you think the antagonist is Phil Guitar. Maybe you think the antagonist is Phil Anschutz or Woody Hunt. Maybe you think the antagonist is El Paso Water.”
The board of the Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District definitely did not emerge unscathed. In the film, Laura Lynch noted that one board member shot a man twice and did time for another offense.
“What was the takeaway for landowners?” I asked Philip. “What did he want the film’s audience to think about?”
“Be aware of potential consequences that lie ahead,” Philip said. “It doesn’t matter if you have one acre or 10,000 acres. If you’re a landowner in Texas, you should look and ask, ‘Am I in a groundwater district?’ And if you are, ‘What are the rules of that district?’ It’s not a bad idea to get involved and see what your groundwater district is up to, what they’re doing, and what the laws are.
“You may think because it’s Rule of Capture, you’ve got the right to do anything you want with your water. And in most situations, you should. Our ruling helped usher in the idea that all landowners should be treated fairly and equitably. But these districts can be autonomous. They make their own rules. They need to be double-checked to make sure all landowners are being treated equitably.”
“And, if your land isn’t within the boundaries of a groundwater district, it helps to know about your neighbor’s use of groundwater and if their intent squares with yours,” I added.
“You could be drained dry,” Philip said.
There’s a bitter postscript to Water Wars. In 2023, after production on the documentary had wrapped, Laura Lynch, 65, was killed in a head-on collision on Highway 62 between Dell City and El Paso three days before Christmas. The photogenic grandmother was the voice of post-ag Dell City, buying derelict buildings and converting them into Airbnbs that catered to tourists visiting Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
It takes a special person to love a little town like Dell City. That was Laura.
TRAGIC LOSS. A founding member of the Dixie Chicks, Dell City native Laura Lynch was killed in a head-on collision after production wrapped.
The history of the Cadillac Ranch for TexasHighways.com
https://texashighways.com/travel-news/fifty-years-of-cadillac-ranch/
The vintage Cadillacs at their original location in the 1970s
Fifty years ago on the summer solstice, three experimental architects and artists completed Amarillo’s iconic Cadillac Ranch. Facilitated by a larger-than-life eccentric millionaire, the permanent installation of 10 Cadillac sedans buried nose first at a 60-degree angle into the dirt of a flat field within eyeshot of Interstate 40 has become the Panhandle city’s No. 1 tourist destination and biggest roadside attraction. It’s a must-see for road trippers touring Route 66, America’s Mother Road, seen by more than 1.4 million visitors a year.
Cadillac Ranch at 50, an exhibit documenting the strange and quirky history of the site at the Amarillo Museum of Art, opens June 1 and runs through Aug. 15, with a special celebration on June 21. One hundred enlarged photographs by Wyatt McSpadden, who has documented Cadillac Ranch since its inception, share space with videos, drawings, and ephemera from Chip Lord from the Ant Farm art and architecture collective that dreamed up the project.
Lord and fellow outsider architect Doug Michels formed Ant Farm in San Francisco in 1968 for underground design projects. “We were doing concepts, sketches, and photo collages of imaginary landscapes and environments,” Lord says. “It was a way to realize some ideas that would expand on conventional architecture.”
When Hudson Marquez joined the group, the three bonded over their shared obsession with automobiles. “At Ant Farm, we were car crazy,” Marquez recalls. “It was always drawing cars, collaging cars, making art with cars. I had an idea to make seed packs where you could plant seeds that would grow cars. You could have a field of ’49 Fords or ’59 Cadillacs that would grow out of the ground.” But to realize any concept, they needed a physical site. And money.
Installing the vintage Cadillacs was no easy feat
The Ant Farm sent out letters with their idea to a number of eccentric millionaires around the country. Prominent Amarilloan Stanley Marsh 3 answered back with an oversized letter written in 36-point type. “I’d love to do something with you, but I only do things here in Amarillo,” Marquez recalls him saying.
Lord and Michels stopped in Amarillo after finishing the House of the Century, a tubular ferro cement lake house near Angleton built with Houston architect Richard Jost. By the end of their visit two days later, Marsh asked Lord and Michels to draft a proposal. “We went back to California and drew up this idea of making a monument to the rise and fall of the Cadillac tailfin,” Lord says. The drawing had a text box in the corner—the budget. They would need $250 to hire a backhoe, and $300 for each of the 10 cars. Marsh gave the Ant Farm the green light.
The Ant Farmers descended on Amarillo. They placed ads in the Amarillo Globe-News seeking used Cadillacs and checked out Marsh’s land holdings. They picked a site near Interstate 40 and the old Route 66. “They were mysterious, these three hippies,” says Wyatt McSpadden, the young photographer who worked for Marsh at the time. He remembers Lord, Michels, and Marquez lived on the property while putting the site together. “They were gone a lot because they were out shopping for cars, trying to make deals, get cars as cheap as they could.”
Finding the first car, the 1949 Cadillac, proved to be a struggle. They found one on the east side of Amarillo, though it cost them a whopping $700—far over budget. “As soon as Doug had the title, somebody pulled the canvas off the bed of the truck,” McSpadden remembers, “and it was full of sledgehammers and axes. Doug took an axe out and started beating on the front of the car. They didn’t care what the front of the car looked like. That was my first involvement with the Ant Farm and the Cadillacs.”
The Cadillacs were moved from their original spot to its current location in 1997
The first hole was dug, and they got the car into the ground. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Marquez says. “We hadn’t dug holes to put cars in before, and we didn’t know anyone who did, so we were just flying by the seat of our pants. We just dug some holes and drove the cars in at 60 degrees, same angle. We didn’t talk about that. It just happened to be. It looked good.” The whole endeavor took less than a week.
The day after the Cadillac Ranch was finished, Marquez rose before dawn and drove out to the site to watch the sunrise. “I was blown away,” he says. Marquez remembered a talk the radical French artist and sculptor Marcel Duchamp gave in Houston. His idea was that when someone sets out to create, they start from what they think is zero and in their mind is 100% of what they want to create. “It’s in your mind, but you never get to 100. That doesn’t happen,” Marquez says. “But that morning was as close to 100% as I ever got.”
On June 21, 1974, a huge party was held in celebration of the ranch, a big tent, open bar, and Amarillo notables included. Shortly after, the Ant Farmers returned to San Francisco to work on other ideas. “When it was first built, it wasn’t hyped yet,” says David Turner, who was the assistant director at the Amarillo Art Center at the time. “People didn’t know what it was. It was just this oddball group of cars some crazy rancher planted in his field.”
There was no signage identifying the site, making it hard to convey the installation was an artist-made sculptural piece. Seeing the installation up close required some want-to. “You used to have to stop on the road, take your life in your own hands, go through a barbed wire fence, and hope for the best,” says Tom Livesay, director of the Amarillo Art Center in 1974.
Though grafitti wasn’t part of the original plan, it’s become tradition for visitors to leave their mark
A year later, journalist Charles Kuralt, host of the folksy On the Road program on the CBS television network, passed by in his bus, pulled over, and put Cadillac Ranch on the map. He was charmed. “At first, we thought someone might be trying to raise little baby Cadillacs,” Kuralt says. “Then we thought maybe the farmer just parked them this way each year after he bought a new model.”
Marsh talked up the Ant Farm and compared the Cadillac Ranch to Stonehenge, declaring, “It’s the most important roadside attraction of our generation.” Kuralt ended the segment waxing poetic over “a cowboy herding steers out there where the tall tailfins grow and the traffic heads west on Route 66 and the Texas sun goes down on the chromium bumpers of the American dream.”
Next came the bullet holes, an instinctive reaction around the Panhandle. If there’s something out there and you don’t know what it is, shoot it! “People would take their keys and scratch their initials into the paint,” Lord says. “Eventually, we went out there and signed it, to copyright.”
Then came the spray paint. First as simple graffiti tags—names, expressions of love, expressions of hate. Then wholesale paint jobs. “I was kind of outraged when people started spray-painting it,” Livesay says. “I asked Stanley what he thought of that, and he said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ It showed ownership. People had to care enough about it, or hated it enough, to come see it. And they did.”
In 1997, Cadillac Ranch moved 2 miles west to its current location. The city of Amarillo was growing, and parking lot lights were visible at the installation. “That property was getting more valuable,” McSpadden says. “It was harder digging them up and replanting them than it was putting them in the ground the first time. From the road, it didn’t change at all. It was still the same flatland background.”
The relocation coincided with the dawn of the internet. Cadillac Ranch had become a featured attraction on RoadsideAmerica.com. Social media further broadened its reach. Cadillac Ranch remains a metaphor for the Golden Age of the American automobile, but over 50 years, it’s taken on many meanings and interpretations. A search for “Cadillac Ranch” on Instagram retrieves images of the Cadillac Ranch at sunrise, sunset, during dust storms and blizzards, and as a backdrop for selfies.
The scent of Krylon is fairly constant. On Cinco De Mayo, red, green, and white paint have dominated. The Cadillacs have been painted pink for child cancer awareness. After Michels died in 2004, the Cadillacs were painted black, his favorite color.
McSpadden spent two days at the site in October 2022, making portraits featured in the Cadillac Ranch at 50 exhibit. “I got people from England, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland,” he says. “People paint, they leave, and 20 minutes later somebody comes up and paints over what they painted. They don’t just paint the cars, they paint the dirt, they paint the access road, the barriers are painted, the trash cans are painted.”
Four years ago, Marsh’s son, Stan Marsh 4, added a merch truck that sells spray paint, beverages, and tchotchkes on the site. “The Cadillacs are one of the last things in the nation that are truly wild,” he says. “There are no bathrooms. There is no running water. There’s no shade. There’s a different energy out there. It’s an adventure every time.”
Marquez says he’s only had two good ideas in his life. “One was the Cadillac Ranch. The other was copyrighting Cadillac Ranch,” he says. “Ant Farm owns the copyright to Cadillac Ranch. For many years we’ve made money, it’s like an annuity. Commercials, clothing lines, billboards, print ads, everything.”
Marsh’s heirs still own the Cadillac Ranch. Following a series of debilitating strokes, ownership of the land was transferred from Marsh to a family trust. He died in 2014, shortly after facing allegations of sexual abuse by multiple minors. Though perception of Marsh’s reputation may have changed following the allegations, Cadillac Ranch’s legacy continues to stand the test of time.
Today, people come from all over the world to see Cadillac Ranch
Stanley Marsh 4 regards the Cadillac Ranch as a participatory work of art that everybody is welcome to collaborate on. “Every mark is permanent, but it’s also temporary,” he says. “You can say anything you’d like to say with absolute freedom—but it’s going to be covered up in 30 seconds.”
The next 50 years are less certain. “We’re looking at options to preserve and protect the Cadillacs for future generations,” Stanley Marsh 4 says.
Lord is not so sure. “I favor not doing a restoration. With farmers, when a truck stops running, they put it out in a field and it rusts away. Just let it rust down to nothing, which eventually it will,” Lord says. “That’s the most logical end of Cadillac Ranch.”
Whatever Cadillac Ranch’s future holds, Livesay appreciates what it means to the Panhandle city. “It’s wonderful it’s lasted so long and generated so much excitement for the town,” he says. “It’s grown with the times. You can’t argue with the facts.”
Terry Allen at Arlyn Studios in Austin in May 2019. Photo by Barbara FG
Maybe you’ve seen Terry Allen’s work.
His sculpture Caw Caw Blues, which contains the ashes of his friend Guy Clark, stands sentinel at the entrance of The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos. Countree Music, a 25-foot bronze cast of an oak tree and a map on the terrazzo floor depicting Houston as the center of the world, accompanied by music, is planted in Terminal A near Gate 17 of Bush International Airport in Houston. Passengers entering security gate D30 in Terminal D at DFW International pass under a 30-foot bronze wishbone titled Wish. A life-size statue of CB Stubblefield of Stubb’s BBQ fame stands on the site of his first restaurant on East Broadway in Lubbock. Nestled in the palmetto palm thicket outside The Contemporary Austin-Laguna Gloria on the banks of Lake Austin is Road Angel, a bronze cast of a 1953 Chevy coupe, the car Allen drove as a teenager, accompanied by more than a hundred audio soundbites (including one of mine), that was permanently installed in 2016.
More likely, you’ve heard Allen’s work.
His song “Amarillo Highway,” about a “Panhandlin’ man-handlin’ post-holin’ Dust bowlin’ Daddy” is a much-covered Texas country classic. The churning “New Delhi Freight Train” was first recorded by the rock band Little Feat. At 80, he’s still out there performing with his Panhandle Mystery Band which includes family and friends, among them son Bukka Allen, pedal steel maestro Lloyd Maines, guitarist Charlie Sexton, and fiddler Richard Bowden— often in conjunction with an art opening.
You may have even seen Allen without realizing it. He and his wife Jo Harvey Allen play Oklahoma couple Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim in the Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.
He’s been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and is in the West Texas Walk of Fame by the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock. Texas Tech is finalizing plans for the Terry and Jo Harvey Allen Center for Creative Studies.
Call him what you want: the patriarch of Lubbock creatives, the greatest living visual artist from Texas, the other Texas music godfather besides Willie, the storyteller of the American West. It’s all pretty much true.
In 2016, Allen created Road Angel which can be seen at The Contemporary Austin-Laguna Gloria. Photo by Brian Fitzsimmons/courtesy of The Contemporary Austin
Now comes Truckload of Art, a 500-page biography by Brendan Greaves, to explain it all.
The first Terry Allen art I ever saw made me laugh out loud. The Paradise was a stark diorama of three spaces, the primary space—a parking lot—bathed in red light with the word “Paradise” in pale blue neon script on the back wall as the centerpiece. Directly below is a planter with three measly cacti, two plastic palms, a car tire, and a pair of plastic flamingos. Flanking the planter were doors marked Lounge and Motel in red neon. Beyond the vinyl-covered doors was a motel room with shag carpeting and a honky-tonk bar space with a jukebox. Paradise was part of The Great American Rodeo Show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1976. Eleven artists were given a year to develop a rodeo-inspired piece. Allen paid homage to the kind of spaces where a real rodeo cowboy would feel at home.
The first Terry Allen music I really paid attention to was the 1979 album Lubbock (on everything), marking the artist-musician’s return to his hometown to collaborate with a new iteration of Lubbock music makers, among them singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who was two classes behind Allen at Monterey High. “I always knew I was destined to write songs,” Gilmore told me recently. “But I thought you had to be really old to be a songwriter. Terry was the first person I saw perform original music. He sang ‘Red Bird’ while playing piano one day at Monterey. That really inspired me.”
Allen and Jo Harvey had been living in Fresno, California, when he came back to make Lubbock (on everything). He instantly became the Don of the Lubbock Mafia of music maker. The Allens eventually moved back—sort of—settling some years later in close-enough Santa Fe.
It’s hard to ignore the tall polymath with stooped shoulders, the piercing eyes of a hawk, and a wide rubbery mouth that can hardly contain his unapologetic flatland twang. Art and music are the same coin, as far as he’s concerned, means to tell stories, which he is very good at doing, in many different ways. He’s so prolific, and so driven to create, he demands to be heard.
Greaves is founder and owner of Paradise of Bachelors Records in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which has reissued Allen’s older recordings and released his most recent albums 2013’s Bottom of the World and Just Like Moby Dick in 2020. Greaves, a self-described “lapsed art worker,” met Allen through the gallery where he worked. He’s collaborated on several projects with Allen and received a Grammy nomination for his liner notes, but taking on the monumental task of telling a very dense story while explaining the dual worlds of art and music, working off journals Allen has kept since junior high, was a whole other deal.
Allen’s father, Sled, a former minor baseball player who promoted wrestling and music events in West Texas, including Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley, who Terry met on one of the six times he played Lubbock in 1955-56, long before most of the world knew who Elvis was. His mother, Pauline, a onetime professional piano player and full-time alcoholic, was 18 years younger than her husband. The biography shows how both inform Allen’s love of performance, his skill at promotion and showmanship, but most of all, his creative drive, providing the inspiration for his DUGOUT series of works.
Allen got his art education at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. One professor brought visiting Dadaists and surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington to lecture. The surrealist Man Ray often stopped by the school to talk to students about the life of an artist. Allen was hooked.
Concurrent with his Chouinard schooling was his pursuit of music. The first song he ever wrote “Red Bird” scored him an appearance on the music television series Shindig! in 1965, generating enthusiasm from Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles.
In 1969, he wrote “Truckload of Art,” a song about a real truckload of art from New York destined for Los Angeles to show the upstart West Coast artists how art was supposed to be done, that crashed on the highway. Two years later, a snippet could be heard coming out of the radio of Warren Oates’ GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop, an arty feature film about street racers on a road trip across the southwest.
After graduating from Chouinard in 1966, he began teaching there and followed by teaching gigs at UC-Berkeley and Cal State Fresno.
Truckload of Art focuses on relationships, beginning with Allen’s partner in crime and marriage, the toothsome Jo Harvey. Theirs has been a tempestuous, sometimes competitive coupling while he chased myriad muses and she pursued her career as an actor, playwright, poet, radio producer, and songwriter—whenever they weren’t working together. He thought she should perform only original pieces she created. She enjoyed working in film.
Also documented is Allen’s long friendship with Dave Hickey, the acerbic writer, dealer, curator, and university professor from Fort Worth who opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin in 1967, and became the most incisive art critic of his time. Like Allen, Hickey wrote country songs, too.
Allen’s Corporate Head outside the Citicorp Plaza in Los Angeles. Photo by William Nettles
I’m not schooled enough to pass judgement on the art beyond my immediate reaction, and Allen usually makes me laugh. That was the immediate response when I saw Corporate Head, the life-size bronze of a businessman burying his head in the wall of a Los Angeles office building. The publication Atlas Obscura describes the work as “almost whimsical, yet rather grotesque.”
Sometimes the work has an edge too sharp to appreciate. That speaks to Allen’s interest in Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty, which strived to “shock the audience.” Allen was drawn to Artaud’s 1937 travelogue A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara about time spent in Mexico among the Tarahumara people experimenting with peyote. His curiosity led to staging his own play about Artaud Ghost Ship Rodez in Lyon, France.
The downs are as interesting as the ups. Juarez, the first of 13 albums he’s recorded, failed to launch as a Broadway musical, despite his collaboration with David Byrne, best-known as the lead singer of the band Talking Heads. The run of the 1994 theatrical play Chippy: The Diary of a West Texas Hooker, co-written with Jo Harvey for the American Music Theater Festival, turned out to be brief, but yielded the song “Fate with a Capital F” cowritten with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, which remains one of my favorite Allen songs.
Some sweet bits pass by too quickly, such as Byrne’s bewilderment participating in a guitar pull with Allen and friends, and Allen’s dust-up with Tommy Lee Jones over verisimilitude. And I would have enjoyed eavesdropping on Hickey and Allen debating art.
It’s the little things that impress. Allen played in a band in high school with David Box, the teen chosen to replace Buddy Holly in the Crickets after Holly’s death in a plane crash in 1959, only for Box to die years later in a plane crash. In 1972, he played the Dripping Springs Reunion, the precursor of Willie Nelson’s Picnics, thanks to a Dave Hickey booking. Even Andy Warhol and the Manson Family make cameos. He’s been everywhere—Cambodia, France, London, Mexico, and India, telling stories every which way. And he took notes.
With Greaves’ help, Allen tells his most compelling story yet, the story of his creative life.
https://texashighways.com/travel-news/remembering-fort-worths-caravan-of-dreams/
Performers for “Kabuki Blues,” an original drama created at Caravan of Dreams. Photo by Courtney Carroll
Forty years ago, a most unusual performance and arts space opened its doors in downtown Fort Worth. A two-story brick building on Houston Street built in the 1880s was repurposed into a music venue featuring jazz and blues, a record label and production company, a theater with its own touring ensemble, dance studio, art gallery, and a restaurant, topped by a rooftop cactus garden, grotto bar, and a geodesic dome.
The Caravan of Dreams was avant-garde, experimental, quirky, exotic, or the work of a cult, depending who you asked, and quite the anomaly—as if Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership had landed in the heart of Cowtown.
Music historian William Williams, who has been documenting music in North Texas for decades, still can’t get over the Caravan and its 18-year run as the coolest performing arts center in Texas. He decided to try and explain it all in Caravan from Dreamland: When Cowtown Conjured a New Frontier, a three-volume history, complete with hundreds of images, told through accounts of participants, staff, patrons, and fans, along with advertisements and news accounts.
“It’s a poignant story,” he said. “They did some amazing things, then it started to fade. And here I am sifting through the ashes.”
The idea for the performing arts space was hatched by Fort Worth’s Ed Bass—one of the four billionaire Bass brothers and nephew to Texas oil billionaire Sid W. Richardson. He created the group with ecologist John P. Allen and artist Kathelin Hoffman of the Synergia Ranch, an “ecovillage” commune of academics, artists, and scientists in New Mexico who were involved in ecological projects around the world.
Bass fell in with the Synergia Ranch folks in 1973 through a construction project in New Mexico and ended up joining The Theater of All Possibilities performing troupe. He funded Synergia projects around the globe, including an art gallery in London, a cattle ranch in Australia, and a hotel with a library and cultural center in Kathmandu. The collaboration helped fulfill Synergia’s mission to fuse together arts, sciences, and enterprise. “They were one of the more successful communes to come out of New Mexico, where there was a huge concentration of New Age communities,” Williams said.
After years of traveling with Synergia and the Theater of All Possibilities throughout the 1970s, Bass returned home, ready to breathe life into Fort Worth’s nonexistent nightlife. He opened the Caravan’s doors on Sept. 29, 1983. Fort Worth had never seen anything like it before, and nothing like it has come along since.
The Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth. Photo by Juan Trahan
The venue’s name was inspired by a couplet written by Bahaudin, the Sufi mystic: “Here we are, all of us: in a dream-caravan. A caravan, but a dream—a dream, but a caravan. And we know which are the dreams.”
The opening featured experimental jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, a native son returned to the hometown he long ago left behind, to debut his original composition Skies of America with the Fort Worth Symphony. After the performance, Coleman’s group Prime Time played the club over the opening weekend.
“Are they cultural pioneers, or rich folks or crazy people?” Diane Werts of the Dallas Morning News mused in an article about the opening. “Actually—delightfully—a little bit of all three.”
For the next eight years, a dream lineup of jazz and blues greats graced the Caravan’s music stage, among them Eartha Kitt, Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wynton Marsalis, Sun Ra, Hugh Masekela, and Herbie Hancock. The venue also hosted hometown acts the Juke Jumpers, Johnny Reno, Robert Ealey, and T-Bone Burnett, and a hot new guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“People of all cultures and backgrounds showed up and had a good time,” wrote Fort Worth journalist Bob Ray Sanders. “It was a mecca for creative exchange that was broader than music, because there was poetry and film and theater. It was a cultural thing that was going on here.” Fans even drove over from Dallas, locals marveled, including professional athletes from the Dallas Cowboys and the Dallas Mavericks.
Born in Waco, the late American jazz musician and composer Roy Hargrove won two Grammy Awards. Photo by Juan Trahan
Psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, Beat Generation writer William Burroughs, anthropologist Jane Goodall, poet Yevengy Yevtushenko and John Allen/Dolphin delivered lectures and spoken word performances at the Caravan. Dance companies graced the theater stage. The Jubilee Theater’s performance of “Negroes in Space” drew record crowds, a big deal in the once-segregated city.
Eight years in, the variety of talent presented in the performing space broadened. Lyle Lovett, a Texas singer-songwriter-bandleader whose music was neither jazz nor blues, sold out five consecutive shows. Jerry Thompson, a principle in the Dallas Alley bar mall concept who had been hired as Caravan’s president, launched a six-month remodel that expanded capacity of the music room, while presenting rock bands like Little Feat and Los Lobos and singer-songwriters such as Lucinda Williams, in addition to featuring jazz, soul, and blues artists
Thompson’s eye was on the bottom line, a novel concept at the Caravan. Operations became more efficient. “Some of the Synergists on the waitstaff weren’t specifically trained or experienced in those positions,” Williams allowed. But the Synergia people had moved on.
In 2001, the Caravan closed for good with a final performance by the nuclear polka band from Denton, Brave Combo. The Synergia folks were moving on to a bigger project, Biosphere II in Arizona, an experimental three-acre closed ecological system in which eight people would live that Bass helped underwrite. Bass shifted his Fort Worth focus to the Will Rogers complex on the west side, overseeing new facilities for national cutting horse competitions and the construction of the Dickies Arena, as well as riding in the city’s annual rodeo parade. A new tenant, the Reata Steakhouse, was moving in to the Caravan space.
As much as Bass and Synergia play major roles in the Caravan, it’s the other stories that make this history come alive. Marjorie Crenshaw, president of the FW Jazz Society, and the superfan Marie Holliday, are profiled in Williams’ work. So is artist and mask maker Leticia Eldridge, who speaks as a Caravan insider who wasn’t part of the Synergia group. The creations of the rooftop cactus garden, and the jazz and dance murals in the building are detailed.
The section recognizing I.M. Terrell High School band director G.A. Baxter and the future jazz greats he educated at the segregated school including Ornette Coleman, King Curtis, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Prince Lasha, Dewey Redman, and Cornell Dupree is enlightening, important scholarship. Several of these same players reunited to perform at the Caravan together.
Fort Worth native and performer Letitia Eldridge acts on stage with a masked singer. Photo courtesy William Williams
The Caravan of Dreams has been gone longer than its run lasted. Ed and Sasha Bass operate the Caravan of Dreams gallery downtown, using the original logo of the performing arts center. Downtown is a little quieter after dark. The action that once swirled around Sundance Square has moved to the Stockyards district.
Williams’ Caravan project stands as a reminder of what once was. “Everything under the sun has a time-stamped expiration date on it, even a performing arts center,” he says. “The decline and end is as important as the ascendent energy. You have to see it in its totality.“
Caravan from Dreamland: When Cowtown Conjured a New Frontier is available to download for free at Williams’ nonprofit Metro Music Project website.