Luckenbach (“population 3”) is not much more than a little bend in the road an hour-and-a-half west of Austin, Texas. In the early 70s, the town was owned by Guich Koock, Kathy Morgan, and Hondo Crouch, a popular local humorist whose business card read, “Imagineer, Authorized Distributor.”
If you’re out east of Fredericksburg, Texas, where all the wineries are these days, you exit Highway 290 and spend a few minutes driving under gorgeous live oaks past barbed wire and cacti until you start seeing signs for the Luckenbach Town Loop. If you’re coming east down FM 1376, you’ll first be greeted by a big red-and-white Luckenbach logo held aloft by cedar posts in a dirt parking lot and crowned with a huge, “western”-style arrow, pointing you to town.
“Town,” itself, consists of the aforementioned loop and just under ten (at my last count) buildings, mostly wooden, some corrugated metal, some stone.
First and foremost among the structures is Engel Halle. According to the plaque on the ancient door (itself covered in names both inked and scratched into the pulp alongside a little white sign that implores, “Please Do Not Write On Me… I Am Over 170 Years Old!”), Engel Halle is “Texas’ Most Famous Dancehall,” where, in 1973, “Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his iconic outlaw music album ¡Viva Terlingua!” The hall was built in 1886 and featured a maple wood dance floor where boots were not allowed, only “Sunday” shoes. (Don’t ask me to reconcile the age of the door with the age of the hall; I’ll leave that to another day.)
When you step inside the hall on a bright, sunny, Texas day when there’s nothing much happening ‘cept the potato chip man coming by (thanks, Hondo), it’s soothing: dark, cool, and quiet. The left side of the hall when you come in is occupied by a dozen or so long, wooden tables and benches, and the floor on the other side is cleared for dancing in front of the relatively (surprisingly) small stage all the way to your right. The stage is a few feet higher than the floor, and it’s decorated with string lights and metal signs touting Lone Star Beer, Jerry Jeff, and Luckenbach itself. Despite the fact that (or maybe because) it’s still regularly in use, it looks rickety, and you could imagine some old-timey variety show taking place on it… or just maybe one of the most legendary performances in country music history.
The rafters over your head are a thing of beauty: wooden beams criss-crossing every which way, strung with more lights and hiding speakers and ceiling fans alongside a conspicuously large ad for Shiner Beer hanging right in the center. And speaking of the need for ceiling fans, the upper half of all the walls on the west, south, and east sides open up and out to let the breeze come through and the music pour out, as it still does at least once or twice a week.
The only rival to the hall’s preeminence in town is the old U.S. Post Office across the street, which also served as a general store and local watering hole for decades. Now it’s a souvenir shop/Luckenbach shrine… and still the local watering hole. The bar in the back of the building features a potbelly stove right in the middle of the floor. Jerry Jeff’s got his boots kicked up on it in the ¡VT! gatefold.
There are a couple of outdoor stages now, a bunch of firepits, always and forever a pickers’ circle under the trees behind the bar, and South Grape Creek on the east side of town (which just means past the beer stand, across the little bridge over the dry ditch, and beyond the memorial firepits).
On any given day, you might find a handful of country folkies in the circle pickin’ on Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” for a small crowd of tourists and locals. Cigar smoke on the breeze and a rooster crowing somewhere nearby.
You could easily sit there all day.
¡TERLINGUA BLOG! 