In case you’re not from Texas and have no idea what ¡Viva Terlingua! is….
Jerry Jeff Walker’s classic album ¡Viva Terlingua! was recorded live with a remote truck in the tiny hamlet of Luckenbach, Texas (population 3), over the course of a week in August 1973. Like a giant washtub of Jerry Jeff’s famous sangria wine, the album mixes in every ingredient he and The Lost Gonzo Band could get their hands on: bouncy golden-age country, moody ballads, honky-tonk, rock and roll, a pinch of soul and psychedelia, and even a ragged, decidedly non-Texan (or maybe completely Texan, for that matter) attempt at reggae. It’s been called “The Big Bang of Texas Music” for its influence on all that came after it.
It’s the archetype of the so-called “cosmic” cowboy’s self-expression — the perfection, if not necessarily the primordial source, of its DNA. The components of its polynucleotide chains are as follows:
∙ The songwriters: Though Jerry Jeff gets the credit on five of the nine tracks, the other four writers are significant, as they are all icons in their own right: Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Michael Martin Murphey, and Gary P. Nunn.
¡Viva Terlingua! was the high-water mark of Austin’s “progressive country” music scene. It’s a party record, but there’s also a deep sentimental thread running through it — a sense of place and community not often encountered in mass-produced popular music. The pictures in the double-gatefold album cover and lyric sheet make the sessions look like a Luckenbach family picnic.
Jerry Jeff and the Lost Gonzos set up in the then-87-year-old dance hall in the middle of “town” (about ten buildings on a little loop), with hay bales as baffles. They threw open all the windows and got to work writing songs (“don’t worry; it’ll all work out”) and putting them to tape while crickets chirped in the evening air. By the end of the week, it was decided that a little shot in the arm was needed to top things off, so a concert was hastily arranged for Saturday night. Judging from the recording, and by all accounts, it was a real banger.
“Other albums had been important to the scene – my record Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir was the first to directly address what was happening in Austin. But ¡Viva Terlingua! wiped out everything else.” – Michael Martin Murphey (in Texas Monthly)
“The definitive progressive country record.” – Ray Wylie Hubbard (in The Messenger: The Songwriting Legacy of Ray Wylie Hubbard)
“They … sat down and made the best record that anybody in Texas will ever make.” – Joe Gracey (program director at legendary Austin, Texas, radio station KOKE-FM, in the Austin American-Statesman)
“Among the most legendary of ‘live’ singer/songwriter albums ever released. It’s the Live at the Fillmore East of redneck Texas folk-rock.” – Thom Jurek, AllMusic
¡TERLINGUA BLOG! 