Luckenbach, TX

We got here October 1 for a month-long stay and one of the must-do things was to go to Luckenbach, TX.

Luckenbach was originally established as a community trading post and the German settlers and the Comanche Indians entered into a peace treaty, which was one of only a few that was never broken. By the 1960s it was almost a ghost town. A newspaper advertisement offering "town—pop. 3— for sale" led Hondo Crouch, a rancher and Texas folklorist, to buy Luckenbach for $30,000 in 1970, in partnership with Kathy Morgan and actor Guich Koock. Crouch used the town's rights as a municipality to govern the dance hall as he saw fit.

It entered the 1970s zeitgeist as an icon of country music the summer of 1973 when Jerry Jeff Walker recorded the live album, "Viva Terlingua" at the Luckenbach dance hall--the album became an outlaw country classic.

In 1977, after Crouch's death in 1976, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson further vaulted Luckenbach into the national spotlight with the #1 country and #25 Pop charting song "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)." It has since become a part of every country music fan’s bucket list.

It’s a fun place on a very low-key scale. The buildings date back 150 yrs or more and there’s lots of music. Here are some of the pictures…Read more