Taylor Day Grace wasn’t quite sure how her now husband Charley Crockett felt about her the first time they hung out. At the White Horse honky-tonk in East Austin, it wasn’t until they rounded “probably hour five” of what would become a fourteen-hour-long conversation that she started to have a feeling. “I was like, ‘Oh, I think he might like me,’ ” she said.
Grace, who works as a musician and stylist, describes her first impression of country singer and songwriter Crockett as “not hide-in-a-corner shy but just a little bit shy” and having a “sweet heart and a deep soul.” The pair previously crossed paths at Austin’s storied blues club Antone’s, in 2018, but all that really came of it was Grace’s asking Crockett if he could point out the bathroom. Grace laughs when she describes their chance encounter at the White Horse on New Year’s Day two years later.
“I just don’t think he knew what to do with me at first,” she said. The two talked till sunup. “I was like, ‘I have to go to work!’ ” Crockett had to go to work too. Like George Strait before him, he left that next day for Amarillo to play the Panhandle’s Golden Light Cantina. He forgot to secure Grace’s phone number before he hit the road, but all was made right by way of Instagram direct messaging.
After nearly five years together, the pair were wed on Willie Nelson’s Luck Ranch this month in what Grace said “felt like the first day of a beautiful life together.” Crockett—who has collaborated with Willie and performed at the property—described the day as a surreal full-circle moment.
For their wedding, which hosted about 180 guests, the couple decided to shun fuss, formality, and anything that would distract their friends and family from the main purpose of their attendance: to have a really, really good time. “You kind of realize it’s really just a party for your friends,” Grace said. “I was sober as a judge.” For a venue, they landed on Luck Ranch in Spicewood, just outside Austin, after agreeing that a typical event space didn’t feel quite true to character, and they made a special ask of Crockett’s pal Willie (the Ranch doesn’t typically host weddings). Although Willie didn’t attend the wedding, Grace said she felt him there in spirit on the day of.
Wedding planner Becky Levin Navarro, of Pearl Events Austin, calls the event’s aesthetic “elevated Texas country chic,” with lots of color and personal touches for those who knew where to look. “Charley calls Taylor Bambi, so we had a little Bambi everywhere. We had butterflies. [We included] all these symbols that mean things to both of their families,” Navarro said. “We made custom matchboxes that had a king and queen on one side . . . any idea I thought was crazy to send to them they embraced with open arms.” In an early conversation about the wedding, Navarro asked Crockett about the couple’s budget for stationery. “Charley stopped and said, ‘Becky, stationery is one of my highest-budget things.’ He said every song that he writes is on scratch pieces of paper from hotels. So he wanted the stationery to be amazing and for the wedding to have amazing paper.” Also important to Crockett was an oyster station and an Alamo-shaped groom’s cake—although he took note of the missing Davy Crockett. (“He was very sad about that,” Grace said.) The ranch was also outfitted with the ultimate in playful touches: a carousel and a mini Ferris wheel. “I thought, ‘I’ve never been to a wedding with a carnival rides, so therefore we must do it,’ ” Grace said.
The couple walked down a light blue, elevated aisle that was surrounded by trees and florals from Remi + Gold. At Grace’s request, the flowers were later donated to a local children’s home. “I’m not into things just getting thrown away. It freaks me out,” Grace said.
The bride wore a mermaid-cut gown with a train and lace detailing from designer Galia Lahav. “I wanted a blend of romantic but also sexy and not too modest, but also not sexy to where it felt too glam. I wanted this perfect balance in my brain,” Grace said. Although she donned a pair of Gucci heels for the ceremony, she later changed into a pair of white cowboy boots from Heritage Boot (“all their boots look custom even if they’re not”) that were better suited to tramping through the fields of Luck Ranch.
Crockett wore a black-and-white suit with Western touches and piping based on a George Jones suit from the sixties. It was a callback to his first custom Western suit, similarly inspired by Jones, which was commissioned by the Austin Chamber of Commerce when Crockett played the Newport Folk Festival in 2019. His wedding suit incorporated material from Grace’s dress into the yolk of his shirt. “We wanted to be real classic with it,” Crockett said. “[But] there’s a little bit of dazzle on there.” He kept to the theme with an elegant pair of black Lucchese boots from Allens Boots in Austin.
Grace floated through the day, she said, constantly taken aback by the emotion she felt. “It’s a big overwhelming feeling. Not bad overwhelming, but a very psychedelic feeling,” she said. “The whole night you’re just trying to get back into your body.”
Crockett similarly felt like he was observing the event from afar—but he liked what he saw. “When we finished taking pictures we were walking back toward Willie’s Western town that he built for Red Headed Stranger, and I could see our dinner table that was so long it must’ve been in three counties,” he said. “It all looked so beautiful, and I was thinking about how the first time I was on that ranch must’ve been ten years ago, in 2014—before I played there at Luck Reunion or did Willie’s Fourth of July Picnic or any of that. I was looking at all we’d created for the wedding and Taylor who looked so beautiful, and all the people. Everybody seemed like children; they were having such a good time.”
In an effort to make sure they had at least one memorable moment to just themselves, Crockett and Grace sneaked off at the end of the reception to dance to Ann Peebles’s “Until You Came Into My Life” on the stage of Luck Ranch’s Opry House. There they found themselves back in their bodies, at the start of a lifetime together.
