Q: I work as a park ranger in the Hill Country, and because of the Waylon Jennings song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” I am often asked about Luckenbach. I did some research so that I could offer tourists some interesting tidbits, but all I found was that the songwriters had never been there. Why, then, did they write a song about it?!
Heidi Dietze, Marble Falls
A: Here’s what the Texanist knows: Luckenbach is a teeny-tiny Hill Country hamlet located in southeast Gillespie County, about ten miles outside of Fredericksburg. It was originally settled by industrious immigrant farmers in the OG (Old German) era of the 1840s. By the late nineteenth century, there was a blacksmith shop, a cotton gin, a post office, a small store, and a saloon and a dance hall—because wherever there are German Texans, there’s usually beer and music too.
Ruralites with a hankering for an occasional cold one and a little company flocked to the bucolic setting beneath large live oaks along Grape Creek. According to local lore, in the sixties Lyndon Johnson would sneak out of the nearby Texas White House, as the LBJ Ranch was known during his presidency, and head over to Luckenbach to knock back a few.
In the early seventies, a trio that included Hondo Crouch, a rancher and colorfully folksy bon vivant, purchased the town, ushering in Luckenbach’s whimsically fun-loving era and attracting folks from outside the farming and chief executive communities. In 1973 Crouch acolyte Jerry Jeff Walker put the town on the figurative map when he recorded his gonzo masterpiece ¡Viva Terlingua! in Luckenbach’s rustic dance hall. (Yes, it is slightly weird that he made one town famous by releasing a record that was named after an entirely different town. You’re welcome to use this tidbit with your tourists, Ms. Dietze.) That album featured “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” by the Texas songwriter Guy Clark, an occasional Luckenbach visitor.
And it was Clark and his wife Susanna who extolled Luckenbach’s virtues to Chips Moman, who, with Bobby Emmons, did indeed write “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” without so much as ever laying eyes on the place. (Jennings hadn’t either, at least not until well after the song was released, in 1977.) When listeners heeded the catchy “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas” refrain, the little outpost became a wildly popular destination for those looking to get back to the basics of life.
Today, though the carefree Luckenbach vibe has been compromised by encroaching overdevelopment, overcommercialization (who needs a Luckenbach-branded candle or money clip or tumbler?), and too many nearby bachelorette winery weekends, the allure, like that of an old Waylon tune, has endured—more or less.
This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Texanist.” Subscribe today.
