God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  I thought about the sanctuary cities bill in September 2017, when a 28-year-old Mexican national, Juan Coronilla-Guerrero, was assassinated in a gang-ridden town in central Mexico. He had been living in Austin with his wife. He was picked up at the Travis County courthouse in March, when he responded to misdemeanor charges of assault and possession of marijuana. He was one of those whom Sheriff Sally Hernandez had refused to hold for federal immigration authorities because he had not committed a sufficiently serious offense. His wife had warned a federal judge that her husband would be killed if he were sent back to Mexico. Other Mexican nationals detained by U.S. immigration authorities have pleaded to be deported anywhere other than across the Texas border, where the Zetas, one of the most brutal of the drug cartels that run much of Mexico, lie in wait for them, routinely kidnapping them for ransom, but often winding up killing them instead.

  The violence and criminality does spill over the border. “In the last five and a half years in Texas,” Dan Patrick told Fox Business News, “we’ve apprehended over two hundred and twelve thousand criminal aliens. We’ve charged them with nearly six hundred thousand crimes, including over a thousand murders, six thousand sexual assaults, ninety thousand other crimes, hundreds of kidnappings. We have to stop sanctuary cities, secure the border, and make America great again.”

  I have spent much of my professional life writing about terrorism. I believe in secure borders. There is good reason to worry about having a vast class of people inside our country who are made criminals simply by their presence. I understand but do not condone their actions. We are complicit in their suffering, however. We take advantage of their weakness, their lack of standing or recourse. The shadow people provide the cheap labor that border states, especially, depend upon. They are not slaves, but neither are they free.

  TWELVE

  The High Lonesome

  You don’t get to Wink, Texas, by accident. It’s sixty miles west of Odessa, tucked below the corner of New Mexico, on a two-lane blacktop passing through the aptly named hamlet of Notrees and a town called Kermit after the son of Theodore Roosevelt who once came to hunt antelope. Seven miles south of Kermit is Wink. It is one of the many near-ghost towns stranded by an oil boom that came and went. In the 1920s, thirty thousand people lived here. Wink was a den of gambling and prostitution, run by the Mob. Those times are long gone, like tumbleweeds blown away in the wind. Wink now is as close to nowhere as you can get and still be on pavement.

  Downtown is made up of a handful of buildings, mostly shuttered, except for a one-story cinder-block structure sporting the word “Museum.” It’s this modest building that draws pilgrims like me.

  On the front door of the Roy Orbison Museum is a number to call if you want to be let in. Walter Quigley answered and said he’d be right over.

  “Do you smell that?” Walter asked, as he unlocked the door. He pointed to the awning above us. “Bats,” he said. “There was a gap up there and several hundred of them got into that space. When they flew out the other evening, I sealed it up, but evidently there are still a bunch in there.”

  Inside the single-room museum was a small collection of artifacts and photos of Roy at different stages of his life, along with album covers and posters. Above the door was a beat-up guitar that Roy once played, which had been hanging in a friend’s garage for forty years. As a teenager, Roy was dumpy, pale as a biscuit, and nearly blind; in high school, he began dyeing his cottony hair black so he didn’t look like an albino. Still, he was picked on incessantly. “The students here would treat him so rotten dirty,” Walter said. “I won’t repeat what they said to him.”

  Walter put on a CD of one of Roy’s albums. There’s so much pain and longing in those songs—“Crying,” “Dream Baby,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and especially “Only the Lonely”—you can feel the rejection pulsing through his soaring, spectral voice, which filled up the little museum, along with the occasional squeak of a dying bat.

  After I moved to Texas, I became a musician. I was thirty-eight and a half years old, and determined to play “Great Balls of Fire” on my fortieth birthday. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m still taking piano lessons, and although I’ll never be a great player, I’m in a band, called WhoDo. We play blues and rockabilly. Our set list is populated with songs by Texas musicians, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, T-Bone Walker, and of course the great Roy Orbison.

  Only the lonely (dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah)

  Know the way I feel tonight (ooh-yay-yay-yay-yeah)

  That song came out in 1960. I was in the seventh grade in Abilene, Texas. I had never heard anything exactly like it—Roy’s operatic three-octave voice on a country ballad, married to doo-wop, and infused with the existential solitude of the West Texas plains, an unhappy man with a thrilling and unmistakable voice, our Edith Piaf.

  One of my bandmates, Brian Turner, who sings Roy’s version of “Mean Woman Blues” to close out our show, had tipped me off to ask Walter about the sacred relic, the object of the pilgrim’s journey. Walter hesitated, then reached under the display case and pulled out a wooden box, wrapped in a sweatshirt. Inside the box were Roy’s trademark tinted eyeglasses, black plastic frames with bifocal lavender lenses. I put them on.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS in high school in Dallas, my friends and I would drive around aimlessly for hours, mesmerized by a late-night broadcast on WRR called Kat’s Karavan. It played early rhythm and blues, otherwise known as “race music,” by such great Texas bluesmen as T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Lead Belly. You can draw a line from those musicians to Janis Joplin, who took the Texas blues and used it to supercharge rock and roll. Another trajectory would go from R&B through mariachi to arrive at Selena, or through pop to discover Beyoncé. Texas is a great scrambler of cultural forms.

  My piano teacher, Floyd Domino, is a boogie-woogie master. He has two Grammys, and he’s played with George Strait, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and many other country stars. He is known for mixing Oscar Peterson with Western swing. He’s been teaching me now for two decades. I’m talentless but persistent.

  I know classical pianists who can trace their training through their teacher and their teacher’s teachers all the way back to Beethoven. I asked Floyd where our tradition comes from. “Al Stricklin,” he said.

  As Floyd tells it, Stricklin, from Antioch, Texas—the Antioch that is in Johnson County (there have been as many as fifteen Antiochs in Texas)—was a self-taught jazz pianist who was influenced by hearing Earl “Fatha” Hines and his smooth Chicago-style swing on the radio. In 1927, when Stricklin was working at a radio station in Fort Worth, three musicians came in for an audition. One of them carried a fiddle in a flour sack. He introduced himself as Bob Wills from Hall County, in the Panhandle.

  “What kind of music do you play?” Stricklin asked.

  “Different,” said Wills.

  Wills promised he would come back and hire Stricklin as his piano player one day when he formed a real band. In the meantime, Wills and his players formed the Light Crust Doughboys, backing up Pappy O’Daniel on his radio show. They were wildly popular, but O’Daniel was a tyrant, and Wills had a drinking problem. After O’Daniel fired him, Wills formed another band that became known as the Texas Playboys. In 1935, Stricklin joined the group. The fusion of Chicago jazz, frontier fiddle, and the blues that Bob Wills learned from his black playmates in the cotton fields constituted the fundamental elements of Western swing. My own band once got to play with Johnny Gimble, who was a fiddle player in the Playboys. I felt that I had been inducted into a fraternity that I didn’t really qualify for.

  I asked Floyd what characterizes the “Texas” sound. “First of all, it’s riff-based,” he said. Riffs are brief musical figures that are stated and restated and explored over different chord changes. Musicians talk about being in the “pocket,” which Floyd explains is “not a spot, i
t’s an area. Texas music tends to be played on the backside of the groove.” You can hear that in the blues shuffles of the Vaughan brothers, T-Bone Walker, Johnny Winter, ZZ Top, and Red Garland—a kind of relaxed, almost-too-late stutter step.

  Floyd grew up in Berkeley, California, in an academic Jewish household, but his ear was captured by the sounds of Western swing. To the despair of his parents, he ran off and joined a band, Asleep at the Wheel, led by Ray Benson, then in Oakland, which was dedicated to keeping that music alive. Bob Wills was their inspiration, and Al Stricklin became Floyd’s mentor. Willie Nelson invited the band to move to Austin in 1974.

  Floyd’s real name is Jim Haber. The stage name was thrust upon him by a couple of his Asleep at the Wheel cohorts who had analyzed his style of playing—which, in their minds, was a combination of Floyd Cramer, the father of country piano, and Fats Domino, the New Orleans R&B king. “When Ray introduces you tonight, he’s going to call you Floyd Domino,” one of them said. It was supposed to be an experiment, but as soon as Jim walked off the stage, everyone started calling him Floyd. It just stuck. A decade later, when Floyd was touring with Waylon Jennings, he decided he wanted his real name back. The production manager called the band together and told them, “Floyd’s real name is Jim, and from now on, that’s what he wants you to call him. Ain’t that right, Floyd?”

  * * *

  JOE ELY, a singer-songwriter friend of mine, marched me through an immense Walmart in Lubbock. We walked toward the rear of the store, past the appliances and ladies’ clothing, until we arrived at the diapers. Joe turned to the baby strollers and said, “Here, right here, was Buddy Holly’s house.”

  Lubbock and the stretch north through the Texas Panhandle produced so many great musicians. Waylon Jennings came from Littlefield, Jimmy Dean from Plainview, the Gatlin Brothers and Tanya Tucker from Seminole. Lubbock itself produced Sonny Curtis, Mac Davis, Delbert McClinton, Gary P. Nunn, Lloyd Maines and his daughter, Natalie—there’s a long list of singers who continue to make music that comes out of the cotton fields and oil rigs and somehow spreads all over the world. Joe is part of that tradition. He reminds me of Bruce Springsteen, whom he’s toured with; he’s a roots rocker who sings about the people he grew up with, making anthems out of their lives. His songs blend country and honky-tonk and Mexican corridos into a distinctive regional sound. You often hear him playing with his fellow Lubbock musicians Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, in a group called the Flatlanders. He is also part of Los Super Seven, along with Freddy Fender, Lyle Lovett, Flaco Jimenez, and a changing cast of other, mostly Texas musicians. I sometimes sing one of Joe’s songs, “Fingernails,” with WhoDo.

  Joe and I rode down Broadway, the redbrick main street, past the only skyscraper in Lubbock, the twenty-story Great Plains Life Building, which sat empty for years after being hit by a tornado in 1970. “You can see it’s still a little twisted,” Joe pointed out. There’s a vacant lot where his father’s Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store used to be, across the street from where several Mexican dance halls in the old warehouses once stood. “I was a young kid, but there was music on every corner,” Joe said, “with accordions and bajo sextos and even horn sections. There couldn’t be bars because Lubbock was dry.”

  I asked Joe what made Lubbock such a musical town. “I don’t know about others, but I think all the emptiness made me want to fill it up,” he said.

  We drove out to the cemetery and got a groundskeeper to show us Buddy Holly’s modest grave, a flat tombstone, the inscription spelled “Holley,” his actual family name. There were several guitar picks left there by visiting musicians. “I brought the Clash here when they played Lubbock,” Joe recalled. “We stayed all night in the graveyard, until the sun came up, sitting around, singing songs, drinking beer.” Joe and I marveled at the brief span of Buddy’s life, 1936 to 1959; he was twenty-two years old when he took that fateful airplane ride with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on a snowy night in Iowa. “All his recordings were done over a period of eighteen months,” Joe said. “His early stuff was bluegrass, and then rockabilly came along. It was Elvis and Carl Perkins that inspired him.”

  We headed out Highway 84 to the Cotton Club, a roadhouse fifteen miles outside of town. The club has gone through many hands, and burned down several times. Joe himself owned it for a while. It’s a one-story clapboard building, an elongated shack, really, but at one time it was considered the most important venue between Dallas and Los Angeles. Johnny Cash, Tex Ritter, Fats Domino, and Benny Goodman appeared there. Bob Wills performed every Friday night. Then in 1955, a cultural tornado arrived in the form of Elvis Presley.

  The daughter of the club owner used to let young musicians, like Buddy Holly and Mac Davis, slip in through the kitchen to hear Elvis whenever he came to play. Waylon Jennings and Roy Orbison were transfixed by his performances. Elvis married country music to rhythm and blues—race music—and turned on a sexual faucet that drenched the Baptists and Church of Christers in unholy waters. After hearing Elvis, Buddy Holly went home and wrote his first rock-and-roll song, “Not Fade Away.” We still play it in our band.

  “See, this is the back door,” Joe said as we approached the club from the grass parking lot. “Elvis’s Cadillac would’ve been right about here. Supposedly, he signed some girl’s panties and her boyfriend beat him up and stuck a rag in the gas tank and burned up his Cadillac.”

  Joe recalled another Lubbock musician who went to high school with him, Norman Odam, a gawky kid who would stand on the stoop of the schoolhouse, at 7:00 a.m., before classes began, and sing at the top of his lungs. Kids would throw pennies at him, which Odam gathered for his lunch money. He began calling himself Legendary Stardust Cowboy. He actually recorded a few songs with Mercury Records, including “Paralyzed.” “It’s three minutes of screaming at the top of his lungs, played on a G7 chord,” said Joe. “It nails you to the wall. T Bone Burnett was on drums. They made some test pressings and sent them to the Dallas stations, and within a week it was getting more play than the Beatles.” Legendary Stardust sank as quickly as he rose, but his persona influenced David Bowie, who modeled his Ziggy Stardust character on him and actually covered a couple of his incoherent songs.

  That evening, Joe played a solo acoustic set at the Cactus Theatre in downtown Lubbock. The place was filled with friends and fans, and Joe was in a ruminative frame of mind. “Growing up in Lubbock, you had to sorta make your own entertainment,” he said, and the audience laughed knowingly. “My parents had friends who owned the dry-cleaning store. We’d go out to the lake for a picnic after church, and then we’d go in the back door of the dry cleaners and they’d let us kids try on other people’s clothes. There was no greater thrill. I wish I had a song about that.”

  * * *

  I DROVE SOUTH, descending from the high plains into Post, the erstwhile utopian community established by the cereal maker C. W. Post at the turn of the twentieth century. He was defeated, like so many others, by the absence of rain, although he used to set off dynamite charges on the mesas every ten minutes for several hours a day with the goal of pulling moisture out of the sky. One can imagine the effect on the other utopians.

  It feels ominous to drive through West Texas with a clean windshield. Road trips always used to be accompanied by the incessant splatter of death. We’d pass through clouds of lovebugs, those perpetually copulating critters, which coated the windshield in a greenish sheen; and then the grasshoppers would hit, in blobs of orange-yellow goo. Painted ladies and miller moths and June bugs contributed their own colorful innards. Wipers only made things worse. The whole front of the car would be peppered with insect carcasses, and the Texas sun baked them into a buggy frittata. They were hell to wash off; I remember scrubbing the grille and never getting it clean enough. Truckers, especially, would protect their radiators with mesh shields. Bugs were simply part of the Texas air.

  Now, when I collide with a bug, I
’m surprised. I can only speak for Texas, but the absence of insects seems to be a part of a general diminution of life. The fence lines along our roadsides used to be ornamented with scissor-tailed flycatchers, those elegant acrobats, so rare now that the insects have disappeared. Steve remembers the sound of turtles being scrunched as tires rolled over them; this was at a time when so many were crossing the road it was hard to thread a route through them. The inventory of life forms is being funneled down to a roster of hardy pests. We’re living in a world of mosquitos, roaches, fire ants, starlings, rattlesnakes, and feral hogs. In fairness to the animals, I suppose I should add humans to the top of the list.

  Snyder is home to the White Buffalo statue in front of the courthouse. The white buffalo is a kind of totem for me. In 1955, the same year Elvis came to the Cotton Club, I was in the third grade in Ponca City, Oklahoma. There was a seminal episode of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, in which Rusty, the orphan who was being raised by a troop of soldiers at Fort Apache, saves the life of an Indian. As every boy my age knew, if you save an Indian’s life, he’s obliged to follow you around until he can return the favor. The Indian in question happened to be on a spirit quest, searching for the white buffalo. I was deeply stirred. The next day in music class, before the bell rang, our teacher asked us each to stand up and say what we were going to be when we grew up. After the movie star, the private detective, and the hairdresser, I rose and said I was going to follow the white buffalo. The hoots I got from my classmates made me feel like Ted Cruz at the Republican convention.