Luckenbach

Luckenbach is a few buildings on Grape Creek: the old general store and post office, a saloon and a dance hall whose maple floor dates from a rebuilding in the early 1930s. German farmers settled the creek in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In 1865 a local schoolmaster, Jacob Brodbeck, tested an airplane of his own design here; its demonstration flight ended in a crash. By the 1920s the place had about twenty residents.

In 1971 Benno Engel sold the town to John Russell "Hondo" Crouch of Comfort, a former swimming champion, actor and newspaper columnist, with Kathy Morgan and Guich Koock as partners. Crouch styled himself mayor and Clown Prince of Luckenbach, declared it a free state of mind, and played it off against Lyndon Johnson's Texas White House down the Pedernales. Festivals followed, among them a Mud Daubers' Day, a Hug-In, a women's chili cook-off and a Non-Buy Centennial in 1976 to protest the commercial Bicentennial, and they drew tens of thousands of people.

The music followed. Jerry Jeff Walker recorded Viva Terlingua here in 1973, and in 1977, the year after Crouch died, Waylon Jennings made a national hit of "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)." Willie Nelson held his Fourth of July Picnic here from 1995 through 1999. Musicians still gather to play.