I've never been to Luckenbach, Texas, but while growing up in Austin I always wanted to go. I'd first heard of the town through Waylon Jennings' popular duet with Willie Nelson. To me, it seemed an easy-going, laidback place where hospitality and good music ("Hank Williams pain songs, Steve Goodman train songs and 'Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain'") were part of the air you breathed. But my mama always said it was a puissant speck on the road barely worth the gas to drive out there, so I never went. But when I awoke earlier this week to the news of Jennings' death due to complications from diabetes, I thought of Luckenbach and the turmoil that we live in today and wished I'd gone there when I had the chance.
In Austin during the 1970s, Jennings' brand of outlaw country was part of the cultural landscape. "Luckenbach" was a particular favorite at relaxed summer barbecues where the tune blended easily with the smell of hickory smoke and Lone Star beer. To a TV-obsessed kid, Jennings was also the good ol' boy narrator of TV's The Dukes of Hazzard. That was how I knew him. (And it is still how many know him. A friend told me that her five-year-old nephew, who loves reruns of the show, called to tell her that Jennings was dead, but that "we can still listen to his music.")
But as a kid, I didn't know that the native of Littlefield, Texas, had once been a member of Buddy Holly's band. I didn't know that Jennings had given up his seat on a chartered plane to J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson on that fateful "day the music died" in February 1959, escaping the crash that took the lives of Holly, Richardson and Ritchie Valens. Nor did I know that he'd helped pen Elvis's last number one hit, "Suspicious Minds," one of my guilty pleasures. I didn't know much about his $1,500-a-day cocaine habit and his drug bust, and what I did know simply enhanced his outlaw image.
In fact, I didn't know much about the polite gentle soul behind that image. He was to me simply part of the atmosphere that I grew up in. In those days after the collapse of Austin's counterculture and the national resurgence of conservatism, Jennings was a nonconformist whose music often offered a rebellious but laidback alternative to the money-obsessed demands of the corporate rat race and the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses suburbs. He brought together the cowboys and the hippies suspicious of that greedy lifestyle. It's his lasting legacy. Even today many Austinites would still rather live in Luckenbach than in Crawford, Texas.
Until recently, I didn't know of his diabetes, either. It can be a slow, painful way to die. My grandfather, in fact, has it. The disease can rob its victims of their freedom, eventually forcing them to spend many hours a week stuck in dialysis. It can also deprive them of their vision, slowly stealing the pleasures and the beauty of this world. Diabetes sometimes even robs them of their legs, as it robbed Jennings of one of his. I hope that Jennings was not in pain as he lay dying. And I hope that now Jennings, a man whose music confronted the national quest for more, has found his Luckenbach, a place where "ain't nobody feeling no pain."
Scott Hoffman
Contributing writer
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