Bob Wills' Day in Turkey and The Pilgrimage in Jefferson

The water tower for the city is in the background.  This farmer plowed up his cotton, for a reason unknown to me, but I bet the government paid him to do oit.

     Last week, I travelled 369 miles due north to meet some old friends and attend the annual Bob Wills Day celebration in Turkey, Texas.  The Bob Wills Committee bought the vacant high school building in Turkey and converted it into a museum, dance hall, gift shop, and dining establishment for use once a year during the celebration.

     The Church of Western Swing, a former church down the street from the high school, celebrates nightly with Western Swing dances where couples two-step into the wee hours.  Breakfast tacos are available at the re-furbished high school cafeteria, along with coffee, pancakes, and sausage.

     The city of Turkey is located about thirty miles north of Matador, Texas, the headquarters of the legendary Matador Ranch, in the so-called Cross-Timbers section of Texas.  The timber part must be elsewhere, because most of the land around Turkey is treeless, with sweet potato or cotton fields covered much of the year by sand dunes.  It is hot, arid, dry, and gritty land.  Outsiders might complain about the twenty-mile-per-hour winds, with gusts to thirty, but the natives don’t notice.

Saturday morning parade with the aforementioned water tower in the background.

     Hugh and I met our friends, Buck Campbell and Ken Black at the festival.  Buck came over from Muleshoe, and Ken drove down from Dallas.  Buck’s son, Scott, lives in a place called Trophy Club, north of the DFW Airport, and his son, Conner, just turned 21, is a student at Texas Tech in Lubbock.  This was Conner’s first Bob Wills, Day celebration.  I imagine there were other families with three generations present, but I doubt if there were many.

     Scott, and the other fifteen members of the delegation from Trophy Club, had restored an ancient riding lawn mower to ride in the Saturday parade and to race in the lawn mower race that afternoon.  Many hours of careful, late-night drinking, planning, and meticulous craftsmanship went into the design and renovation of that machine.  It created quite a stir when unveiled for the first time, its shiny black paint job emblazoned with decals from a variety of sponsors.

The Trophy Club beast bears down on the competition at turn five.

     Jody Nix, a virtuoso on the fiddle and practitioner of Western Swing Music from ‘way back headlined the Saturday night dance, as he has for many years.  I have watched Jody grow old at these sessions.  His perfectly groomed hair and moustache are now gray.  His form-fitting western shirt, hand-tooled Ranger belt, and starched Wrangler jeans are all larger and much tighter than in years past.

     I first saw Jody Nix when I was in college.  Buck Campbell and I took dates to the “Brownfield Stomp,” a monthly dance at the VFW Hall in Brownfield.  Hoyle Nix and his band would come up from San Angelo to play, and Buck and I would drive over from Lubbock with our dates.  Jody Nix was about twelve, and, back then, played a sit-down steel guitar for his dad’s band.  He only played on Saturday nights because Hoyle insisted he stay in school.

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     This last Thursday, Charlotte and I drove to a different world, but stayed in Texas.  A bit over 412 miles northeast of Kerrville, deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, the city of Jefferson transports us back to the Antebellum South.  We were there for the annual “Pilgrimage,” a festival that celebrates the history of this unique little city.

Bobbie Hardy's plantation house, finished in 2002, but no longer a B & B.  We watched the muster of the Confederate soldiers from this porch.  The 1860 Episcopal Church is directly across the street.

     Jefferson, once the second largest and most prosperous city in Texas, grew as an inland port, shipping bales of cotton down Big Cypress Bayou to the Red River, then on to the Mississippi and Natchez, St. Louis, or New Orleans.  Entire plantations from the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, having “farmed out” their soil, relocated here during the 1840s and ‘50s, bringing their possessions, their slaves, their attitudes, and their way of life.  The army Corps of Engineers, in a successful effort to drain the swamp, left Jefferson high and dry before the turn of the century.  With the loss of the port on Big Cypress Bayou, prosperity literally dried up.

     Many plantation homes in the little city were lost to decay, but in the late sixties, when the Bed and Breakfast industry developed in Texas, these homes became popular and desirable places to visit.  Tourism revived the economy of the quaint little town.

     In 1872, during the heyday of Jefferson, a Cincinnati playboy and his lady companion visited Jefferson for about two weeks.  They stayed at the Excelsior Hotel, and Abraham Rothschild, a young diamond merchant, called upon local businessmen, peddling his wares.  At night, he and his “lady” frequented the Rosebud Saloon, where she cut a fine figure, dripping with Abe’s diamonds.  She became known around town as “Diamond Bessie.”

Part of the cast from Diamond Bessie during the parade.  I can pick out the Sheriff, the Defense Attorney, the Judge, and a local "Social Worker" in the red dress.  The old man, seated and waving an American flag, was a Belly-Gunner on a B-17 in World War II.  He was only 5-2, and fit nicely into the pod beneath the plane.

     On a Sunday, Abe and Bessie left for a picnic in the nearby woods.  That afternoon, Abraham returned alone and caught the Monday morning train back to Cincinnati.  Bessie was found, two weeks later, deep in the woods with a bullet in her head.  Abe was arrested in Cincinnati and brought back to Jefferson for trial.

     In the fifties, a play was written about the incident, and has been performed annually during the Pilgrimage for sixty consecutive years.  I was asked to play one of the jury members in this year’s presentation, and jumped at the opportunity.

The arthor, as one of the finest jury members money can buy.

     On Sunday morning, I sat on the front porch of a plantation house similar to “Tara” from “Gone with the Wind,” and watched as three hundred costumed Confederate soldiers re-enacted the original muster in the park across the street. These Jefferson volunteers were marching off to join General Lee’s army.  A letter used in the original ceremony was read from the front steps of the Episcopal Church, the same place it had been read at the start of the Civil War.  The brick church was built in 1860 and is still in use today. 

       I cannot help but compare the two experiences, one week apart, in Texas.  On Saturday, at 10 AM in Jefferson, it was warm and humid.  Pecan, oak, and pine trees towered over the little city, and we wished for the hint of a breeze.  I thought of last Saturday in Turkey and four hundred people sitting in lawn chairs on a former football field, trying to hold their umbrellas in a thirty-mile-a-hour wind, seeking protection from the blowing sand and hot sun.  They braved the elements to sit there and hear Bob Wills’ music, played by old men, the remnants of Bob’s Texas Playboys. 

     Western swing music by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys brought joy, hope, and laughter to the dirt farmers on the scorched, open prairies of West Texas during the depths of the depression.  At the same time, in run-down homes deep in the East Texas woods, genteel southern ladies served herb tea in China cups and prayed their husbands would find work.  Poor people in little towns built this state.  Rich men helped, but poor people did the work.  With pride, energy, and hard work, they created Texas.  So long as I am able, I will attend their celebrations—I will honor their customs and their memories.