between rural and urban citizens. The heart part did not suggest a soul. Ever since it was established in 1849 by Jacob de Cordova, replacing the Hueco Indian village next to abundant springs, Waco had been a tough place to live.
Waco’s leaders bragged that the small city was a manufacturing, retail, and wholesale hub, as well as home to Connally Air Force Base, and the capital of the Brazos River agriculture empire. More accurately, Waco was an overgrown small town controlled by good Christian oligarchs who were joined at the hip to the administration of Baylor University, the oldest institution of higher learning on Texas soil and the world’s largest Baptist institution. Drinking and dancing were not part of Waco’s official history. Neither were honky-tonks.
But to a charismatic kid from Abbott with music on his mind, the city of almost one hundred thousand “wide-awake and hospitable people,” according to the local chamber of commerce, looked like a wide-open situation. Any place on the Dallas Highway with enough electricity to power a 40-watt bulb was a beer joint, dive, private club, or roadhouse, with the featured entertainment a live band or a jukebox. The city’s main drag, the red-bricked Austin Avenue, was an aspiring neon-lit Broadway. Storied venues such as the Melody Ranch, the Western Club, the new Terrace Club, Geneva Hall, Linden Hall, Elk Hall, and various SPJST and Knights of Columbus halls were scattered all over Waco.
Waco was devotedly Southern in outlook, western in underbelly, and closer to Jesus than most communities, or so its citizens liked to think. New people with new ideas contrary to their own were not wanted in a place where cotton was still king and African Americans were still “nigras,” as far as most respectable Wacoans were concerned.
But Waco was also a weird, gothic kind of place that was home to a succession of cranks, crazies, and rugged individualists, including the gentlemen who invented Dr Pepper and Big Red, two distinctive soft drinks that endure to the present. The parade of different drummers began with William Cowper Brann, the publisher of the
Iconoclast,
an incisive, wickedly biting journal published during the late nineteenth century that boasted a circulation of one hundred thousand who ate up the opinions Brann openly shared with his readers. A consistent critic of all things Baptist, Brann was twice engaged in gunfights in the streets of Waco. He lost the second battle along with his life at the corner of 4th and Austin on April 1, 1898, shot in the back. But the God-fearing Christians were not satisfied. More than a hundred years later, the profile of his likeness etched on his tombstone was defaced, a chunk of marble near his temple chipped out, supposedly from a bullet.
The Waco that Willie Nelson came to know was more the Brann version than the Baptist. His first impressions were formed from the radio, where Hank the Hired Hand, as Hank Thompson was first called, was a daily feature on WACO, 1460 on your radio dial. The son of Bohemian immigrants, Thompson had been exposed to the same breadth and variety of music as Willie. He had his first hit record, “Whoa, Sailor!” when Booger Red was starting out with Bud Fletcher and the Texans. “He came to the gymnasium in Abbott and had braces on his teeth,” Willie recalled. “He was just getting ready to go Big Time.”
Thompson proceeded to heat up jukeboxes well into the 1950s with a string of singles, from “Humpty Dumpty Heart” to “Six Pack to Go,” as he built a rep as the new King of Western Swing, despite Thompson’s being a cultured man who’d seen the world in the navy and had attended Princeton University, which earned him derision from his musical peers. “Hank Thompson had a great band until Billy Gray left; he didn’t know shit about meter,” one player remarked. Bob Wills called him a pretty boy. “If Hank ever runs out of nursery songs, he’s going to run out of songs,”
Waco’s leaders bragged that the small city was a manufacturing, retail, and wholesale hub, as well as home to Connally Air Force Base, and the capital of the Brazos River agriculture empire. More accurately, Waco was an overgrown small town controlled by good Christian oligarchs who were joined at the hip to the administration of Baylor University, the oldest institution of higher learning on Texas soil and the world’s largest Baptist institution. Drinking and dancing were not part of Waco’s official history. Neither were honky-tonks.
But to a charismatic kid from Abbott with music on his mind, the city of almost one hundred thousand “wide-awake and hospitable people,” according to the local chamber of commerce, looked like a wide-open situation. Any place on the Dallas Highway with enough electricity to power a 40-watt bulb was a beer joint, dive, private club, or roadhouse, with the featured entertainment a live band or a jukebox. The city’s main drag, the red-bricked Austin Avenue, was an aspiring neon-lit Broadway. Storied venues such as the Melody Ranch, the Western Club, the new Terrace Club, Geneva Hall, Linden Hall, Elk Hall, and various SPJST and Knights of Columbus halls were scattered all over Waco.
Waco was devotedly Southern in outlook, western in underbelly, and closer to Jesus than most communities, or so its citizens liked to think. New people with new ideas contrary to their own were not wanted in a place where cotton was still king and African Americans were still “nigras,” as far as most respectable Wacoans were concerned.
But Waco was also a weird, gothic kind of place that was home to a succession of cranks, crazies, and rugged individualists, including the gentlemen who invented Dr Pepper and Big Red, two distinctive soft drinks that endure to the present. The parade of different drummers began with William Cowper Brann, the publisher of the
Iconoclast,
an incisive, wickedly biting journal published during the late nineteenth century that boasted a circulation of one hundred thousand who ate up the opinions Brann openly shared with his readers. A consistent critic of all things Baptist, Brann was twice engaged in gunfights in the streets of Waco. He lost the second battle along with his life at the corner of 4th and Austin on April 1, 1898, shot in the back. But the God-fearing Christians were not satisfied. More than a hundred years later, the profile of his likeness etched on his tombstone was defaced, a chunk of marble near his temple chipped out, supposedly from a bullet.
The Waco that Willie Nelson came to know was more the Brann version than the Baptist. His first impressions were formed from the radio, where Hank the Hired Hand, as Hank Thompson was first called, was a daily feature on WACO, 1460 on your radio dial. The son of Bohemian immigrants, Thompson had been exposed to the same breadth and variety of music as Willie. He had his first hit record, “Whoa, Sailor!” when Booger Red was starting out with Bud Fletcher and the Texans. “He came to the gymnasium in Abbott and had braces on his teeth,” Willie recalled. “He was just getting ready to go Big Time.”
Thompson proceeded to heat up jukeboxes well into the 1950s with a string of singles, from “Humpty Dumpty Heart” to “Six Pack to Go,” as he built a rep as the new King of Western Swing, despite Thompson’s being a cultured man who’d seen the world in the navy and had attended Princeton University, which earned him derision from his musical peers. “Hank Thompson had a great band until Billy Gray left; he didn’t know shit about meter,” one player remarked. Bob Wills called him a pretty boy. “If Hank ever runs out of nursery songs, he’s going to run out of songs,”
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