Most of us are caught up in our urban lives and the pressing decisions of the day. There is another America where millions of people live happy productive lives closer to the land. Being city dwellers we don’t see this other world except to know that somehow they feed and clothe us. Next time you take a drive in the country, step out of your SUV and experience the other America. It is worth a look.
Some people just catch your eye as a photographer. So it was with this man who was walking around Luckenbach striking poses for the tourists. I just had to take his picture. Here is what I wrote about an earlier version of the image in 2016.
The dime novel narrative surrounding my subject was already there, all I had to do was make it visible. The text is a combination of sentences I wrote myself and a paragraph from an actual dime novel, The Untamed by Max Brand, published around 1919. Max Brand is surely one of the great marketing names of the twentieth century. Of course given the context of his work it may well have been a reference to a permanent tattoo on a horse. No matter, it is a wonderful name for a western novelist.The West we know from popular entertainment is a wild exaggeration of larger than life characters and their dastardly or heroic deeds. My subject personified many of those stereotypes at least in my mind. He made a turn of the century dime novel impression of rugged individualism with impeccable style cues.
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Old country stores have always served many purposes in rural America. They were often post offices, smoke houses, feed stores and gathering places for miles around. Floore Country Store just happens to be what you might call my local honky-tonk. It’s a place to hear the real-deal, country and roots music.
Central Texas is full of such places. Put a pin through Austin and draw a 100 mile circle on a map and there will be dozens of venues not much different from Floores. Naturally on Saturday night folks came to town to kick their heels a little and so it is today. Saturday night belongs to the devil and Sunday to the lord.
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