Earlier this week we roamed over to Luckenbach to soak up a little of that Texas mystique, and I thought while we’re in the neighborhood we oughta just keep goin’ about the good old days. Well, as I said, back in the 1970s Texas became the epicenter of something called the outlaw country music movement. It kinda started around 1972, right about the time Willie Nelson’s Nashville home burned down and he moved back to Austin. Later that year Nelson held his first Fourth of July festival at Dripping Springs – featuring Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser, Kris Kristofferson and Leon Russell – and that sort of kicked off the whole shebang.
Michael Martin Murphey
You’d hit the usual hangouts, like the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon, and you’d see musicians sipping their beer from longneck bottles and longhairs and rednecks co-inhabiting peacefully. The music could turn a redneck into a “cosmic cowboy,” and hippies became “redneck rockers.” Michael (not yet Martin) Murphey wrote the movement’s unofficial anthem with “Cosmic Cowboy,” off his Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir album. Willis Alan Ramsey cut his one eponymous album on Leon Russell’s Shelter label in 1972 then he dropped off the face of the earth. Jerry Jeff Walker walked onstage at Castle Creek in his boxer shorts, and Gove Scrivenor played the harmonica and the autoharp and did a solo with his foot (stomping percussion). Over in Houston, Townes Van Zandt played in places like Anderson Fair and the Texas Opry House, commuting from the dilapidated trailer where he lived in Austin, while Guy Clark gave voice to his great songs.
30 Days Out 
