On the Trail of Cattlemen, Desperadoes, and Guitar Legends

A road trip embracing museums, music, and monuments

I’d been to the States before, on my own, attending the Clovis Music Festival in New Mexico, and a similar event in Lubbock, Texas, both dedicated to the memory of Buddy Holly and 1950/60s rock music.

In 2009 I took my wife along, to spell the driving and take a serious road trip across those southwestern states on our way to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and later, Nebraska.

It started in Lubbock, Texas, with a visit to Buddy Holly’s gravesite. I caught up with old friends, some of whom had played with Buddy, and visited The Buddy Holly Centre. As well as a museum, it has a neat record and T-shirt store.

Stocked up with Rock’n’Roll T-shirts and CDs of West Texas’s finest — Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, The Flatlanders, Waylon Jennings — and with Lubbock in our rearview mirror, we headed to Clovis on US-84.

Over the years I’d become a volunteer at the festival. I got to drive acts like Tommy Roe, Tommy Allsup, and Shirley Alston Reeves of the Shirelles, to their afternoon sound checks, and then to the evening shows seeing them perform. My wife, being a newbie, drew the short straw, helping outside with Security and monitoring car parking every night before the show.

The Shirelles became the first all-female black group to reach #1 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 1961 with ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow,’ which reached #4 in the UK in February 1961. The Beatles covered two of their numbers on their first album, Please Please Me — Boys and Baby It’s You.

We stayed in the same hotel as legends Bobby Vee, Johnny Tillotson, Jimmy Gilmer & The Fireballs, and Tommy Allsup. Tommy was the guy who flipped the coin, which Ritchie Valens called heads, to decide who would accompany Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper on that ill-fated flight from Clear Lake, Iowa, on 3 February 1959.

Back in our hotel lobby after the shows, somebody would pass around an acoustic guitar and we’d jam until the early hours. Tommy Allsup would teach us his, Ritchie’s, and Buddy’s guitar licks. He never took off his cowboy hat, was never without a guitar, and was always the last to go to bed. Tommy, a former record producer and Nashville session musician, played on over 6,500 records!

My wife supported my Rock and Roll adventure; now it was my turn to do the same for her. She was and still is, passionate about the Old West and Native Americans, their history, and culture.

So, listening to those CDs we bought in Lubbock, our road trip began with a visit to the Billy The Kid Museum and his gravesite in Fort Sumner. Traveling south to Lincoln, we stayed in Sheriff Pat Garret’s former home, then a very good bed and breakfast establishment.

The area around Lincoln and Roswell is famous for John Chisum, the Cattle King of the Pecos, and the Lincoln County Wars of 1878–1881. More than 50 people were killed along a one-mile stretch of a dusty road that curved through Lincoln — a fact that led President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 to declare it “The Most Dangerous Street in America”.

Billy the Kid was responsible for some of the trouble. His boss, an English Cattle Baron, John Tunstall, had been murdered because he was seen as a rival and a threat by the Murphy & Dolan Mercantile. They owned the only store in Lincoln County and believed Tunstall was trying to muscle in on lucrative contracts they had won supplying beef to both the Mescalero Apache Reservation and the US Army at Fort Stanton.

Deeply affected by the act, Billy swore vengeance, claiming that Tunstall was one of the few men who had treated him like he was “free-born and white”.

Although nothing to do with cows or music, we were so close we just had to visit Roswell’s UFO museum, before heading north to stay with friends in Santa Fe.

With four days of our holiday remaining before flying out of Denver to England, we hoped to make it to the other Lincoln in Nebraska, to see the grasslands, where 150 years before, the Pawnee ruled the roost.

Late September, leaving Santa Fe, New Mexico at 9 am in 75-degree heat, we weren’t fazed. A full tank of gas, no cigarettes, brilliant sunshine, and wearing sunglasses, we headed north on I-25.

Nebraska next stop…well, almost.

“Well it seems as though this light will never turn green I’ve been driving for a while, can’t tell where I’ve been I got nothing on my mind, I got nothing to do I’m just driving around listening to Nebraska”

We didn’t expect blizzard conditions as we negotiated the Raton Pass near the Colorado border. A cold front had come down from Canada and was blanketing the mid-west and Colorado with the white stuff. The temperature dropped to 32F.

255 miles into our journey and three inches of snow on the bonnet, sorry, hood of our car, we pulled off I-25 at Colorado City, expecting to find at least a town, to be faced with a gas station, gift shop, and diner serving coffee and burgers. It seemed everyone from the I-25 was crowding in there.

Four hours later the weather abated and we got as far as Fort Collins for the night, still 466 miles from Lincoln, Nebraska. The next day, despite the cold, we did the tourist thing in Cheyenne and Laramie, place names we knew from Westerns on TV in our youth, buying fleeces to keep warm as we walked the deserted streets.

Reaching the Nebraska state line, we turned back, aborting hopes of seeing Lincoln as the weather closed in and the temperature plummeted once again. It seemed the red light of Nebraska was against us.

Returning to Denver, we booked into a hotel, reviewed our road trip…and start planning the next one.