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…
