by Stan Raines (proofed and revised @ 8:30 pm)

The plan was to meet at Harley’s at four-thirty and “sit out back” and run through the material we’d picked out since we really hadn’t had time through the week to get together for actual rehearsal, but as Kathy and I drove down the caliche road and Harley’s came into view, I could see the hole in the plan. Cars and trucks were lining both sides of the road going to and coming from the entrance to Harley’s parking. When we crossed the turn of the resaca that runs beside the bar, you could see that every available space out back was filled. We drove on by, slowly. Didn’t want to raise unneccesary dust.

And there was Joel, sitting in his big ol’ truck, so I honk and he waves as we go by and park just past the next vehicle pulled over to the road’s edge. Our rehearsal wasn’t going to be what we had thought. I suggested that we take a look inside, as Joel had never been there before. Joel was excited. Good idea. Harley’s has two buildings joined to each other on the dusty plain of the resaca. The first, the store and bar, is a neatly made metal building in light blue with an attached front porch reminiscent of the kinds of porches on the houses in the Western movies I watched at a kid, on houses we’d see once in a while on the backway up to Lubbock to visit Justin at the law school. Long and low across the front of the building, cedar posts and planking nicely grayed out to silver, a couple of wide comfortable chairs with a barrel between them for a table, kittens crawling in the little stand of cactus and flowering plants on one corner. A comfortable, quiet place.

We go around to the parking lot entrance to go into the dining and dance hall in back of the bar. It’s got a rough-hewn look to it, open wooden beams and rafters, round wooden tables replacing the long plastic ones out of Sam’s Warehouse that had filled the place until last year sometime. There are still quite a few of those around, but the writing’s on the wall. They’re goners.  It’s dark and low, stage lights glittering on the instruments and the gleaming red stage, and the band is belting out an excellent boot scootin’ boogey. The lights over the tables are dimmer, of course, but not needed all that much as it’s right around five in the afternoon and there’s pretty fair light coming in the screened windows around three walls. And they’re just screens. No glass. In bad weather, you lower shallow boxes folded and hung above them. We get Joel a beer and me a Diet7Up and hang by the door between the bar and dance hall for a while before going out on the newly constructed patio on the east side.

Here you see the patchwork corrugated metal siding used to cover the dance hall, unpainted but bright, and it’s reminiscent of some barbecue joints you pass on the back way to Uvalde (and stop if you’re hungry). My feeling is that John Nolan has built much of this himself, he and some friends and many cases of beer. Rebuilt it, too.  Joel’s impressed. He had no idea how authentic the place is and was shocked, he says, when he pulled by and saw how packed it was. We’d played there the previous Friday to a total of five in the room and five or six or eight back in the bar.  John Harley (or John Nolan) had said it was good, what he’d heard us do, and we’d be building that Friday night fish fry up just the way he’d built up the Sunday barbecue.

So back out to the caliche street and we set up behind Joel’s big Chevy and start running through songs, talking out kinks and running them again. A short grizzled man in jeans and a bandana comes up and listens a while and then asks Joel, who was just then emptying his bottle, if he needs a beer and then goes off. A few minutes later, he’s back with that beer and walks away. This is a bar that takes care of its musicians. Three twenty-somethings come up and listen a while and then the girl in the group says John’s looking for us. The band’s taking a break and he wants us to go on.

So we trundle in with guitar cases,  gig bags, and a music stand and stool and set up. It takes too long it seems, but Chet Mink, guitarist for the house band, helps us connect to the PA and we launch into “The Weight,” that crafty old piece by the Band with its imitation nostalgia and depth that nevertheless registers, and it goes pretty well. We picked it because it’s fairly uptempo and a crowd pleaser. But my new strings are dusty from bikes and trucks going by while we’re playing and they’re sticky. Doesn’t matter. You play with the guitar you got. Sometimes you have to work harder, is all. Three songs later and John is back shooing us off so the band can come back up. His idea is that there be continuous music. He doesn’t put it in these terms, but it’s a show and the show’s why people come and the show’s got to go on. And now he’s got a fiddler coming in.  John’s a good stage manager. Courteous and to the point and with his eye on pleasing the audience.

So he and the Bayview Bush Riders, the Number One Band in the Rio Grande Valley, he says, take the stage and start kicking butt. They are good. They really are. Tight, clear, sweet country music, and the hall roars and people are pushing back their chairs and scrambling on to the dance floor and hooting and hollering and just having a good time. It is a predominantly Anglo crowd and definitely a celebration of Texas’ cowboy culture, but there’s a fair mix of Hispanics present and they are having themselves a good scoot of the boot, too, and everybody’s happy. Dancing is such a wonderful thing. You see some of the roundest, definitely awkward people transformed into graceful creatures by their jumping into the beat and going with it. You see a bunch of strangers transformed into a performing company. You see how wide and varied is that which we must find beautiful.

This wasn’t our appointed stage time, though, and, since we’d had our practice cut off, we went back out on the road. It’s a little rougher to work this time. The sun’s going down, so we have to leave a door open to get light from the truck. We run through the four songs we’ve planned on playing and get back just as John is calling for us to come back up. It’s supper time and we can see folks lining up to get at that barbecue. It’s been in the air all afternoon, and people are hungry. We’re the dinner music.

We take advantage of it. And take a point from the Bush Riders’ performance and start with some well-known numbers with a tradition of audience participation built in — “London Homesick Blues” and “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” I run through a peculiar arrangement I’ve been working on., a slowed down version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the old Hank Williams piece heavily influenced by the way I’ve heard Spencer Borhen sing it, accompanied only by his lap steel Fender. I’m pleased to hear people joining in the chorus the first time around; saddened when I don’t hear them a couple of choruses later. Nevertheless, this is cool. This is where we want to be going. Then we’re done because a fiddler has shown up and John wants to get him on. As we were running out of prepared numbers–I was about to launch another Hank piece, “Hey, Good Lookin’”–this is something of a relief.

So we pack as quickly as we can–there’s that show’s-gotta-go thing going on– and haul out to the bench under the windows by the parking lot. We’re happy campers. It’s such a rush to play and, nervous as we might have been, we played and kept on playing till it was time to stop. There’s something of success in that and the hope for more. And we’d plugged the Friday night gig about six times so, who knows, we might even get some folks showing up. The one couple that had been there the last Friday left after the first set, but wanted to know if we’d be back because they would and they’d bring some friends, the lady said. This is starting to look like a real possible thing, we agree. Joel’s been working hard in spare time through the week and put together a planned repertoire of about forty songs. We’ve only got a dozen or so run through, but we’ve got time. Joel, family and career man, has got to go, so I thank him and he thanks me, and off he drives.

Back in with Kathy and Sandra Mink, Chet’s wife and Kathy’s sister, I sit down and groove on what the band is doing. John has brought up a man with a button accordion and he’s doing a fair job of keeping people going. But the highlight of the night comes when he steps down. The fiddler stays up and  a friend of his takes the drums and they go off into a jigging reel that has the dancers pounding the floor. They become part of the percussion. It goes on for eight to ten minutes of more and the fiddler’s got them in his hand. He’s playing the dancers as much as the fiddle. At the end of the melody, he goes into a double stop bounce on an open G string and G an octave up and speeds up one time or slows down next before kicking into the tune again. The dancers love it. They’re tranced and hardly notice when the shuffling rhythm steps up to what might seem an impossible pace.

When it ends, Kathy announces that, with work on the morrow, it’s time to go. I find John Harley and thank him, sincerely, for letting us come out and play and let him know we’ve decided on “Long Time Coming” as a name for the act. It’s quite a thing he’s built out here in the back country. Quite a thing. And we’re happy to be joining up.