By Diana Finlay Hendricks
Many books are described as “defining a generation,” or “coming-of age,” but rarely does a magazine article grow into a book that withstands more than a half-century and four editions. Reid’s book defines more than a generation. It chronicles a new sound.
Singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen calls Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock “the playbook for my generation.”
Todd Snider says, “In 1986, as I was discovering Jerry Jeff (Walker) and Willie (Nelson) and Billy Joe (Shaver) on stage, I was handed Jan Reid’s book. It was required reading. It’s the Bible of the Austin Music Scene. In The Beginning.”
Lyle Lovett, Jack Ingram, Charlie Robison, and others who have taken this burgeoning sound to national stages were influenced by the pioneers of this cosmic/outlaw/redneck/ progressive sound: the musicians, the club owners, the writers, photographers, and audiences who were spotlighted in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.
An Accidental Journalist: The Improbable Rise of Jan Reid
–Diana Finlay Hendricks
Jan Reid never intended to be a music writer. As his friend and fellow writer, W. K. “Kip” Stratton writes in the foreword to the latest edition of The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (TCU, 2021), “He was in the right place (Austin, Texas) at the right time (the early 1970s) to witness firsthand a club scene… that came to define what we now call Americana music.”
The 1970s brought new voices to music and literature in Austin. This renaissance helped to create music venues, publishing houses and periodicals. In 1972, Texas Monthly was founded by a 26-year-old Dallas native, Michael R. Levy, who hired William Broyles as the founding editor, and Gregory Curtis as the first staff writer. Levy’s intention was to create a “writer’s magazine,” which led to the magazine fostering young, promising writers in the early days of their careers. After eight years at the helm of Texas Monthly, Broyles shifted gears into a successful screenwriting career, and Curtis went on to serve the longest term as editor of the iconic magazine, from 1981 to 2000.
Jan Reid was among the first of those developing Texas Monthly writers. In November of 1973, he and Don Roth wrote a feature for the magazine entitled: “The Coming of Redneck Hip: Rock and country music met in Austin. That friendship may make the state.”
The 5,300-word feature spotlighted the Armadillo World Headquarters and the Vulcan Gas Company, Kenneth Threadgill and Eddie Wilson, Steve Fromholz and Michael Murphey, Doug Sahm and Jerry Jeff Walker. But, according to the article, one person stood head and shoulders above the rest:
“If anyone is qualified to serve as high priest of Austin’s movement toward the big time, it’s the grinning, gentle rebel who made the music industry come to him on his own terms yet somehow remained the almost universally admired nice guy and artist. Willie Nelson has thus become a symbolic figure, the one man whose approach to life and music makes sense of Austin’s curious mix of freaks and rednecks, trepidation and ambition, naiveté and striving professionalism. And where symbolic heroes move, cults often follow.”
Prophetic words. Willie had left Nashville, and come home to Texas in the summer of 1972, forging a trail for troubadours, singer-songwriters, and musicians who wanted to be artists instead of products. Today, fifty years later, Willie is clearly the most famous musician to come from that moment in Austin music.
But Willie was not the only artist Reid recognized as a future legend. Beyond that Texas Monthly article, Reid knew he had much more to say. A year and a half after the Texas Monthly article, the first edition of The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock was published by David and Joyce Lindsey’s Heidelberg Press. Lindsey said, “My wife, Joyce and I had started a little publishing company that evolved into Heidelberg Press. We’d had some success with several other books, and I knew I wanted to do a music book. We knew Melinda Wickman (Swearingen). And she knew Jan. He wanted to do a book. And I don’t remember if I went to him or he came to me, but we both knew that something new was happening in Austin and it was very exciting.”
Jan was working as a sports editor for the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung. In the early days of the book’s development, email and cell phones were nonexistent, and long-distance calls were expensive. Lindsey said, “Jan would write to me on foolscap paper—you know the newsroom paper that yellows on Wednesday if you write on it on Monday. He would mail these ideas and I’d help with the structure, and we kept noodling with it until it fell into place.”
It didn’t take long for Reid to write the book. Less than two years after the Texas Monthly article appeared, in 1974, the book was in print.
“It was hard to promote anything in those days,” recalled Lindsey. “Joyce and I went to a lot of concerts and handed out flyers promoting the book. We went to Willie’s College Station Picnic. There was a tunnel that ran under the highway between the parking field and the concert stage field. We stood in that tunnel and handed out thousands of flyers to everyone coming through the tunnel moving toward the stage. After the music started, we walked out of the tunnel to listen to the music and found every flyer we had handed out—on the ground. It was disheartening. Despite what they considered failed promotions, the book was a financial success for Reid and for Heidelberg Press.
“Redneck Rock,” Lindsey recalled the origins of the title. “Our publishing office was in a garage apartment in our backyard. We had business meetings in the driveway. Jan and I bounced around with titles for a few days. Then he drove over one afternoon and said, ‘I think I have it. The something-something-something…. Of… Redneck Rock.’”
Lindsey added, “Redneck is a word that is still around. Recently, I had to go to a funeral in Odessa (Texas) and stopped west of San Angelo for gas. The guy paying in front of me had ‘I’m a Redneck and Proud of it’ tattooed on his neck. West Texas never changes. I have always felt like it was the right word for the book.”
Who knew that title—and what Jan wrote about music and hippies and bars—along with what he didn’t write—would stir up trouble?
The Controversies
[Jan Reid] comes in here talking about how I run a beer joint…quoted a junkie about how I’m trying to operate to keep alive. And it’s in hardback so it’s history; there ain’t nothing we can do about it… You go to the library in ten years. And if you’re in the eighth grade and you’re writing a paper on the Austin music scene, and you pull that book out… it’s history.
–Eddie Wilson, Owner,
Armadillo World Headquarters
In conversation with Michael Martin Murphey
When The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock was published in 1974, it was not without controversy. The first, and likely most memorable, was when Michael (not yet using his middle name) Murphey objected. “He was mad about a lot of things. He didn’t think I had the credentials to write a book about him or any other musician,” Reid recalled, “and he didn’t want anything to do with rednecks. He was on the verge of separating himself from the cosmic cowboy scene and moving toward, I guess, a more sophisticated audience.”
Michael Murphey threatened to sue for his picture being on the cover, because he didn’t like being described as “redneck.” Reid laughed as he recalled how that happened: “Willie (Nelson) was slated for the original cover, but the day Melinda (Wickman-Swearingen) went to shoot the cover, Willie had just shaved his beard and cut his hair and looked just like Elmer Fudd. We didn’t have time to wait for his hair to grow back so we went with a photo of Michael that Melinda had taken at a show.”
A year after the book was published, Reid wrote in the Texas Folklore Society’s publication:
I anticipated some adverse reaction to the title, but not too much. Redneck was a pejorative born of class ethics, not ethnicity… A harsher term of similar meaning was “poor white trash.” I quickly found, however, that many young people were extremely sensitive to the term. When the book was published, (Murphey) demanded either a new title or else another likeness on the dust jacket.”
Reid said that the lowest point came when he was a guest on a radio program in San Antonio. The drift of a young caller’s argument was that rock music was sacrosanct and ought to remain separate from rednecks and their terrible country music. Obviously disgusted, he asked, “And don’t you think that title’s kind of—offensive?”
Reid said, “I weakly replied that I could only speak for myself.”
“Well, I think you’re an idiot,” the caller said, and hung up.
Eddie Wilson, whom Reid refers to in a later edition of the book as “the most important and enduring businessman and champion Austin music ever had,” disputed the way Reid described him and his business in the first edition of the book. But Wilson wrote in his 2018 memoir, “All in all, he treated me fairly… I did get treated pretty well in the book.”
For a while, rumors swirled about Murphey filing a lawsuit to have The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock cease publication and be removed from bookstores, citing the publisher’s lack of permission to use his image on the cover. The lawsuit never materialized but the undercurrent managed to fuel even more interest in the book.
Bobby Earl Smith, attorney, and pioneer of the Austin music scene, was one of the founders of Freda and the Firedogs, a popular dancehall band around during that era. “It’s easy to see looking back,” Smith said. “Whatever you were immersed in appeared to be the entire world of Austin music. There were wheels within wheels in the music scene, but in the middle of it, you only see what you see. And Jan was focused on what I would call the folk contingent. Those folk singers, and a few rock musicians, saw what was happening in Austin, so they put together a band with a steel guitar and a fiddle, and bought a cowboy hat. My blues friends called it the progressive country scare.”
“A lot of us were mad about the book because of what he didn’t write about. I was a pissant. I was complaining to anyone who would listen about Jan getting it all wrong. He didn’t feature Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys. He didn’t write about Freda and the Firedogs. We were not in the book. I got really mad, and real fast. We (Freda and the Firedogs) were making a mark. We signed a contract with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, who was in Austin trying to capture this new sound. He wanted Freda and the Firedogs. Our great sin of omission was that we kept Wexler waiting at the altar too long. It was only about seven or eight weeks, but during that interim he fell out of favor with the label and his Austin experiment fell apart. Our contract was lost in the shuffle. Still, we should have been more than a one-line mention in that first book. I picked the book apart. It wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t right. I was telling everyone that the facts were there, but were like a jungle, like pick-up sticks. If you tease one out, the others will fall.”
“It got back to Jan, and he ran into me at the YMCA, and said, ‘I hear you know something about facts.’ And I felt stupid. I realized this was the new journalism of the 1970s. Looking for the truth of the matter is sometimes more important than the fact of the matter. The chaff falls away when you sift the wheat. And, well, you know, I have a real history of being wrong,” he laughed.
Four incarnations of The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock later, Smith admits that memory is a funny thing. “It skips around like a rock across water over the years. Today we know that Jan Reid was really important to what we were trying to do,” he said.
Many magazines and newspapers were covering Austin music; the Austin Sun and Picking Up the Tempo, among them; with writers like Chet Flippo, Joe Nick Patoski, Joe Gracey, and Townsend Miller covering the front lines of the new sound, but Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock was the only book. And that book served to confirm that this new sound was a reality.
Joe Nick Patoski has reviewed or blurbed each edition of the book. He said, “I wrote two reviews of the book in the Austin Sun. The first (1974) was glowing. The second (1977) received a less kind review. As ambitious as it was, I said that Jan got it wrong. He did not see what was going on. Now, I can look back and say that it is as close to the Bible as anything that has been written. There still hasn’t been another book that has tried to cover that subject to that degree—the country/rock/progressive/whatever-you-want-to-call-it shift.”
Writers and musicians who witnessed that scene agree that Jan’s book made a difference. It imprinted the legitimacy of this new sound that everyone had been talking about, and journalists had been chronicling in other, less permanent forms. There is something important about books. They flourish and last.
The Early Years
A succinct profile of Reid’s early background can be found in his introduction to The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. He expands on his background in a collection of essays in 2000, Close Calls, and his 2002 memoir, The Bullet Meant for Me. His words flow effortlessly as they tell the story quickly and with candor.
Jan Reid was a native Texan, born in the Abilene hospital in the spring of 1945. When he was four, his family moved to Wichita Falls, where he grew into what he described as an “accidental journalist.”
“I was a reader growing up in North Texas,” Reid wrote. “It beat hoeing the flowerbeds.” J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye brought his first experience of staying up all night to finish a book. A college freshman at his hometown university, he admits having little in common with the protagonist, but was at once struck by the phrasing and dialogue and was “moved to my bones.”
After several false starts in college, (football coach, economist, lawyer, historian), Reid decided he wanted “a glimpse of the 1960s Promised Land, California.” So, he joined the Marine Corps Reserves. “I woke up with my head shaved in San Diego, hearing the warbling menace of drill instructors and drum beat of marching boots and thought, pal, you’re going to make some mistakes in life, but this one’s a doozy.”
The reserves saved him from the draft, for which he is still grateful, and after sitting out the Vietnam War defending Abilene, Texas, Reid continued plodding through college, and working construction and other odd jobs, until finally in his last semester, he signed up for a creative writing class. “I finally found something I wanted to do. Something I thought I could do,” he said.
A young Larry McMurtry, only nine years older than Reid, was setting the woods on fire with his novels and essays, only twenty miles from Wichita Falls, in Archer City, Texas. McMurtry made this writing dream seem doable. His characters were recognizable. His books were about familiar ground. And people were reading them. Most impressive of all, his books were being made into movies featuring some of the big stars of the day.
Reid wrote, “My stock was rooted in the same red soil, though my elders were farmers and wildcat oilmen, not cattle ranchers. I didn’t meet McMurtry for another twenty years and have never been able to say I know him. But it was impossible not to be influenced by him.”
Reid was 23 when he graduated from Midwestern State University and left Wichita Falls. He moved to Dallas, stumbling around a city he described as stifling. He found work as a copywriter for an insurance agency and spent his nights working on a novel about an unhappy young man driven to political assassination. The subject was still a fresh wound in Dallas. It was 1968 and had only been five years since the Kennedy assassination. He admitted “Thank God it never saw print. But I learned something important. Trying to write a novel made me feel uneducated. I hadn’t read enough to be a writer.”
In the summer of 1970, Reid moved to Austin to begin graduate school in American Studies at The University of Texas. After a year, he was an academic burnout, slogging through the novels of Henry James. “The books that moved me were McMurtry’s essays, In A Narrow Grave, and the Willie Morris memoir, North Toward Home. John Graves’ Goodbye to a River was right up there with them. They had relevance.”
Despite a few wrong directions along the way, finally, with a bachelor’s degree from Midwestern, and a master’s degree from the University of Texas (1972), Reid set out to chronicle and defend Texas culture, landing in a celebrated career of tilting at windmills for the nearly five decades.
He made his way through the sports desks at a couple of small-town weekly newspapers (the Mount Pleasant Tribune and the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung). But he wanted more. A visit with the editor of Texas Parks and Wildlife redirected him to the front door of a startup magazine called Texas Monthly that was said to be seeking young and hungry contributing writers.
Jan Reid and Texas Monthly
Music was not the only art to redefine itself in Texas in the early 1970s. Twenty-six-year-old Michael R. Levy had graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and earned a law degree from the University of Texas. Along the way, he had been a stringer for United Press International and was on the desk when Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower and earned his 96 minutes of infamy. Levy worked at the Dallas County Jail, drove a taxi, sold advertising for Philadelphia Magazine, and worked on Texas Senator Oscar Mauzy’s staff. And in 1973, he started his own magazine.
“I wanted to create a community magazine. And the community was Texas. The neighborhoods were Dallas, Houston, Wichita Falls, San Marcos…. A community where everybody knows everybody. And I figured that if we put out a magazine of national quality for Texas, we’d have a shot at success. It worked. If you look at when Jan began working at the magazine, and the people who came together at that time, it was sort of like God wanted there to be a magazine with this great assemblage of talent. Not only were these people incredibly talented, but they also had great hearts and souls. I wanted them to be staff writers, so they could concentrate on our stories, instead of worrying about their next gig, like a freelancer has to do. And we gave these writers the opportunity to do longform journalism.
Texas Monthly won a National Magazine Award in its first year and has gone on to earn fourteen more National Magazine Awards, putting it on a level playing field with The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair.
Before long, true to Levy’s dream, the early Texas Monthly writers were a close-knit group, Reid recalled, “complete with family drama.”
Romance, influences, mentors, and lifelong friendships grew from those early years of Texas Monthly. Michael Levy writes in the foreword to The First Five Years: The Best of Texas Monthly, “This volume contains only a sampling of what I consider to have been some of the best journalism published anywhere.”
But Reid’s initial introduction to Texas Monthly was less than welcoming. “I went up to the office, and Levy came out and snatched my file from my hand, and just left me standing there. And that was it. I had a high school football game to cover that night, so I went back home to New Braunfels. But soon after that, I got a note from Greg Curtis. He was the number two over there, behind Bill Broyles. I knew who they were. He and Broyles had been star students of Larry McMurtry’s at Rice (University). Greg had read my file and sent me a note that said ‘What you left here, we can’t use for various reasons. But if you have any other ideas, get back in touch with us.’”
Less than a week later, his first Texas Monthly story literally ran through town. Reid recalled his big break. “Some losers had held up an icehouse in San Antonio, and immediately ran a red light and got the police after them. By the time they got to New Braunfels, literally every cop within 45 miles had entered the bullet-riddled freeway chase. The robbers missed a curve and rolled over in front of the construction site for the new Canyon High School. They had a Bonnie and Clyde scene with more than 120 bullet holes in the driver’s door and a couple of dozen shots into the new high school building.”
The bad guys died. The good guys headed back to the New Braunfels city hall to get their stories straight, an evening that allegedly turned into a poker and bourbon party lasting well into the morning, and Texas Monthly published Reid’s first contribution in their third issue: “The Get Away That Didn’t Last.” (May 1973). This would be Reid’s first of more than fifty major stories and features to grace the pages and cover of Texas Monthly through the years.
Six months after his Texas Monthly debut, “The Coming of Redneck Hip” marked Reid’s first longform feature in the November 1973 issue. He wrote of this new country rock hybrid sound that was coming out of Austin, chronicling the migration of seasoned musicians flocking into the capitol city.
As he wrote about the first financial music festival disaster that was the Dripping Springs Reunion festival in 1972, Reid knew he was onto something more. He introduced Armadillo World Headquarters owner Eddie Wilson to a broader audience than the young hippies and old cowboys who stood side by side in the old armory building-turned-music hall in Austin.
He wrote:
(Eddie) Wilson and his music business colleagues stress that any Austin music boom must remain localized. The creation of a music center in Austin would bring millions of dollars into the local economy, millions that would wind up in the pockets of Austin musicians, technicians, artists, and publicists struggling to get by now. Even the environment would benefit. According to Wilson, the music industry, unlike others that a growing Austin might attract, “doesn’t pollute and it doesn’t get in the way visually; about 50 million dollars could be put into the Austin music business and remain invisible.” The stage has been set very nicely, so why not continue? Thus, the music businessmen proceed, caution thrown to the winds.
“It wasn’t just the music,” said Reid. “Austin was becoming a mecca for writers, artists, musicians, poets and even politicians. There was a real scene growing here. There is no doubt about that. This new voice was developing. The first time I heard this new music, Michael Murphey—Michael Martin Murphey—was playing on this slope out in the cedar breaks, called Hill on the Moon. They had a stage, and a good sound system and people could just walk up. They had a poetry reading first, and that was not too good. Then Murphey came on stage with his band and did “Geronimo’s Cadillac,” and it was electrifying. I’d never heard anything like it. Except that I had. It was country, it was gospel, it was rock and roll. It was electrifying country, but closer to rock and roll than Nashville country. It was Austin’s own voice.”
As Reid wrote about Murphey on that stage, he was describing an entire new sound coming out of Austin, “It was like somebody turned a Baptist church into a country-western honky-tonk invaded by hippies. The longer they played, the more evident it became that this was a music in which the instruments took a back seat to the lyrics.”
“It was like somebody turned a Baptist church into a country-western honky-tonk invaded by hippies. The longer they played, the more evident it became that this was a music in which the instruments took a back seat to the lyrics.”
Reid’s Texas Monthly feature painted a vivid picture of this new moment in music, describing it as “Redneck Hip.” A few months later, in the spring of 1973, Reid began writing a book about this new music scene.
The longest-tenured editor of Texas Monthly, (1981–2000) Gregory Curtis was a senior staff writer in 1974. During this interview, he was surprised to hear that any controversy had arisen in the wake of Reid’s book, and had much to say on the subject. “I don’t know what is controversial about the book. I reread it not long ago, when it was reissued (TCU, 2021). I was really impressed, again. Surprised would be the wrong word, but I really did like it.”
“In 1974, Jan knew this was a book when nobody else really did. And he wrote it. He reported it and wrote it and he got it published. And I remember thinking, I’m not sure I would do that, but now I know it was exactly the right thing to do. It was what was going on at that moment. It’s a picture of Austin. My hat was off to Jan as I was reading the latest edition. It is, and it was a book that needed to be written.”
Curtis added, “As for what was in and what was out of the book, okay, you’re going to write about the Austin music scene in the early ’70s, or you’re going to write about the San Francisco music scene in the ’60s, you must make choices and you make your own choices. And other people are free to disagree with them and think, oh, yeah, well, where is this band or that band. But unless it’s some huge omission, for instance, you write the ’60s San Francisco book, and you never mentioned the Grateful Dead, which was the central core of the scene, the writer can pick and choose. And that’s exactly what Jan did. And people might think, well, so and so was important. And back then, we all had to pick and choose who we went to see. If you go out to see X, you are going to miss Y. That’s the choice you had to make.”
Despite whatever controversies have come and gone, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock has withstood the test of time and several incarnations. Heidelberg Press dissolved and Da Capo released a paperback edition in 1977. In 2004, the University of Texas Press issued a 30-year anniversary edition with Scott Newton pictures and substantial additions to the manuscript, followed by the latest edition with additional commentary published in 2021 by TCU Press. These resurrections of The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock have proven it to be among the most definitive studies of this influential moment in Texas music.
Whatever the reason for Reid’s title of the book, one only needs to read the blurbs on the dust jackets of the various editions of The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock for an understanding of its importance to artists, journalists, and historians. Kinky Friedman writes, “Ever wondered why God chose Austin to be the live music capital of the world? Read this book.” In a review for GQ magazine excerpted for the book cover, Robert Draper, another Texas Monthly veteran, writes, “Reid’s book is a classic, and its prescience is a thing of wonder. Today there are literally hundreds of performers who owe their sound if not their very existence to the curious amalgamation Reid captured in his book.”
Jan Reid and Austin City Limits
In 1975, KLRU, Austin’s public television station, transformed from a modest hand-me-down studio filled with outdated equipment and surplus office furniture to a state-of-the-art station with multiple studios and pricy equipment. The program director, Bill Arhos, began looking for new programs to develop and pitch to PBS. Years later, he told Jan, “I got the idea for Austin City Limits from reading your book.”
“What?” Reid asked.
Arhos replied, “What was the most visible cultural product of Austin? It was obvious. It would be like ignoring a rhinoceros in your bathtub.”
“What was the most visible cultural product of Austin? It was obvious. It would be like ignoring a rhinoceros in your bathtub.”
Reid recalled the first year, “They pitched a pilot with Willie that was taped on October 17, 1974. I was not there that night. but I had been at the actual first episode the night before, featuring B. W. Stevenson. There was something wrong with that recording, so they had to use the Willie taping as the pilot during the January pledge drive, and it was so successful that PBS signed on to produce a series.”
Today, more than a half-century later, ACL is the longest running music series in American television history.
After The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock was published in 1974, Reid continued to sculpt a prolific career at Texas Monthly and published several books, fiction and nonfiction, writing, it seems, about everything but music.
In fact, he recalled, “About 25 years after that book came out, someone asked me why I stopped writing about music. It hadn’t occurred to me that it’d been that long. I had written several novels, so I thought about it and realized that the reasons I had stopped writing about music didn’t make sense anymore. So, I started doing some short pieces. The first one was Lyle Lovett. I saw something new and different, but strikingly familiar in him. He opened for John Prine at the Paramount Theatre. Here was this crazy looking guy with that hair, playing country music with a cello. And he sounded a lot like Willis Alan Ramsey. I later learned that that Willis had been among his early influences.”
In 1998, Reid wrote a feature for Texas Monthly entitled, “The Improbable Rise of Lyle Lovett.” They met for the interview in a Manhattan Hotel, on the day of Lovett’s seventh album release. Step Inside This House is a tribute to the Texas songwriters who had influenced Lovett; among them, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Fromholz, Michael Martin Murphey, and Willis Alan Ramsey.
Lovett told Reid, “The first time I encountered these songwriters was reading about them in your book. I learned to play the guitar listening to some of these songs. For me, this record (Step Inside This House) is going back to the beginning. It’s kind of like taking stock and starting over.”
Reid is among a short list of Texas writers who have crossed paths with great moments in Texas history. A study of the life and times of Jan Reid is like the modern parlor game of “Six Degrees of Separation,” and the degrees quickly melt to one or two.
Jan Reid’s body of work can be described in four broad categories, with all paths leading to or from Texas: music, politics, sports, and literature. Reid’s life crossed paths with almost as many politicians as musicians. Politics played as much of a primary role in his writing as other components of Texas culture. He penned magazine features about Texas gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez and revered Texas legislator Bob Eckhardt; and wrote articles that grew into books recounting the tilt of Texas politics, caused in great part by Tom “The Hammer” DeLay and Karl “Boy Genius/Turd Blossom” Rove.
Jan Reid and Politics
A genealogical study of Texas politics in the late twentieth century finds Reid swinging from several branches of the tree—and writing about those wild years when liberals ran free and ran Texas. Reid’s mentor, Billy Lee Brammer, was married to Nadine, who later married Texas liberal patriarch Bob Eckhardt, a strong legislator about whom Reid wrote one of his most reactive Texas Monthly articles.
Reid’s longtime friend and romantic interest in the 1970s, Shelby Hearon, was writing the Barbara Jordan memoir (Barbara Jordan: A Self Portrait, Knopf/Doubleday 1979) during the time she and Jan were living together.
In 1980, Jan Reid was introduced to Dorothy Browne by novelist and former Dallas Cowboy receiver Peter Gent at a party. Gent introduced her as Dorothy Brammer, but she announced that she was through changing her name to those of men, and from then on was going to use her family name. Jan and Dorothy soon realized that the rest of their lives were meant to be spent together. They were married on July 4, 1982, and were together for 37 years, until her death in 2019.
Browne’s daughter, Lila Reid Vance, (who legally added Reid to her name to honor her stepfather) said, “Jan came into my life through my mom. I was eight when they got married, so I was about six when they started dating. I didn’t meet him at first, because I spent weekends with my dad, but when I did, I instantly felt comfortable with him. What really stuck with me was that they really had a wonderful love affair along with a very modern marriage. My mom worked hard, and Jan was home writing. He would pick me up from school and take me where I needed to go.”
“When Jan died, I kept reading these tributes about him, and how he was so soft spoken and gentle and calm, and all these things. And I kept thinking that obviously, those people were never teenagers living in the same house with him. I tried his and my mom’s patience for a few years. When I was about 15, Jan and I were having an argument, and I told him he was ugly and stupid and boring. He quickly came back with “I’m okay with the first two, but boring?’” she recalled with a laugh, adding that, as teenagers will do, she outgrew that phase of rebellion, apologized for words he had long since forgotten, and she and Jan remained close throughout his life.
“After my mom died in December of 2019, Jan and I pledged that we would go out to more concerts and do things together. I was newly divorced, and he said he would be my wingman. He really helped me through that time. We went out to see (songwriter) Terry Allen, and then we saw Delbert McClinton at the Paramount on March 7, 2020. The next week, everything shut down with COVID, and he died in September of that year.”
When he passed away, he willed his home, and his beloved collie, Biscuit, to Lila, which she says, tearfully, “was life-changing for me.”
When she married Jan, Dorothy Browne had been working for the Texas Civil Liberties Union. Ann Richards was elected Texas State Treasurer, and Dorothy went to work managing correspondence and researching policy for Richards. She followed Richards’ trajectory and was named associate director of the Texas Criminal Justice Division -Office of the Governor by newly elected Governor Ann Richards, with whom both Dorothy and Jan developed a longtime friendship. And that friendship led to his definitive biography, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards.
“It’s hard to say where that book begins,” Reid said. “Ann was 47, the first time I saw her in 1985. She had just come home from rehab, ‘Whiskey Tech’ as she called it. We became good friends. When she died, Evan (Smith) called and asked me to write the memoriam for Texas Monthly. That surprised me because I was not one of (Texas Monthly’s) political writers. But I was her friend.”
That article led to a rich, full-bodied story that is as much as story of twentieth century Texas in its glory years as a biography of a leader. Reid spent more than three years researching and chronicling this epic journey. “The University of Texas Press came up with the money and asked for 8,000 words. Sixteen thousand words later, the book was pretty much done at something more than 450 pages. I am sorry I didn’t get to do more about the New York years. But it was already twice as long as we had expected. In the manuscript, I was on page 200, and had not even gotten her to Dallas yet. David Richards, her former husband helped a lot. Bud (Shrake, Richards’ longtime companion) got sick before we had a conversation about this, and he was racing to finish his last novel,” Reid recalled.
Despite Reid’s second thoughts about what he left out, all that he managed to squeeze into the book makes for quite a story. Reid’s fiction writing talents coupled with Ann’s not-so-storybook life make for a biography that is hard to put down. More than a biography or memoir, this book is as much about the Times of Ann Richards (1933-2006) as it is about the Life of the former governor. Reid’s Texas roots, cultural instinct, and political savvy are evident throughout the project.
Through his career and life, Reid remained a fan of sports and politics. Of music and of Texas.
“I’m not a music writer. I am not a political writer. I am not a sportswriter,” Reid said. As we ended one of our last visits, I asked how he would describe himself. We were sitting in his home-office in the hills of West Austin amid stacks of books and piles of paper, projects in various stages of completion. He leaned forward in his worn, wooden desk chair and fiddled with his cane, for a moment before saying, “I guess I’m just a writer.”
Just a writer—who was improbably lucky.
