The horses at Willie Nelson’s place graze around a saloon, a chapel and an opera house that were never meant to last. They were built as a Western movie town in the 1980s, and the 93-year-old country singer has turned the land around them into a refuge for horses that were headed for slaughter.
Nelson calls the property Luck. He likes the joke that comes with it: “When you’re here, you’re in Luck, and when you’re not, you’re out of Luck.”
From slaughter line to hand-feeding
More than 70 horses were living on his Texas Hill Country ranch when Nelson gave a television interview in 2019, and he said most of them had been rescued before they could be sold for slaughter. He described the herd in typically dry terms.
“My horses are probably the luckiest horses in the world,” Nelson said. “They get hand-fed twice a day, and they were just ready to go to slaughter is probably the last thing they remembered, so they’re happy horses.”
He drove the interviewer around the pastures in his old pickup, which is how he prefers to see the place. Accounts of the ranch’s size differ: Nelson’s 2019 tour put it at 700 acres, while a 2024 profile of the town by the people who run it described a 500-acre ranch shared by rescue horses and a regenerative farm. Either way, it sits about 30 miles west of Austin, next to the community of Briarcliff.
A town built for one film
The buildings came first. Nelson spent years trying to film Red Headed Stranger, a Western based on his 1975 concept album. Universal once green-lit it with a $14 million budget and wanted Robert Redford in the lead; Nelson and writer-director William D. Wittliff eventually bought the script back and made the picture themselves for $1.8 million.
The main set, nicknamed “Willieville,” went up across the road from Nelson’s golf course over roughly two years. Cameras rolled there on April 29, 1985, which happened to be Nelson’s 52nd birthday, and the shoot wrapped on June 14. In the film the street plays Driscoll, Montana, where Nelson’s preacher takes on a family that controls the water supply.
The set then doubled as Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the miniseries Lonesome Dove, and later hosted other shoots, weddings and a long run of music videos.
How the set nearly fell down
Movie towns are mostly fronts, and this one aged badly. A former Nelson employee recalled horses wandering the main street past broken sidewalks and waist-high grass. A tornado in the 1990s flattened the original saloon, and a 2014 storm took out more buildings and forced a full rebuild of the two-story hotel that serves as Nelson’s private clubhouse, which he calls Luck World Headquarters.
The property’s timeline, in order:
- 1979: Nelson buys the nearby Pedernales Country Club.
- 1985: filming of Red Headed Stranger begins on the new Western street.
- 1990s: a tornado destroys the original saloon.
- 2012: about 700 people turn up for the first concert at Luck during South by Southwest.
- 2014: a storm forces the hotel and clubhouse to be rebuilt.
- 2019 onward: the Opry House is restored, with the chapel next in line.
That first concert grew into the annual Luck Reunion festival, which organizers say now draws about 4,000 people. That works out to nearly six times the 2012 crowd (4,000 divided by 700 is about 5.7), all squeezed onto a street built for a single film shoot 41 years ago.
Still his favorite hangout
Matt Bizer, who co-founded the group that manages the town, said Nelson still sometimes drives his pickup into Luck when he is home and plays poker late into the night at the clubhouse. “We don’t want to interfere with Willie’s vibe,” Bizer said.
The horses also made it into his music. In that 2019 interview he said his feeling for them went into a song called “Ride Me Back Home,” recorded for a CD due out that summer.
As for slowing down, Nelson has a standing answer. “I retire after every show,” he said, before explaining that the band always ends up wanting to play again, so back on the road they go.
Further reading
Image: BSC Photgraphy, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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