Matt

Written by Quillbilly contributor Matthew Kerns

Texas Jack

"I Watched Him Ride Out of Sight"

On October 30, 1912, the Jacksonville Journal ran a small human-interest piece tied to a large piece of news: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had broken up for the season. As it often did, the great traveling show was dispersing for the winter, its performers and employees scattering across the

Buffalo Soldiers

Buffalo Soldier Henry Johnson & the Meeker Incident

In 1879, the simmering tensions between the Ute people and the U.S. government finally boiled over in northwestern Colorado. At the center of the conflict was Nathan Meeker, an idealistic Indian Agent who believed he could force the Utes to abandon their nomadic culture for farming and fences. When

Author

Full Circle Moment

Back in August of 2017, I made the trip to Cody, Wyoming, for the Buffalo Bill Centennial Symposium at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. I had just finished the first draft of my book on Texas Jack Omohundro and was trying to find a publisher. That evening’s

WonTone Records

Pipeliner Blues — Del Ray Hillian

By the time Del Ray Hillian recorded “Pipeliner Blues” in 1973, the song had already lived several lives. It began as a Moon Mullican number back in the forties—one of those rib-tickling, hip-swinging hillbilly boogies that Moon could toss off between gospel sets and beer-joint romps. Mullican sang it

WonTone Records

Alabama Enough

Nobody ever accused Del Ray Hillian of subtlety. A native of Sand Mountain, Alabama, Hillian was raised on a steady diet of gospel hymns, Alabama football, and southern cooking. When he signed to WonTone Records in the mid-1970s, the label hoped to capture the outlaw-country energy spilling out of Texas

Current Events

Robert Redford

Robert Redford, one of Hollywood’s true icons, has died at 89. For more than half a century he embodied the golden era of American cinema, shaping not just what movies looked like, but how America saw itself. Redford’s career spanned genres, but time and again he returned to

RIP

RIP Graham Greene

Graham Greene has walked on. The Oneida First Nations actor, who was good in every role he inhabited, died this week at the age of 73. For more than four decades, Greene gave voice and weight to characters who might otherwise have been forgotten. He was nominated for an Academy

Books

Book Review: A Most Noted Man

Azariah Wild. It’s one of the great names of the Wild West. But even most serious students of American history have either never heard of him, or have heard of him only in connection with Billy the Kid, to whom he offered a deal. In the fall of 1880,

History

Conflict, Coffee, and Courage: Texas Jack & the Nez Perce in Yellowstone, 1877

It was supposed to be a fun summer trip to Yellowstone National Park, but then tragedy struck. And that's when Texas Jack rode in. In August of 1877, George Cowan and his wife Emma decided to spend their second wedding anniversary camping in Yellowstone Park. George, 35 years

Music

Take Two, They're Small

Yesterday I posted one of my tongue-in-cheek “WonTone Records” write-ups about Losing Her By Fractions (One Fifth at a Time). My dad commented that it reminded him of a song my grandfather, Lee Jackson Cooper, wrote with Dalton Roberts. So of course I went digging—and in mere minutes stumbled

Music

Losing Her By Fractions - Del Ray Hillian

Del Ray Hillian was born and raised on Sand Mountain, Alabama, a hard plateau where the air is thick with both history and humidity. His reputation as a songwriter was always for lyrics that cut straight to the bone. A former gospel tenor who fell in with the barroom circuit

History

The Boy Fiend & The Blame Game

In March of 1874, Bostoners began whispering about a missing girl. Her name was Katie Mary Curran, just ten years old, daughter of John and Mary. She'd left home one morning to buy a school notebook and never came back. Posters went up. A $500 reward was offered

Food and Drink

A Succulent Chinese Meal

The other day a new restaurant opened in Chattanooga. Ox2 Buns & Noodles. It’s wedged between Best Buy, Hamilton Liquor, and Fresh Market, out near Hamilton Place. I’d eaten there back when it was one of those Chinese places indistinguishable from the next, the kind with laminated menus,

History

Will Rogers Was America(n)

Will Rogers, who died on this day in 1935, was the very definition of American. Born to a Cherokee Nation family in Oologah, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Rogers joked that though his ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, they "met the boat." Dog Iron Ranch,

Music

Albums I Like — Sophisticated Giant by Dexter Gordon

Dexter Gordon had been gone for a long time—14 years in Europe, mostly in Copenhagen and Paris. So when he finally came back to the States in the mid-1970s, it wasn’t just a return—it was a homecoming. Live sets of his triumphant return to the Village Vanguard

Personal

The Ballad of James Killingsworth

Back in the early Aughts, I worked for a company called ARS, and Brad York was my right-hand man. Brad and I sat across from each other with four or five other people in a dingy little office that had once been the card room of a golf course clubhouse,

Wilderness

Bison & Cougars & Bears! (And Lies)

You may have seen the picture. The road leading away from Yellowstone National Park is impassable, crowded with grizzly bears fleeing the area. Accompanying the picture is an explanation that park officials believe that "they know something we don't," suggesting the imminent eruption of the supervolcano

History

The Man Who Made The West Wild

149 years ago, on August 2nd, 1876, Jack McCall walked into Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, drew his Colt Single Action, yelled "Damn you! Take that!", and shot James Butler Hickok in the back of the head. Wild Bill was dead before he

Environment

What We Stand to Lose at Dinosaur

There’s a photo in a family photo album, from way back when you took a thing called film to a place called a photomat, where they did a thing called developing said film, and you put a physical copy of the resulting photograph in a book where your mom

Pop Culture

The Mundane Hulk

When I heard that Hulk Hogan died, I didn’t think about Terry Bollea. I thought about being seven years old, sitting too close to the TV, watching WrestleMania III. I thought about the way Hogan’s music hit—"Real American" crackling through grainy speakers—and how the

Education

What We Were Taught

Today I got this meme in a text from a friend. One of those internet declarations that gets passed around like gospel: “School never taught us how to do our taxes, but we sure learned how to square dance.” My first thought—and the response I sent in the group