From the Logbook: Guy Clark, Rockport's Songwriter

Some towns get a courthouse hero. Some get a football legend. Rockport got something rarer: a songwriter other songwriters still measure themselves against. Guy Clark, the craftsman's craftsman of American music, the man Nashville called a master and Texas called its own - grew up right here on this Texas Coast.

The Boy Who Came to the Water

Guy Charles Clark was born in 1941 in Monahans, way out in the West Texas oil patch, in his grandmother's thirteen-room shotgun hotel. The legend goes, the lobby was full of bomber pilots, drifters, and an old wildcatter named Jack Prigg.. the man who'd one day be immortalized in "Desperados Waiting for a Train," one of the most beloved songs in the American canon.

But it was Rockport that raised him. In 1954, after his father finished law school, the Clarks moved to the Gulf, and Guy came of age in this pretty little beach town. He wasn't hiding in his room with a guitar, either. He was captain and center of the Rockport-Fulton football team. Junior class president. Debate standout, science fair winner, school-play actor, yearbook illustrator. And somewhere between the bay breeze and the boat docks, he fell in love with Mexican folk songs and flamenco guitar.

He graduated in 1960 and lit out for Houston's folk scene, where he'd meet Townes Van Zandt and begin one of music's great friendships. Los Angeles came next, then Nashville, where he and his wife Susanna opened their home to a generation of writers - Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris and helped invent what we now call Americana.

But the Coast Never Left Him

You can hear Rockport all through Guy's catalog. "The South Coast of Texas" is a love letter to this exact shoreline - the shrimpers, the bays, the hard and beautiful work of a waterfront town. He gave a whole album that name in 1981, and no one has ever written this coast better.

"Boats to Build" turns the boatwright's patience into a philosophy of living: take your time, measure true, build something that holds. That wasn't a borrowed metaphor. Guy was a working luthier who built his own guitars by hand his whole life, and it's hard not to trace that maker's soul back to a boyhood spent around the boatyards and bay docks of Aransas County. "Texas 1947," his memory of a whole town turning out to watch a streamliner roar through, captures the small-town Texas he knew in his bones.. ordinary days holding a little wonder.

He wrote the way the boat builders here work: no wasted motion, nothing for show, everything true.

A Legacy That Came Home

Guy Clark died in 2016, a Grammy winner, a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer, a north star for everyone from Lyle Lovett to Chris Stapleton. And in the end, Rockport claimed him right back. There's a statue of Guy in Fulton now, guitar in hand, looking out over the coast that shaped him. The Rockport Center for the Arts throws a festival in his honor, and his songs still drift out of open truck windows along Water Street.

Not bad for the kid who once led the Rockport Pirates onto the field on Friday nights.

Hear It for Yourself

Next time you're staying with us at Reel 'em Inn, put on Old No. 1, The South Coast of Texas, or our favorite Dublin Blues and take a slow golf cart ride along the harbor at golden hour. Watch the shrimp boats come in. Listen to the rigging clink against the masts.

Our goal is to hear exactly what Guy heard. Some things about this coast don't change and thanks to him, they never will.

Guy Clark Family Foundation

“If I knew where good songs came from, I'd go there more often.”

– Guy Charles Clark