Watch: Luke Bell playing a song on this Cody, Wyoming street corner

Luke Bell was filmed performing on a street corner in downtown Cody, Wyoming -- almost certainly on or near Sheridan Avenue, the main street of the small Western city that was part of his home territory. The footage captures him doing what he did best: playing his guitar and singing on a public corner, no stage, no PA, just the song and the voice and whoever stopped to listen. The image of Bell on a Cody street corner is entirely consistent with his persona and his approach -- a man who had no interest in the machinery of the music industry and considerable interest in the direct transaction between a song and a listener.

Cody is a city of about 10,000 people in northwest Wyoming, at the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It has the character of a genuine Western town rather than a tourist imitation of one: working ranches, rodeos, a hardware store, bars where the regulars have been coming for thirty years. Bell grew up in Wyoming and identified with its landscape and culture to a degree that went beyond branding; his songs about the West had the specificity of someone who had actually been cold on a horse in the mountains, actually drunk in the bars along Sheridan Avenue.

The footage of Bell on the Cody street corner has become part of the small but growing archive of material through which his fans try to understand what was lost when he died in Tucson in August 2022. He was 32 years old. The corner on Sheridan Avenue in Cody -- the Buffalo Bill statues, the wooden facades, the mountains visible at the end of the street -- is freely accessible to anyone who wants to stand where he stood.