Willie Nelson's Luck, Texas Ranch

Just west of Austin on the Pedernales River, Willie Nelson owns a private ranch that also contains Luck, Texas — a genuine if tiny ghost town he built as a Western movie set in the 1980s and has used ever since as a filming location, recording retreat, and annual festival ground. Luck consists of a handful of frontier-style buildings: a saloon, a general store, a church, a jail, and several storefronts arranged around a dusty main street that has stood in for small-town Texas in films including Red Headed Stranger (1986), which Nelson himself starred in.

Once a year, during South by Southwest, Nelson opens Luck to the public for the Luck Reunion — an all-day music festival that brings together Americana, country, and folk artists in an intimate setting that no festival venue in the country can replicate. Tickets sell out within hours, and the lineup tends toward artists Nelson personally admires: idiosyncratic, road-worn, decidedly uncommercial. The rest of the year, Luck is closed to the public; the ranch is private property and Nelson's principal residence when he is not touring.

The town's name — almost certainly an intentional joke — appears on official Texas highway maps and has its own zip code. It is a characteristically Nelsonian creation: absurdist, self-sufficient, deeply personal, and more authentically Texan than most things built to look that way. For fans making a pilgrimage through Texas country music geography, the drive out US-290 past Luck is a ritual, even if the town itself remains just out of reach.