Sign Up  /  Login

Shoot Low, Sheriff! LbNA #37846 (ARCHIVED)

Owner:Boots Tex
Plant date:Mar 1, 2008
Location:
City:Bastrop
County:Bastrop
State:Texas
Boxes:1
Found by: Mosaic Butterfly
Last found:Apr 26, 2010
Status:FFFFFFFFFFFFFFaaF
Last edited:Mar 1, 2008
**Confirmed Missing**

Bob Wills was a true Texas treasure. He was born March 6, 1905, at the Moss Springs Community,  near Kosse, Texas in Limestone County. He was instrumental, no pun intended, in creating a new art form called Western Swing and for over four decades influenced American popular music in general and country and western in particular. Reared in poverty among unlettered white and black musicians who expressed their deepest emotions in music, he learned to perform and compose from his heart and soul. Like those musicians, he was concerned more with musical feeling than with musical propriety.  He can often be heard above the music, yelling inanities such as “Shoot Low, Sheriff, He’s Ridin’ a Shetland!” This folk environment contributed to Wills' uninhibited, free, experimental, and often radical approach to music that put him years ahead of his time. Just how far ahead he really was is evident in the fact that his music appealed to both the age of jazz and swing era and continues to be popular in these times of rock and country and western. Bob Wills began his career as a fiddler in 1915 and ended it at a recording session for United Artist fifty-eight years later, in 1973. He made his first record in 1929 and his last forty-four years later.  His band, The Texas Playboys, was one of the most successful bands of his time, often out-drawing pop bands like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. Between his first session and his last, he made over five hundred and fifty recordings. From the horse and carriage to the space age, from the telephone to telstar, from the model T Ford to President Gerald R. Ford, few performers, in music or any other art, have appealed to the public through such a vast and changing period in history. How he and his music could sustain this response for over a half a century is a human as well as a musical enigma. He died in 1975 in Fort Worth.

Directions:
This letterbox is hidden at South Shore Park at Lake Bastrop in Bastrop, Texas. From Bastrop, go north on Hwy. 21 one mile past Bastrop State Park and look for the signs to South Shore Park. Enter the park and pay your fee. Turn right at the first park road towards the camping area.

To the box:
Park in the parking lot between camping site no. 1 and the maintenance road. There's a covered sitting area there. Take the trail into the woods and go right at the intersection. You'll soon come to a road that goes off to the maintenance building to your right. From there, count 150 steps and stop. Look into the woods to your left and you will find a large, leaning old oak tree about 10 steps into the woods. Walk to it and you will see that it is split from top to botton. Inside the tree, you will find the box, about 18" from the ground, supported and hidden by a good-size stick. When you finish with the box, please place it back in the tree and make sure the stick is back in position to do its job. Thanks.