Lee Roy, Speed, West Texas, and Bob

Photographer Western Doughty captures a gonzo road trip

On May 26, 2013, photographer Western Doughty received an excited 4 a.m. phone call from his friend, the late historian and journalist Lee Roy Chapman. Years earlier, Chapman and Marcos Matheos had found the original tour bus of Bob Wills—the King of Western Swing and iconic godfather of Cain's Ballroom—in Big Spring, Texas. Chapman was well known for his exceptional ability to sniff out obscure and forgotten pieces of Tulsa history, and one of his ongoing missions was to locate the bus and find a way to get it back to Tulsa. Now, it was finally happening. Chapman had made a deal with Tulsa businessman Loren Frederick, who financed the purchase and agreed to send Chapman down to negotiate the details with the owner. Chapman called Doughty to share the good news—and to ask for a ride.

"When?" Doughty asked, thinking the road trip would likely be planned in the next few weeks.

"What are you doing now?" Chapman replied.

“My mom’s from down there, and I thought ‘why not?’” Doughty says now. He grabbed his camera and took a bunch of speed to survive the impromptu journey on no sleep, and a few hours later, the two were strapped into Doughty's beat-up '97 Acura with no struts and only one working window, careening southbound, smoking cigars and laughing like mad men. 

Doughty captured the journey on film, creating a gorgeous document of a deepening friendship against the evocative tranquility of the small towns and countryside leading to Big Spring.

Along the way, they stopped in Archer City, home of author Larry McMurtry and his renowned rare-and-used bookstore, Booked Up. 

Archer City was also the shooting location for the 1971 film adaptation of McMurtry’s classic novel, “The Last Picture Show.”

“The movie, Peter Bogdanovich’s visuals, were a huge influence on my photography,” Doughty says.  Shot in lush black and white, the film tells McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical tale of restless youth coming of age in rural Texas. The film opens with an iconic image of Archer City’s Royal movie theatre. The camera slowly pans from the theatre across the desolate street as a windstorm carries leaves and debris across the frame. Doughty shot the theatre while they were there, paying homage with his own black and white image of the landmark and town, which looks remarkably unchanged in the 40-plus years since Bogdanovich’s film. 

When they arrived in Big Spring, they found the storied bus rusting in a field alongside other forgotten vehicles. 

“You see these kind of ramshackle places in Big Spring, [The owner of the bus] has got these cars in these fields, he’s got a trailer for crime scene clean-up,” Doughty says, laughing. “A lot of these guys [in West Texas] are millionaires, but you’d never think they’d be wealthy, they’re so unassuming. But that’s kind of how it is down there. Really interesting place.”  

Doughty was skeptical of the bus’s origin at first. “I was like, ‘are you sure this was Bob Wills’?’” he recalls. “Then we get on the bus. I found a picture of Bob Wills, and I found a gas receipt that he had signed. Nine bucks to fill up a bus.” 

Doughty has curated a selection of these photographs for an exhibit entitled “Lee Roy, Speed, West Texas, and Bob,” which is featured through the end of the month at Mainline Art & Cocktails. The project is an emotionally complex, deeply personal work for Doughty; both his mother and grandfather grew up in Big Spring, and traveling the landscape that bore his family had an unexpected effect on him that he describes as “spiritual.”  He’s also still grieving the recent death of Chapman, who passed away last October. He says this trip marked a turning point in their friendship during which emotional walls came down and they bonded like brothers. The exhibit is, more than anything, a delicate, moving tribute to Chapman’s memory. 

“We challenged each other,” Doughty says. “It was all good, even the bad was good, ya know? My struggle [with this project] was: it’s still too soon for a lot of people. I wanted to be gentle with it. I didn’t want it to mess with the sacredness of what he meant to me. Lee Roy is in one photo, and you’d have to look really hard to find him.” 

For Doughty, the bus was the least significant aspect of the trip, though it’s featured prominently in the exhibit. This dichotomy—putting a visual emphasis on the bus while keeping Chapman and West Texas in the background—is a clue to just how personal this project is for Doughty. He wanted to share the memories, the spirit of the trip, but only so much. He’s kept the most important parts to himself. 

At the end of our interview, Doughty recalls a moment that perfectly sums up the whole trip. The gonzo nature of the experience is capped by an incredible brush with Mother Nature that, like the drugs, the family history, and Chapman himself, is only alluded to in the exhibit, represented by two photos of ominous, beautiful storm clouds. 

On the way back from Big Spring, Doughty and Chapman drove through Amarillo and stopped at The Big Texan, where they gorged on 72-ounce steaks while outside clouds churned and the temperature convulsed. The whole time they’d been in Texas, Oklahoma had been in the throes of an extended tornado outbreak. 

As they hit the road for the last leg of the drive east down I-40, a storm was forming in front of them that would eventually grow into an absolute monster. In an extended moment of poetic divinity, the storm led Doughty and Chapman through Central Oklahoma, a kind of cosmic path-clearing that eventually turned quite literal: the storm produced one of the largest tornados in recorded history, a staggering 2.6 miles wide. Doughty and Chapman rode it.

“Lee Roy and I followed the tornado all the way in.”

For more from Joshua, read his article on Donald Trump's rally in Tulsa.