Traces of Texas reader Travis Sawyer kindly shared this photo of the grave of Jack Prigg in the Monahans Memorial Cemetery in Monhans, Texas. Who was Jack Prigg? If you've heard Guy Clark's great song "Desperados Waiting for a Train," you've heard about Jack, even if you didn't realize it at the time. Jack Prigg was an old West Texas oilman who lived at the Clark Hotel, the 13-room hotel run by Guy’s grandmother, Rossie Clark, in Monahans. Guy described him variously as a wildcatter, an oil-well driller, and, with a grin, his grandmother’s boyfriend. During World War II, while Guy’s father was away in the Army, Prigg became the principal older male figure in young Guy’s life, essentially the grandfather he never otherwise knew. Jack had spent decades in the oil business, and Guy later described him as a weathered, worldly character who had drilled wells with old cable-tool rigs and worked for Gulf Oil. Guy remembered going with him to oil fields, pool halls and taverns, and even witnessing a well blow in, spraying oil while Jack scrambled around the rig. He took Guy for haircuts and to cowboy movies, taught him to drive, and generally treated him as a grandson. Years later, when teenage Guy began playing guitar, the two would sit in the hotel kitchen. Jack particularly loved the song “Red River Valley,” and Guy remembered the old man tearing up when Guy played it. That memory became one of the emotional cores of “Desperados," of course. In an interview I read, Guy said that he regarded the song as a eulogy for Prigg, but the title tells you something about how a boy saw the old man: not simply as an aging oil-field hand, but as somebody who seemed to have stepped out of a Western. Guy later said that, to him as a child, Jack was “a real desperado, the real deal.” In my opinion, by the time Guy wrote the song, he understood something the boy couldn't have understood: his larger-than-life companion was growing old and nearing the end of the line. Thank you, Travis. What a fine trace of Texas this is!