n the summer of 1973, the US country singer Jerry Jeff Walker was in the middle of nowhere, recording his soon-to-be-classic album ¡Viva Terlingua!. A crowd was packed to the rafters in an old dancehall 70 miles west of Austin, in Luckenbach, Texas. An extension lead ran from the hall to a recording truck outside. After everyone had gone home that night, Walker stood in the street and said to Hondo Crouch, Luckenbach's self-appointed mayor: "I wonder what we just did."

When Crouch had bought the town two years prior, its population was just three people – and according to the most recent census in 2021, it's back at the same number. But in the 1970s, this ramshackle town thrived as Walker and his peers headed there, and Luckenbach became one of the most improbable yet important centres for country music.

Hondo Crouch, who died 50 years ago this month, was a goat-rancher, writer and champion swimmer. A contradiction of white hair and a mischievous, boyish face he'd sing Mexican – ranch songs – wherever he went. His business card read "Imagineer, authorised distributor". In 1971, he clubbed together with two friends to buy Luckenbach, which had become a ghost town since its creation in the late 1800s and its population high in 1904. They paid $30,000 for an old dancehall, general store, bar and a few outhouses. With Crouch as the town's self-appointed mayor, the Luckenbach Dance Hall became a gathering place for outlaw country musicians; a freer, rural alternative to Nashville.

Country star Gary P Nunn remembers him as a "pied piper", leading musicians and eccentrics to a simpler life. In Walker's case, Crouch's daughter Becky Patterson met him at an open-mic night, and brought him back to the family ranch. "He had on these little Coke bottle blue glasses," Patterson remembers, "and Hondo said, 'I knew he was a musician because he asked for seconds and ate so much. He was starving!'"

At the time, Nashville's country industry was chasing the urbane, pop-friendly sound of countrypolitan, heard in stars like Patsy Cline and Charlie Rich. Musicians like Walker and Willie Nelson were tired of being told to clean the rust out of their music, and wanted their steel guitars and fiddles back. Going up into the country, they found Luckenbach, Texas.

Away from the eye of studio producers, ¡Viva Terlingua! sounded like the communal, unpolished life it celebrated. Gary P Nunn's song London Homesick Blues appears on the record and Nunn spent that summer in Luckenbach sleeping in a teepee with his wife and baby. "My wife didn't think much of it, everyone else was staying in hotels," he chuckles. "But Jerry Jeff used to say you can't get that magic in the studio."

The atmosphere in the dancehall is palpable: you can hear crickets during the lulls between the crowd's stamping and hooting. Two years later, ¡Viva Terlingua! even reached space when the song Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother was played to wake the Apollo–Soyuz astronauts in July 1975.

Rolling Stone covered the ¡Viva Terlingua! sessions, which drew hippies from across the country. By the mid-70s, the life expectancy of Luckenbach road signs was reportedly about four hours; visitors stole them so frequently that the highway department stopped replacing them.

But a haunt for hippies and country fans was catapulted to even greater renown when in 1977, Waylon Jennings released Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love). Guy Clark, who had been involved in ¡Viva Terlingua!, had told Nashville songwriters Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman about Crouch. They wrote the song the next morning. Willie Nelson joined Waylon on the final chorus and the song hankers after leaving metropolitan riches for a simpler life in Luckenbach: "Baby, let's sell your diamond ring / buy some boots and faded jeans, and go away."

That yearning for rural life resonated so much that the song spent six weeks at No 1 on the country chart, then crossed over to pop radio. "It was like the whole world were like, where's this Luckenbach, Texas?", Nunn says. Folk came by the busload to get back to basics. Willie Nelson famously lost a game of dominoes against the town's elderly champions, and returned in 1995 to host his Fourth of July Picnic festival in Luckenbach for five years running.

There is a "picking tree" at Luckenbach, where country musicians have passed guitars around since Crouch's day. Contemporary star and Yellowstone actor Ryan Bingham honed his trade there and organised an annual festival, The Western, in the hall. Kit Patterson, Crouch's grandson, remembers Bingham and other musicians sitting round the picker circle. "It was this beautiful, intimate moment around the fire, reliving life before all the fame."

Crouch's family still runs Luckenbach through Luckenbach Texas, Inc. Protecting its name has meant taking legal action, including against a whisky brand trying to piggyback on the town's cultural capital. "Lawsuits are the antithesis of what Luckenbach is about," says Kit, the company's president. "But at the same time, if the integrity of what Luckenbach is isn't protected, it becomes diluted."

Crouch preached a kind of backyard mysticism – a characteristically American devotion to ordinary things. In surviving footage filmed outside the hall he twinkles at the camera, "I love this town. I love every rotten board in it." He liked to say Luckenbach had a bigger moon than any other town, and he says as much on Walker's 1977 album A Man Must Carry On, also recorded in Luckenbach. On Luckenbach Moon, Crouch crows his poem over a stumbling guitar line.

We try to tell folks who come by here to look at our town
What a big, mean moon we have
But nobody'll believe it.

Elsewhere on the record, poet Charles John Quarto remembers Crouch as "like some song you can't unlearn" and Walker sings My Buddy: "I miss the way your eyes saw things upon the land … the grey days I miss you most of all."

Crouch never heard A Man Must Carry On or Waylon Jennings's hit. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 27 September 1976. When Patterson phoned Walker to tell him her father had died, he dropped the receiver and never came back to the call. The church overflowed at Crouch's funeral. Willie Nelson arrived but didn't get out of his truck, unwilling to draw attention from Crouch.

I asked his youngest daughter, Cris Crouch Graham, whether the moon really was bigger in Luckenbach. She laughed. "The moon's the same moon as everywhere else. But he made it bigger, and so it is."