Meet the Blacksmith at the Center of Austin Music’s Golden Era

In December 1975, James Szalapski showed up to Clarksville with a documentary crew. The novice director wanted access to the emerging outlaw country scene, and the West Austin enclave had been drawing honky-tonk hippies since the late Sixties. 

On the first day of shooting, he followed Townes Van Zandt into a house near the corner of 12th Street and West Lynn. It belonged to Seymour Washington, a 79-year-old retired blacksmith who had shod horses since the 1910s. In the documentary, as Van Zandt picks out “Waiting Around to Die” on his guitar, Washington – who would be dead within a year from bladder cancer – watches intently. By the end of the song, tears stream down his weathered face.  

Heartworn Highways, newly 50 years old, immortalizes Washington as an onlooker. Folks that lived in Clarksville, his Clarksville, saw things differently. They called him Unk. 

Cleve Hattersley spent a lot of nights in Unk’s yard. The Greezy Wheels founder fled the Haight for Austin in the late Sixties, originally intent on weed smuggling before a bad bust led him to music. Rent was cheap in Clarksville, a nearly all-Black neighborhood founded by freedmen in the 1870s, and he moved into a modest place for around $50 a month. 

Some longtime residents cast sidelong glances. Outsiders in Clarksville usually meant trouble; the construction of MoPac in the late Sixties cut right through the neighborhood, forcing a third of residents from their homes. Unk, however, opened up his home to the newcomers.  

“He understood that we felt like disaffected people, and to him we weren’t,” Hattersley said. Like most of the Clarksville crew that remain, Hattersley is now in his 70s. He sounds like Jack Nicholson might after a couple drags from a joint. 

Unk’s house, not unlike the others that lined Clarksville’s dirt roads in those days, was understated, three rooms at the most. There was no TV, and he used old newspapers to insulate the walls. Hattersley said there was always something going on at Unk’s, and always someone playing music. The Sunday barbecues were famous – Szalapski originally went to Clarksville in hopes of capturing one, but the December weather wouldn’t allow for a cookout. 

Before he became Unk, Washington, born to freed slaves in 1896, went by “The Walking Blacksmith.” He took up the trade after his father, a fisherman in the days when Clarksville stretched south to the Colorado River, passed away in the early 1910s. 

There was a blacksmith shop on every corner in those days, but once cars came into vogue in the Twenties he took up a position at the Sanitation Department, where he worked until rising racial hostility drove him back to horse shoeing in 1942. This time, he worked for himself, and wealthy ranchers brought their horses to him from all over Central Texas. 

Some men, Washington said, handle horses roughly when they shoe them. He preferred to be gentle.

“You want to go up to a horse’s head first and pet him on the neck and scratch him,” Washington said in Heartworn Highways. “I don’t care how bad and rough he is, he’ll soon understand that you want to be his friend.” 

The Mayor of Clarksville 

In a 1953 Austin American-Statesman profile, journalist Bill Brammer called Washington, then 57, a “mover of mountains.” He was 6’2”, 250 pounds, but spoke softly. His wife was already dead, and his flock of children grown, though nobody who knew him in the Seventies seemed to remember any family coming around. By the time the hippies came to town, Unk had lost a step, and he spent most days watching over the neighborhood from his front porch. But his reputation stuck – he was known as the unofficial mayor of Clarksville. 

“Everybody respected Seymour. Everybody,” Hattersley said. “He could have run for office in that neighborhood if he wanted.”

At Unk’s, Hattersley – whose Aug. 12, 1972 show with Willie Nelson at Armadillo World Headquarters was perhaps the single most important moment in Austin music history – drank beer and smoked joints with a party that, depending on the night, might include Van Zandt, Joe Ely, Guy Clark, Wally “Oat Willie” Stopher, Kerry Awn, Jesse “Guitar” Taylor, Richard Dobson, Butch Hancock, or Rex Bell. But Unk was the center of it all. 

“He knew he was the patriarch,” Hattersley said. “That’s what gave him the greatest pride. He knew it, and we fawned over him.” 

They went to him for advice too. Bliss McCauley, whose mother was in with the hippie crowd, was just 10 when Unk died, but she remembers Van Zandt and Clark going to the old man with their songs. He listened to a lot of old blues and jazz records on his turntable, and they trusted his ear. In his famous Heartworn Highways scene, it seems strange at first that he nods and says “that’s right” while Van Zandt plays. The tears weren’t grief – they were his stamp of approval. 

“He was steady,” said McCauley, who moved to Austin from San Francisco in the late Sixties. Somewhere, there’s a picture of her standing in front of the whole gang, the only child in the group. 

“They could trust him,” she said of Unk. “They trusted his ear, his opinion, his wisdom, his taste. He was more grounded than they were.” 

Unk’s counsel often had nothing to do with music. Richard Dobson said he could have been a preacher if he hadn’t been a blacksmith. Laura Carter, whose house on Patterson was a 10-minute walk from Unk’s, used to stop by his porch for life advice. She was paying $90 a month in rent and waitressing to get by as a young mother. 

“He would make you feel like you could make it,” she said, visibly emotional. Voice breaking, she added, “They were the best times of my life.”

Uncle Seymour Washington and Townes Van Zandt in Heartworn Highways

Unk’s closest friend in Clarksville was Van Zandt, but that didn’t come without tough love. When Van Zandt’s drinking got out of hand – and it often did – Unk called him out. On more than one occasion, Carter saw Unk kick Van Zandt out. Delivering a sermon on responsible whiskey drinking in Heartworn Highways, he stares right at Van Zandt, who had drunkenly fallen and scratched his face the night before: “You don’t have to drink a barrel of whiskey because you see a barrel sitting there.” 

Van Zandt and his posse were doing a lot more than drinking too much whiskey. In Robert Earl Hardy’s biography A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt, Cindy Morgan, the musician’s camera-shy teenage girlfriend, recalled: “Clarksville was basically a place where we were all on heroin, all shooting up.” Kids from Mathews Elementary went to Nau’s for ice cream after school, but the drugstore sold syringes and codeine, too. When Szalapski came to town, those that were using – it wasn’t everybody – had to create diversions when the needles came out. Hattersley and Carter said they never saw any of it. 

McCauley’s father came back from Vietnam addicted to heroin and was in and out of jail until a deadly overdose at 49. Growing up without a dad, the men in Clarksville – Unk included – were her father figures. Some faced their own battles with addiction. Van Zandt spent the night on her couch right before a lifetime of substance abuse took his life at 52. In recent years, Father Time took Joe Ely, Richard Dobson, Guy Clark – most of the Clarksville crew. Unk was the first big blow. 

McCauley fought back tears as she remembered walking by an empty front porch at 1613 West 12th Street shortly after his death. “When he left that corner,” she said, “it didn’t feel the same.” 

When Unk got sick, Van Zandt, Hancock, Dobson, and Greezy Wheels put on a benefit show at Soap Creek Saloon so he could spend his remaining days with a full-time nurse at home. Van Zandt showed up too drunk to play, as he frequently did, but they raised the $700 they needed. Unk died a few days after the show, on November 12, 1976. 

His funeral at Sweet Home Baptist – despite a somewhat tense relationship with the church, who didn’t approve of Unk’s taste for bourbon – packed the pews with hippies and Clarksville lifers. A 1976 Statesman article on the Soap Creek fundraiser claimed, “Seymour Washington may not have been the loner he thought he was,” but it’s hard to believe he ever thought anything like that.

When freedman Charles Clark bought two acres from a Confederate general in 1871 and established a colony, he made the neighborhood a haven for the disenfranchised. When the hippies rolled in a century later, they looked a little different, but evenings on Unk’s porch upheld Clarksville’s character. 

In 1979, developers showed up in Clarksville and offered residents $20,000 for their homes, which they would fix up and flip for $150,000. The decades of gentrification that followed made the area overwhelmingly white, lined with swanky bungalows and German cars. Nau’s shut down a few years ago, and today West Lynn crawls with upscale eateries, “Western” outfitters selling flannels for head-spinning prices, and corporate transplants conferencing through AirPods over overpriced lattes. The house on the lot where Unk’s stood is valued at nearly $2 million. 

It was worth more when he was in it. 

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