You may remember the story about how I got my cowboy hat. Well, yesterday I received another sartorial gift from a Texan, equally cherished and most definitely destined for good use.

Yessiree, you got that right, those are genuine, original, vintage Nudie Cohn boots in that thar photeau above.

In case you don’t know Nudie, he was one of the great designers of the 20th century: he designed “Elvis Presley’s $10,000 gold lamé suit, worn by the singer on the cover of his ‘50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong album'” (see the Wiki) and he also created Gram Parsons’s “Gilded Palace of Sin” suit, now in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

They were given to me by one of the most beloved folks in the Texas wine biz, Joe Pat Clayton (do you remember how Tracie P and I met Joe Pat, thanks to Cousin Marty, at a James Burton show in Austin?).

He bought them on Ebay but they didn’t fit him. “I just wanted to make sure they’d go to someone who’d know what they were and would appreciate ’em,” he said when he surprised me yesterday. Well, I’m here to tell you that he found the right guy!

Man, Joe Pat, I cannot thank you enough. I’ll wear them for sure next week at my show with The Grapes.

In other news…

I am hoping that the Prince of Puns, Thor, will appreciate a paranomasia I concocted yesterday for a new client in Austin: