The Southwest's master storyteller.

My family had a vinyl recording of J. Frank Dobie reading The Ghost Bull of the Mavericks and other stories that was released by Domino Records in 1960. We even had a record player that worked so that I could spend countless hours listening to Dobie's raspy Texas drawl spin tales he'd collected from old-timers around the state. During break-time in elementary school, I would retell those stories to my classmates, pretending I'd heard them first-hand. They believed me in general, until I got to the title story about the "ghost bull" who disappeared from the wild cattle trap. They had no problem with a bull who could disappear. But I lost them when I claimed to be hunting "wild cattle". These were kids from Texas who knew there were no more wild cattle. It was an early lesson in how far the storyteller can stretch credulity. Today, a recording of the original work is hard to come by, but Dobie's book, Tales of Old-Time Texas, is readily available. Some of the stories are signature Dobie humor, some are filled with mystery, and some are clearly "tall tales" meant for entertainment. Stories such as "The Dream that saved Wilbarger", which I used in the latest Nick Fischer novel, A Time to Die, are included and give the reader a strong sense of the life and times of the early Texas pioneers.

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