Fredericksburg, Texas

Everything Fredericksburg is known for

13 songs mention this city 10 artists from here

Fredericksburg, Texas, located in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, is known for its German heritage and as a prominent wine destination. The city also has a notable connection to music. Eleven songs mention Fredericksburg, and ten artists call it home. Among these artists is Bernie Nelson, a country musician, and Johnny Nicholas, who plays the blues. The town is also mentioned in songs like "Fredericksburg" by Say Zuzu and "Stoned" by Old 97s.

Music in Fredericksburg

Songs About Fredericksburg

Enchanted Rock
Lesser Antilles
93%
"Enchanted Rock"
Fredericksburg
Golden shoals
83%
"TITLE"
Fredericksburg
Chad Richard
80%
"Song about Fredericksburg"
Fredericksburg
Say Zuzu
80%
"Song about Fredericksburg"
Fredericksburg
Jesse Stratton Band
80%
"Song about Fredericksburg"
Stoned
Old 97s
74%
"Take a Greyhound to Fredericksburg"
Boomtown (Talco Tapes Version)
Treaty Oak Revival
43%
"From Crown to Enchanted Rock"
My Texas
Josh Abbott Band
41%
"If you haven't climbed up to enchanted rock"
Boomtown
Treaty Oak Revival
40%
"From Crown to Enchanted Rock"
Stoned
Old 97's
20%
"Take a Greyhound to Fredericksburg"
No Kinda Dancer
Robert Earl Keen
19%
"To the oom-pa-pa rhthm of a German delight"
I Like Texas
Pat Green
7%
"I like to pick my guitar down at Luckenbach"
Under The Texas Sky
Paige Lewis
7%
"Fredericksberg sippin"

Artists From Fredericksburg

B
Bernie Nelson
country Pop: 55
J
Johnny Nicholas
blues Pop: 18
M
Mike Blakely
country Pop: 9
Q
Quincy Harper
country Pop: 8
J
Jake Martin
country Pop: 5
S
ShAnnie
americana Pop: 5
D
Dan West
country Pop: 5
W
Woody Eastman
folk Pop: 4
J
Jason Grove
country Pop: 3
B
Bryan Maldonado
blues Pop: 1

Rivers & Roads in Song near Fredericksburg

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Fredericksburg.

Interstate 10 32 songs Guadalupe River 17 songs Texas Colorado River 6 songs

Musical Heritage

Luckenbach dance hall and townsite RoadyGoat

Luckenbach isn't really a town — it's a wide spot outside Fredericksburg, a dance hall and a couple of buildings under the oaks. German farmers settled it back in the 1840s; the Luckenbach family gave it the name, and there's been a dance hall here since the late 1800s. Then in 1970, a rancher and self-appointed clown prince named Hondo Crouch bought the near-dead little place outright and turned it into outlaw-country holy ground. In 1973, Jerry Jeff Walker hauled a mobile studio out to the open-air stage and cut "Viva Terlingua!" live. Willie Nelson brought his Fourth of July Picnic here in the late 1990s. Hondo's daughter, Cris Crouch Graham, still tells the stories. Everybody's somebody in Luckenbach — that was always the joke, and the point.

RoadyGoat →

Luckenbach RoadyGoat

Luckenbach's been in operation since 1887, and for a good long while it was a ghost town near Fredericksburg — barely a dot on the map. Then its name got tied to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Willie ran his Fourth of July Picnics through the 1990s, and the crowds found the place. These days a house band works familiar country hits for the daytime folks. There's a retail store now, climate-controlled bathrooms, White Claws in the cooler. That secondhand shop where a writer bought cowboy boots back in 2005? Sells nothing but hats anymore. The town's changed around the edges. But the name Waylon and Willie hung on it still pulls people down that road, chasing something older than the gift shop.

RoadyGoat → · 9.5 mi away

Luckenbach Dance Hall RoadyGoat

Everybody knows Luckenbach from the Waylon Jennings song — "back to the basics of love," 1977 — but the dance hall was already old by then. It went up in the late 1880s, on a spot that had been a trading post between German settlers and the Comanches. What changed everything was 1970, when a rancher named Hondo Crouch bought the whole town for thirty thousand dollars and turned it into Texas' favorite excuse to do nothing at all. Three years later, Jerry Jeff Walker hauled a mobile studio out here and cut "¡Viva Terlingua!" live on the dance floor over a week in August — a dollar a ticket, about three hundred people in folding chairs. There's a bumper sticker around town that sums the place up: "where everybody is somebody." Ten miles from Fredericksburg, and a hundred miles from your worries.

RoadyGoat → · 9.5 mi away

Luckenbach revival of Willie Nelson's Picnic RoadyGoat

By the mid-nineties, Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic had gone quiet — four years dark. Then it came roaring back to Luckenbach in 1995, and it ran there through the end of the decade. Here's the part nobody planned: a twenty-three-year-old copy editor from the San Angelo Standard-Times named Dave Dalton Thomas was out at the dance hall on his day off when the promoters told him the Picnic was returning. He filed the story, and the wire services carried it clear around the world. Thomas kept pulling that thread until he'd written the whole book — PICNIC, the history of the tradition, out from Texas A and M University Press. Luckenbach was already immortal — Waylon and Willie saw to that back in seventy-seven. But once in a while, the town writes the reporter, and not the other way around.

RoadyGoat → · 9.5 mi away

¡Viva Terlingua!' recording sessions RoadyGoat

Summer of nineteen seventy-three, Jerry Jeff Walker hauled a New Jersey recording truck out to Luckenbach, a wide spot near Fredericksburg, and cut a whole album live in a dance hall. Five days, no audience — just the band running takes with nobody watching. Only two songs got a crowd, at an event that August: "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother" and "London Homesick Blues." That second one they played live for the very first time that night, and when the tape ran out mid-song, they had to do the whole thing over. The record came out that November and stalled at number one hundred sixty on the charts. Didn't matter. "London Homesick Blues" — "I wanna go home with the armadillo" — became the Austin City Limits theme for twenty-eight straight years. Some records outlive their chart position.

RoadyGoat → · 9.5 mi away

History of Fredericksburg

The Baron Who Threw Away His Title to Build This Town RoadyGoat

You're standing in a town that began as a noble experiment that almost ate itself. In 1846 a German organization grandly called the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, better known as the Adelsverein or Noblemen's Society, was trying to plant thousands of settlers in the Hill Country. The man who actually made it happen was Baron Otfried Hans von Meusebach, who did something startling for a nobleman: he renounced his title at the Texas line and asked to be called plain John O. Meusebach. The first wagon train left New Braunfels on April 23, 1846, and reached this valley between two creeks on May 8. Meusebach bought 10,000 acres on credit and gave every settler one town lot plus ten acres of farmland. He named the place for Prince Frederick of Prussia, the highest-ranking member of the society. The early going was brutal: an epidemic that summer and fall killed somewhere between 100 and 150 of the new arrivals. The town survived anyway, and the German bones of it are still everywhere you look. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Wikipedia.)

RoadyGoat →

The Coffee Mill in the Middle of Main Street RoadyGoat

Right in the green heart of Marktplatz sits a stout eight-sided building locals have always called the Coffee Mill. Its real name is the Vereins Kirche, the Society Church, and it was Fredericksburg's first public building, raised in 1847 by the original settlers. The design was no accident of frontier carpentry: it followed an old German octagon style modeled on Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen, built with the half-timbered Fachwerk method the Germans brought with them. Folks thought the squat octagonal shape with its little cupola looked like a Kaffeemuehle, a coffee grinder, and the nickname stuck for good. For decades the building did everything a young town needed: church for every congregation in town, the first school, town hall, fortress, and refuge. By 1897 it was crumbling and blocking traffic on Main Street, so it was torn down. When the Gillespie County Historical Society formed in 1934, its very first mission was to rebuild the Coffee Mill, and a replica went up in the old market square in 1936. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Texas Historical Commission.)

RoadyGoat →

The Bedtime Story That Became a Pageant of Fires RoadyGoat

On the night before Easter, fires still flare on the hills ringing Fredericksburg, and the story behind them is one of the great frontier bedtime tales. As the legend goes, in the spring of 1847, while the Germans were negotiating peace with the Comanche, children in the young settlement were frightened by mysterious signal fires burning on the dark hilltops around them. A pioneer mother is said to have calmed her kids by inventing a gentler explanation: those weren't war fires, they were the Easter Bunny's kettles, boiling wildflowers to dye the eggs he'd deliver come morning. It's a beautiful story, and like most good legends it's tidied up the history a little; the records show the Germans and Comanche were actually negotiating in early March, not Easter week. The deeper root is older still: about half of Fredericksburg's first settlers came from regions of Germany where lighting Easter-eve fires on the hills was an ancient spring custom. Since 1946 the town has staged the Easter Fires Pageant, with hundreds of costumed residents, including the famous bunnies, telling the tale beneath the burning hills. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Texas Highways.)

RoadyGoat →

Fredericksburg German Settlement

1846

German colony founded in 1846 by the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. Baron von Meusebach negotiated a peace treaty with the Comanche in 1847.

National Museum of the Pacific War

1885

Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in WWII, grew up in Fredericksburg, Texas. His grandfather's hotel is now the National Museum of the Pacific War.

Historical Marker →

Nimitz, Chester W.

1866

Typical early Fredericksburg home built 1866 by Carl Basse. Property of the Henke family since 1873. Heinrich Henke, early settler, Confederate freighter, had butcher counter on front porch; meat processing was done in back yard; there the horses that pulled meat vending cart were stabled. Shop later built on foundation of stone walls surrounding lot. He and his wife Dorothea (nee Weirich) added the long dining room and kitchen with sloped roof to accommodate their twelve children. Many of their furnishings are preserved by Udo Henke, a descendant. In small room to rear of front bedroom, on Feb. 24, 1885, their daughter, Anna Henke Nimitz, gave birth to Chester William Nimitz, destined to command the greatest naval armada in history. A 1905 honor graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, Nimitz was chief of staff to commander, Atlantic Submarine Fleet, W.W.I. Installed first Naval ROTC unit in U.S. Navy, 1926; selected Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet after attack on Pearl Harbor; appointed Fleet Admiral, U. S. Navy, 1944. As representative of the U. S. he signed Japanese surrender documents on his flagship, USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945 in Tokyo Bay. Admiral Nimitz died in San Francisco on Feb. 20, 1966. (1968)

Historical Marker →

Nimitz, Chester William

1885

Chester William Nimitz, who guided Allied forces to victory in the Pacific in World War II , was born in Fredericksburg, Texas, on February 24, 1885, the son of Chester Bernard and Anna (Henke) Nimitz. His father died before he was born. During his early years his grandfather Charles H. Nimitz , a German immigrant, former seaman, and owner of the Nimitz Hotel , served as the father figure whom Nimitz credited with shaping his character and values. In 1890 Chester's mother married her late husband's younger brother, William Nimitz, who managed the St. Charles Hotel in Kerrville, where Chester eventually became chief handyman. Young Nimitz, with little prospect of a college education otherwise, determined to seek appointment to the United States Military Academy. On learning that no such appointment was immediately available, he applied for the United States Naval Academy instead. He graduated seventh in his class of 114 at Annapolis on January 30, 1905. After two years' training as a passed midshipman aboard the U.S.S. Ohio , he was commissioned an ensign and given command of the old Spanish gunboat Panay in the Philippines. After transfer to the destroyer Decatur , he ran the ship aground and was court-martialed, reprimanded, and denied his request for battleship duty; he was assigned to a submarine instead. In four consecutive undersea commands, he became a leading "pigboat" authority and built a reservoir of experience that proved invaluable in both world wars. In 1913 Nimitz married Catherine Vance Freeman of Wollaston, Massachusetts. They eventually had three daughters and a son. Shortly after marriage the Nimitzes left for Europe, where he studied diesel engines in Germany and Belgium. He returned to Brooklyn Navy Yard to supervise the building and installation of the first diesel engine to power a United States Navy vessel. With the rank of commander in World War I , he served as chief of staff to Adm. Samuel S. Robison, commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, then as executive officer of the battleship South Carolina . Afterward, Nimitz went to Pearl Harbor to build the submarine base and command the Submarine Division. Between wars he progressed through the various steps prescribed by the navy for training its commanders. At the Navy War College, 1922–23, he dealt with a theoretical Pacific war, developing the plan that he eventually put to practical use. He then served again as chief of staff to Admiral Robison, who had become commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet. Nimitz was assigned to the University of California at Berkeley in 1926 to develop the prototype for the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps; there he produced a model that was duplicated in fifty-two colleges and universities. Nimitz left Berkeley with the rank of captain in 1929 and progressed through commands of a submarine division, the San Diego destroyer base, and the cruiser Augusta , flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. After service in Washington as assistant chief of the navy Bureau of Navigation and promotion to rear admiral, he commanded first a cruiser division, then a battleship division. In 1939 he became chief of the Bureau of Navigation, a position he still held when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the aftermath of the attack, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel was relieved as commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Nimitz was chosen to replace him. The change of command took place at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941. With the rank of fleet admiral, Nimitz viewed his primary task as combatting the tendency of both the American public and the military to reflect on mistakes that had permitted the Pearl Harbor disaster and brought the nation into World War II. He focused instead on the enemy's mistakes and the positive aspects of the American position: the Pearl Harbor submarine base remained intact, and the aircraft carriers, at sea on December 7, had been spared. From the nerve center at his headquarters, Nimit

Tsha Handbook →

Enderle, Benjamin Lester

1921

Benjamin Lester Enderle, peach grower, surveyor, and teacher, was born in Kerrville on February 28, 1889, to Albert and Amelia (Dietert) Enderle. His maternal grandparents were among the founders of Comfort, Texas. Enderle graduated from Tivy High School in Kerrville in 1906 and received a teaching certificate. For the next six years he taught school in several small towns around the state. On September 9, 1908, he married Louise Elizabeth Forres from Fayetteville. They had three children. In 1912 Enderle moved to Fredericksburg, where he was appointed Gillespie county surveyor, a position he held for the next sixty-three years. In 1913 he also accepted a post at Fredericksburg High School, where he was a math and science teacher and a coach until 1944. In 1921 Enderle and his wife began planting peach trees on fourteen acres east of Fredericksburg as a means of paying off their land house. He worked to develop a durable species that would survive shipment, using Hale, Burbank, Elberta, and Stark clingstone varieties. By 1925 the Enderles were producing more from their several hundred trees than they could sell locally. Enderle's boyhood friendship with Howard E. Butt 's family provided an outlet for the sale of peaches outside the Fredericksburg area, the H-E-B stores in Austin and San Antonio. In 1935 Enderle bought another 145 acres and soon had about 5,000 peach trees in production. He is regarded as the originator of the Hill Country peach industry. He was a charter member of the Gillespie County Peach Growers Association, the Gillespie County Historical Society, and the Hill Country Poultry Association. He was a member of the chamber of commerce and the Lions Club and was an elder at Memorial Presbyterian Church. He died on June 3, 1983, in Fredericksburg and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. See also FRUITS OTHER THAN CITRUS .

Tsha Handbook →

Fredericksburg, TX

1846

Fredericksburg, the county seat of Gillespie County, is seventy miles west of Austin in the central part of the county. The town was one of a projected series of German settlements from the Texas coast to the land north of the Llano River, originally the ultimate destination of the German immigrants sent to Texas by the Adelsverein . In August 1845 John O. Meusebach left New Braunfels with a surveying party to select a site for a second settlement en route to the Fisher-Miller Land Grant . He eventually chose a tract of land sixty miles northwest of New Braunfels, where two streams met four miles above the Pedernales River; the streams were later named Barons Creek, in Meusebach's honor, and Town Creek. Meusebach was impressed by the abundance of water, stone, and timber and upon his return to New Braunfels arranged to buy 10,000 acres on credit. The first wagontrain of 120 settlers arrived from New Braunfels on May 8, 1846, after a sixteen-day journey, accompanied by an eight-man military escort provided by the Adelsverein. Surveyor Hermann Wilke laid out the town, which Meusebach named Fredericksburg after Prince Frederick of Prussia, an influential member of the Adelsverein. Each settler received one town lot and ten acres of farmland nearby. The town was laid out like the German villages along the Rhine, from which many of the colonists had come, with one long, wide main street roughly paralleling Town Creek. The earliest houses in Fredericksburg were built simply, of post oak logs stuck upright in the ground. These were soon replaced by Fachwerk houses, built of upright timbers with the spaces between filled with rocks and then plastered or whitewashed over ( see GERMAN VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE ). The colonists planted corn, built storehouses to protect their provisions and trade goods, and prepared for the arrival of more immigrant trains, which came throughout the summer. Within two years Fredericksburg had grown into a thriving town of almost 1,000, despite an epidemic that spread from Indianola and New Braunfels and killed between 100 and 150 residents in the summer and fall of 1846. The first two years also saw the opening of a wagon road between Fredericksburg and Austin; the signing of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty , which effectively eliminated the threat of Indian attack; the opening of the first privately owned store, by J. L. Ransleben; the construction of the Vereins-Kirche , which served for fifty years as a church, school, fortress, and meeting hall; the formal organization of Gillespie County by the Texas legislature, which made Fredericksburg the county seat; the founding of Zodiac, a nearby settlement, by a group of Mormons under Lyman Wight ; the construction of the Nimitz Hotel ; and the establishment by the United States Army of Fort Martin Scott, which became an important market for the merchants and laborers of Fredericksburg, two miles east of town. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1849, Fredericksburg also benefited from its situation as the last town before El Paso on the Emigrant or Upper El Paso Road. Religion played an important part in the lives of the German settlers of Gillespie County. Devout farmers drove as much as twenty miles into town for religious services and built Fredericksburg's characteristic Sunday houses for use on weekends and religious holidays. Though most of the original colonists were members of the Evangelical Protestant Church, there were also Lutherans, Methodists, and Catholics. Initially, all communions held services in the Vereins-Kirche, but in 1848 the Catholics built their own church, which was supplanted in 1860 by the Marienkirche (old St. Mary's Church). Also in 1848 the German missionary Father Menzel erected a large wooden cross on Cross Mountain just north of Fredericksburg. The Methodists withdrew from the Vereins-Kirche around the same time, and another group left the Evangelical Protestants in 1852 and formed Zion's Evangelical Luthe

Tsha Handbook →

Things to Do in Fredericksburg

historical 13.1 mi away
Luckenbach Texas

Luckenbach was a failing ghost town of three residents when Hondo Crouch bought it in 1970 for thirty thousand dollars and declared himself mayor of an…
quirky
ALL WELCOME / COME BACK Street Names

Stand at the Gillespie County Courthouse and look at the cross streets running off Main. Heading east the first letters spell ALL WELCOME — Adams Llano Lincoln…
quirky 9.4 mi away
The Song Nobody Had Seen

When Waylon Jennings recorded Luckenbach Texas (Back to the Basics of Love) in 1977 it shot to number one on the country charts and number 25 on the pop…
quirky 9.5 mi away
The Town That Sold for Thirty Grand

In 1970 old Benno Engel retired as postmaster of Luckenbach Texas and placed an ad in the local paper that read TOWN FOR SALE -- lock stock and dancehall. The…
quirky 11.1 mi away
Luckenbach Texas

The entire 'town' is a dance hall and post office. Waylon sang about it.
historical 12.7 mi away
Birthplace and Burial of a President

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in Stonewall on August 27 1908 in a small farmhouse on the Pedernales River. He served as the 36th President and spent about 20…
historical 15.0 mi away
LBJ Ranch

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in this stretch of the Hill Country in 1908 and came home to it every chance he got even as president. The ranch on the…
quirky 16.3 mi away
Enchanted Rock

A massive pink granite dome rises four hundred feet out of the Hill Country north of Fredericksburg. Tonkawa and Comanche peoples believed the rock was haunted…
day trip
Day Trip to Fredericksburg 🇩🇪 (FULL EPISODE) S1 E5

Featured on The Daytripper — a full-episode local travel guide.

Everything Near Fredericksburg

270 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Fredericksburg on the Map
All music from Texas → · Browse more cities