What Lonesome Dove Taught Me About Building a Community

The following is adapted from Jazz, TX by Doc Watkins.

I was seven years old when I first watched Lonesome Dove, and it broke my heart. I had no idea what the story was about going in. I only knew my mother loved it so much she stayed up all night to finish the nine-hundred-page novel in one sitting. I cried for days over characters like Gus and Jake Spoon, and by the time it was over, that dusty frontier town had been inscribed onto my heart. To date, I've probably watched the miniseries more than fifty times.

I grew up feral, in the best sense of the word. As the oldest of seven, I spent my Oregon childhood roaming the fields behind our farmhouse, exploring the open land between apple and pear orchards, chopping madrone firewood alongside my stepdad, and stuffing myself with wild blackberries every August until my fingertips turned fuchsia. We were the last generation to grow up without the internet. My siblings and I didn't just play outside. We played Lonesome Dove. We weren't feral kids to ourselves; we were cowboys riding the range, living off the land, certain we never had to go home for anything.

That romantic notion never really left me. When I went shopping for graduate programs in classical piano, the University of Texas at Austin made the list. But what clinched my decision wasn't the faculty or the money. It was the place. As the plane descended into Austin, the Texas scenery felt familiar, like something I'd seen a hundred times on my thirteen-inch TV screen. I couldn't shake the stupidly romantic pull of living on the doorstep of Lonesome Dove country.

Years later, that same pull shaped the jazz club I opened in 2016. Everyone thought I was crazy to open Jazz, TX in San Antonio, a city known more for barbecue and the Alamo than its jazz scene. It felt like the doubters in Lonesome Dove who said you couldn't drive cattle from South Texas to Montana. But we did it anyway, and the club went from pipe dream to packed house every single night.

Here's what the frontier lore taught me. There are places that are only special because someone loved them. Lonesome Dove wasn't a shining city. It was a dry, dusty, one-horse town. Without the people who made its memories, it was nothing. It's people that make a home. In a world that keeps pulling us onto our screens and into our silos, Jazz, TX became a place where people could get off their phones, rub elbows on a too-small dance floor, and experience something human and real.

That's the story I set out to tell. Not a business playbook, but a love letter to a little club that shouldn't exist.

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For more on building community and putting the human back into hospitality, you can find Jazz, TX on Amazon.

Doc Watkins is a CEO, tech founder, club owner, pianist, singer, bandleader, and wannabe cowboy. He opened his first club, Jazz, TX, in San Antonio in 2016 and his second club, Doc’s, in Houston in 2025. An active musician, Doc has released ten albums and plays nearly one hundred shows a year with his eleven-piece orchestra. He is the co-founder and CEO of TurnTable, a ticketing and marketing software company created for jazz clubs. A husband and father of four, Doc has called San Antonio home since 2006.