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The old man in the photograph is leaning against a 1939 Packard, foot up on the bumper, sharply dressed in a black suit, smiling like a man who knows something. The inscription on the back says “Jack Prigg.” The setting is the dusty streets of Monahans, Texas.
Monahans is where Guy Clark was born on November 6, 1941. And Jack Prigg — the man in that photograph, an oilfield hand who had seen better days by the time Clark knew him — became the soul of “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” one of the most recorded songs in country music history. When Clark showed the photo to an interviewer in 2013, he looked at it and laughed: “Well, that must have been a Sunday.”
The song describes an old man crying at the kitchen table, haunted by broken memories and old songs, with a young narrator who worshipped him like a grandfather. The real Jack Prigg hung around his grandmother’s boarding house in Monahans, drove that Packard, dressed sharp, and lived by his own code. Clark absorbed him into the permanent record.
West Texas Roots
Monahans sits in Ward County in the Permian Basin, the vast oil-producing plain of West Texas that has driven the Texas economy since the 1920s. The town grew up around petroleum and railroads. Guy Clark’s grandmother ran a boarding house there — the kind of West Texas establishment that attracted oilfield workers, drifters, and characters like Jack Prigg who came through and left their marks.
Clark grew up splitting time between Monahans and Rockport on the Gulf Coast, where his father practiced law. But the West Texas world of Monahans gave him something that the Gulf Coast could not: a cast of characters whose lives felt mythic, and a landscape stripped down to bone-dry essentials.
“Desperados Waiting for a Train” was first recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1973 on the legendary live album Viva Terlingua. It has since been covered by The Highwaymen, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, and dozens more. Members of the Western Writers of America named it one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time. Jack Prigg never knew any of that. He was just a man in a good suit on a Sunday in Monahans, leaning against a Packard.