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The George Strait birthplace Poteet marks the beginning of an American original. On May 18, 1952, in this small Atascosa County town ringed by strawberry fields and South Texas sky. George Harvey Strait Sr. arrived in the world at the now abandoned Shott’s Memorial Hospital.
Nothing about Poteet predicted what was coming — it was a town of a few thousand souls, known primarily for its Strawberry Festival and its proximity to San Antonio. But something in that South Texas air must have lodged itself in Strait from the start, because everything he would eventually sing about — cattle, heartache, dances, the long flat drive home — was woven into this place.
Poteet sits in Atascosa County, about 37 miles south of San Antonio, and it is George Strait country in every sense. His father owned a 2,000-acre cattle ranch outside nearby Big Wells. His family worked that land on weekends and in summers, and those hours in the saddle gave Strait the authenticity that no amount of studio polish could manufacture. He wasn’t performing cowboy — he was one. You can hear it in “Amarillo by Morning,” in the easy authority of “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind,” in the way he wears a hat like he was born to it. Because in a sense, he was.
Strait eventually moved to nearby Pearsall, where he grew up and attended high school. But Poteet is the root. When you look out toward the fields and the flat South Texas horizon, it is hard not to think about what this state has produced from its most unremarkable-looking corners — and how a quiet kid born here would one day fill Kyle Field with 110,905 people, the largest concert audience in American history.