"The Wildest Show Behind Bars." Started in 1931 as morale relief for inmates and ended in 1986 with a condemned grandstand. For fifty-five Octobers, every Sunday, more than thirty thousand people drove to a prison in Huntsville to watch the men inside ride bulls, fight cows, and play guitar.
Lee Simmons, the new general manager of the Texas Prison System in 1930, was a former Sherman sheriff who believed in what he called "honest work and honest play." His staff put on the first prison rodeo in October 1931 — entirely for the inmates, on a dirt field inside the Walls. There were no ticket sales, no grandstand, and no advertising. Just convicts watching convicts try to ride convicts' horses.
Word spread to Huntsville, then to Houston, then to the wire services. By 1933, the public was invited. By 1937, a steel grandstand seated 15,000. By 1950, the Sunday traffic into Huntsville stretched eleven miles down State Highway 75 and the rodeo had become — implausibly, undeniably — one of the great American spectacles of the mid-twentieth century.
A standard rodeo program with a few events you would not find anywhere else on Earth.
The signature event. A red Bull Durham tobacco sack containing fifty dollars was tied between the horns of a Brahma bull. Any inmate who could pull it off — by any means — kept the money. The bull was usually winning by the bell.
Three-man teams of inmates chased an unbroken cow around the arena and tried to fill a Coke bottle. First team to deliver liquid to the judge took the purse.
Stock supplied by the prison's own herd. Many inmates had never sat a horse before they got to Texas. Some left with rodeo cards.
The straight events. Trusty cowboys from the Ramsey and Eastham horse details — many of them lifers — competed in regulation rodeo style.
Open bronc riding for any inmate who signed up that morning. Volunteers got eight seconds to either ride, fall, or be carried out.
Three hundred mounted inmates in white, lining up before each show under the Texas flag. A photograph of the Grand Entry hung in the Capitol for three decades.
The midshow concert was the rodeo's quiet revolution. For thirty cents extra, the crowd got an hour of music from whoever happened to be the most famous person in country, gospel, or western swing that year. Almost everyone played at one point or another. They came because the rodeo paid scale, because the publicity was enormous, and — many later admitted — because the audience was unlike any other on Earth.
The King of the Cowboys rode his palomino into the arena to thirty-five thousand inmates and free citizens. He came back in 1948, 1953, and 1962.
Eleven years before Folsom. He paced the dirt in black, sang "Folsom Prison Blues" to men who knew exactly what he meant, and never forgot the sound it made coming back at him.
Then a Nashville songwriter on the rise. He played his own set, then sat in with the prison band the Goree Girls had inspired.
The Dallas burlesque dancer, then serving fifteen years at Goree for marijuana possession, was paroled to perform a single rodeo show — and then sent back inside.
She told a Houston reporter afterward that the rodeo was the only audience that had ever scared her, "and the only one I cried after."
The all-women string band of the Goree Unit. They opened the rodeo for nearly twenty years and had a weekly radio show on KPRC Houston during the war.
By the early 1980s the wooden grandstand — built by inmates from prison-cut timber and prison-fired brick — was failing. Engineers condemned it. The TDC, then under federal supervision and bleeding money, could not justify the cost of a new one. The 1986 rodeo, attended by 19,000, was announced as the last. Director Lane McCotter promised the rodeo would return as soon as a new arena was built.
It never was.
The grandstand was demolished in 1989. The arena floor — where Roy Rogers had ridden, where Cash had paced, where men with twenty-year sentences had won fifty dollars off the horns of a thousand-pound bull — became a parking lot. The midshow's brass railing, the only piece of the structure preserved, hangs today on the wall of the Texas Prison Museum, three blocks down University Avenue.
"It wasn't the money. It wasn't even the cheering. It was the one Sunday a year you could be the best thing on a horse for ten seconds and somebody outside the wire would know your name." — Anonymous · Eastham Unit · interviewed 1989