Welcome To Crockett, Texas!

Western hospitality is a beautiful thing.

C&I headed to the small town of Crockett, Texas, for our interview and cover shoot with Billy Bob Thornton for this very January 2026 issue you’ve got in your hands.

Pinning down the busy star of Landman had been proving tricky. It wasn’t just being the leading man of Taylor Sheridan’s oil-biz thriller that had his calendar so tight. Thornton was also touring with his band, The Boxmasters. Lucky for us, they were on the road and coming through the Lone Star State, where they had a gig at the newly renovated Ritz Theatre in Crockett. We suddenly could calendar a place and date and deploy the troops.

We didn’t know a thing about Crockett. We had to look it up on a map to figure out what kind of field trip we were talking about. And what would we find when we got there? Not quite 7,000 inhabitants. Our kind of old: incorporated on December 29, 1837, in Houston County, Texas’ oldest, and the fifth-oldest city in the state. Rich history. Named after Davy Crockett, and said to be located near where the frontiersman camped on his way to the Alamo. Historic downtown, historic homes, and close to the scenic (but Hurricane Helene-damaged) Davy Crockett National Forest.

So we knew what Google told us about Crockett. But we didn’t know a soul there.

Boy, was that about to change.

Cue the cold calls. The first one was to the Crockett Chamber of Commerce, where the unbelievably kind and capable—and freakishly patient and persevering!—executive director Lizzy Hodges took the bull by the horns. Before we knew it, she had personally hoofed it to every photogenic location in town and sent pictures of the places she figured might best accommodate our crew for a quiet, laid-back, in-depth interview by entertainment editor Joe Leydon and serve as a fetchingly Western backdrop for a cover shoot with photographer Dixie Dixon and her team. All told, C&I descended with five folks and lots of equipment.

The big-hearted generosity of spirit wasn’t just ordinary kindness and thoughtfulness. It was above-and-beyond, downright Biblical love-the-foreigner-as-yourself, how-we-do-it-in-Southeast Texas kind of Western manners. And we’d like to take this opportunity to give everybody their flowers, before the actual floral arrangements of gratitude can actually be delivered.

First flowers to Lizzy, who not only advised about absolutely everything on the ground and made all the appropriate introductions but also went so far as to procure oil drums—“Would you like black or blue?”—for the shoot to give some appropriate Landman energy.

To Ann Walker, executive director of the Piney Woods Fine Arts Association, which helped bring back to life the vaudeville-era Ritz Theatre—originally an opera house built in 1894—where Thornton and The Boxmasters performed sets of raucous rock that night to a sold-out crowd. She mother-henned both Thornton’s crew and ours, making sure everybody was well-fed and where they were supposed to be.

And to cowboy musician-poet Pipp Gillette, who hightailed it back from a cowboy-poetry gig in Winnsboro to open his Camp Street Café for the interview and shoot.

And let us not forget Thornton himself—he brought the country charm in spades.

It was a day we at the magazine will never forget. When you read all about it in our cover story and see what that gorgeous and memorable day in Crockett, Texas, brought into being, we think you won’t forget it either.

Thanks to everyone in Crockett for the tremendous hospitality and Western warmth. As we turn over a new leaf and begin a new year together, may we all experience that kind of love and welcome—and extend it, too.

From our January 2026 issue.

PHOTOGRAPHY by Dixie Dixon.