Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Stetson: American Icon, a beautiful and heavy (nearly six-pound) coffee table book that’s out now. Through archival and modern photographs and personal odes, the book celebrates the iconic Garland, Texas, hatmaker.
Growing up in the ’60s, I watched all the great Westerns, and I always wanted to be a cowboy. I wore a cowboy hat from when I was little onward. It was an inexpensive, black felt hat. Grown-ups referred to it as my Stetson.
I’ll own a real Stetson one day, I thought to myself.
The oldest real Stetson I still wear, I bought in 1990 from longtime Houston hatter Gary Cohen of Gary’s Hats and, later, The Hat Store. It’s a silverbelly 20X, 4½-inch cattleman’s crease in the crown with a 3½-inch, mild-set brim, the kind of traditional shape my cattlemen uncles wore, the shape all the old cattlemen at auction sales wore, the shape that says Texas.
But whether you’re wearing a traditional shape—and whether you even know what a traditional shape is—a hat can transform the way you feel. You put on the right hat, and you somehow feel taller. You swell with the confidence of your heroes, even if it’s just in your imagination.
People in my line of work wear hats to great effect. You can’t hear the music of George Strait or Dwight Yoakam or Garth Brooks or Willie Nelson—or Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby—without picturing them in their hats. Their hats, their style of felts and particular shapes, are their identity, their indelible look we see in our minds when we think of them. A plethora of performers agree, as you’ll see in the following pages.
Even though I wear a hat for every day, I don’t typically wear a hat on stage. But I did wear my old 20X the first time I played Rodeo Houston, in year 2000, in the Astrodome. I felt that night like a grown-up version of the little boy whose parents took him to that rodeo every year. My Stetson made me feel like the cowboy I imagined myself to be.
An honor that means as much to me as any I’ve ever received was my induction in 2012 into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame. As my friend, legendary West Texas horseman Johnny Trotter, said at his induction, “You don’t call yourself a cowboy.”
“You aren’t a cowboy until somebody else calls you one,” he said.
The right hat makes all the difference.
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