The stack of letters is about an inch high. Most are handwritten in black ink on lined, three-holed notebook paper, with A-plus penmanship. Curlicues, stars, and graffiti-style lettering are reserved for signatures, although the writers typically sign off with something other than their given name: Boo, Mr. 18, Yishai, Mr. Palmer, Your Boy L.A., Dan D Man.
For the past decade or so, inmates at the James Lynaugh Unit, a state prison outside Fort Stockton and some eighty miles from Marfa, have written letters to David Beebe, a man they’ve neither met nor seen. They know his raspy voice and his drawl, y’all, as the deejay on the Night Train Express, a radio show that airs Tuesday nights, from nine until midnight, on Marfa Public Radio. “I like that nice, mellow vibe,” he smoothly intones as Crystal Thomas’s soulful “Country Girl” slides to its natural conclusion. “The news is coming up, but first, a shout-out to the guys on the Lynaugh Unit from me, and also from Dan D Man. I got a message from him: ‘I hope things continue to go well for those of you who are making progress on your terms.’ Marfa Public Radio. This is David Beebe, I’ll be back for hour three, don’t go anywhere!”
Night Train Express started in 2008. Beebe had just moved to Marfa, but business and social ventures frequently kept him on the road to and from Houston. At the time, the Marfa station’s automated nighttime play tended toward folk standards and wheedling cowpoke ballads. Sleepy music, in other words. Very sleepy. “I remember thinking this radio station is trying to kill me by playing lullabies,” Beebe says about his drives back home. “I thought, I need to start a show with some late-night music, keep people awake!”
He sent a one-page proposal to the station’s manager, pitching a show that would beam Southern soul and an array of Spanish-language genres into the yielding darkness, along with a category Beebe defines as “grown-folks music”: “non-rap R&B for the over-twenty-five crowd. Homegrown, party-centric, no disparagement of women, no cussing, lots of innuendo, ‘dress up for church in the morning after spending all night at the club’ music.” When could he start? the manager replied. All aboard the Night Train Express.
Deejays at the station had long received occasional fan mail from inmates at the Lynaugh Unit. One of Beebe’s early writers, Paul, told him that inmates dissected the show on Wednesdays in the day room or in the prison yard and would come up with requests for the next week’s installment. “Paul wrote a couple letters after he got out, saying, ‘Send my regards to these people,’ ” says Beebe. After those dedications made it on-air, letters from other inmates began rolling in.
Beebe, who is 52, grew up in Houston, the son of a probate-attorney dad and a mother who taught high school and college French. Recorded music was a poignant backdrop to his early life. “When I was a little kid, radio stations weren’t so formatted,” he says. “You’d hear rock, disco, country, soul, and oldies on the same station. Every day, I was like, I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to play today.” He savored the soul and R&B at school parties where Myron Anderson, the storied radio host of Texas Southern University’s KTSU, was hired to spin tunes, and he soaked up indie and punk music from Texas bands such as the Judy’s and Butthole Surfers on KTRU, Rice University’s student radio station.
In the seventh grade he joined a band, and he’s sung, blown the harmonica, drummed, or laid down the bass with someone, somewhere, ever since. His high school group, the bluesy Banana Blender Surprise, played Beatles and Fabulous Thunderbirds covers and, eventually, originals about Moon Pies and the crusading TV journalist Marvin Zindler. During his junior year, Beebe transferred from the private St. John’s School, which was small and tony, to Lamar High School, a public school with some three thousand students. “It was like twenty-six percent black, twenty percent Hispanic, fifteen percent Asian, and thirty percent white—regular people and a lot of kids with not a lot,” Beebe says. “Lamar put me in with people from different backgrounds. I was playing in bands, being involved, joining school clubs. The best move I ever made was going to Lamar, setting my path for being a public person.”
During college at the University of Texas, Beebe worked the door and bar at an Austin reggae joint, and he booked acts for Rockefeller’s, in Houston, while on break from school. After Beebe graduated with a history degree, in 1993, he and Banana Blender toured endlessly for several years, putting nearly 200,000 miles on a Suburban jalopy. “This music thing is a winner for me,” he says. “I’m never happier than when the music is going well and the band sounds great.”
Years of working Houston clubs followed, including at the Fabulous Satellite Lounge and the Continental Club. Meanwhile, he drummed rock and roll favorites in the Allen Oldies Band and played a couple hundred shows a year with the El Orbits, a lounge trio. The frenetic pace couldn’t continue. “I had a full career of over three thousand shows by age thirty-five,” he says. By the summer of 2006, his vocal cords were nearly kaput and would eventually require surgery. When a group of Houston folks he knew approached him about renovating Marfa’s funeral parlor into a club called Padre’s, Beebe was ready to at least consider a change. He visited the town and wrote out a list of pros and cons. Cons: No more announcing matches for Houston Roller Derby. No more jogging along Buffalo Bayou. No Vietnamese food. Pros: I can always come right back. “This was maybe the last chance I had to do something totally different, to jump off a cliff and see if I land,” he recalls. “I can go right back to my family, my friends, my club.”
Beebe bought an Airstream and hauled it to Marfa, and with work underway at Padre’s, he soon encountered permitting tribulations with his new travel trailer home. He began attending city meetings and blogging about them. A local election drew near, and candidates were few. “The mayor said, ‘You come to all the meetings and ask good questions. I’d like to see you run for city council—you’re going to open a business, you could help us out.’ ” In 2008, Beebe won his seat by a two-vote margin; he served six years. “I was trying to understand how a city works,” he says. “It was a great education.”
When he left Padre’s in 2012, it occurred to him that he could return to Houston. But, he realized, “I couldn’t imagine leaving and never seeing anyone at the Marfa post office. I couldn’t face that not being a part of my day.”
So Beebe stayed and tested his entrepreneurial resolve. He started Boyz 2 Men, a taco-and-barbecue truck whose blatantly baffling menu was labeled the Binder of Confusion and whose disinterest in customer service was so contrarian that it approached performance art. “Oh, we don’t give recommendations,” the counter guy reliably deadpanned when someone would ask. “Not after what happened last time.”
There was a short-lived recycling business. He became the local distributor for Zapp’s potato chips. The food truck morphed into a burger place called Bad Hombres. Its motto: “They’re kind of expensive.” He learned Spanish and played bass in a border-music duo with Primo Carrasco, a retired railroad worker. And, urged by others to continue his civil service, he served as justice of the peace, in Presidio County, from 2015 to the end of 2021 and has been a county commissioner since 2022. “Being a civil servant,” he says, “you should be honest about who you are, and you should be real.”
No matter the changes, left turns, obligations, and busyness in Beebe’s life, Night Train Express remained. He deejayed live in the studio for years, sometimes accompanied by his on-air sidekick, Jason “the Newscaster” Kolkur. During the pandemic, Beebe switched to a pretaped format. He still plots out and records these shows in a studio that occupies part of a bedroom in the house he shares with his wife, Hilary, and their baby daughter, Mirela.
The inmate requests don’t play every week, and he never devotes an entire show to them. Despite Beebe’s deep musical background, Lynaugh inmates have introduced him to artists and styles outside his knowledge base. “Most of the music that they have turned me on to is not ultrarare, but it’s not music that I was ever exposed to enough to know it,” Beebe says. “Now with the internet, it’s easy to research a tight-knit scene like Latin freestyle or go-go or lowrider music and open up the mysteries. Also, some mainstream R&B acts like Slave and Junie were artists I didn’t know of, and I thought of myself as pretty well-versed in that stuff from my life in Houston, from the two legendary soul and R&B radio stations I listened to pretty much all day, every day.”
Although the men at Lynaugh are not his sole intended listeners, they are an audience whom Beebe has thought about for years. “I think that most, if not all, of the guys who write to me regret whatever they did to get there but are grateful for a possible future. And grateful for the memories they have, which music makes them closer to.”
The archive of inmate letters contains a range of salutations to Beebe: Mr. Bebee, Mr. Bee Bee, Mr. Bebe, David Bee Bee, David BeBee, David, David-Be-Bee, Mr. BeBe, Mr. David Be-Be, Dave BB, Hey Mr. D.J., Mr. Dave Beebe, and, simply, Dave. The writers are unfailingly polite, formal even.
There’s no question that the Lynaugh Unit houses inmates who’ve done terrible things that have hurt other people. Yet whatever
bad decisions, addictions, hard luck, or wrong-place-wrong-time circ*mstances landed these men at Lynaugh, it is absent in the Night Train correspondence. The letters expose their good sides, their mannerliness, their affection for one another and for the people they miss.
From Your Boy L.A.: “I’d like to start this letter by saying your Tuesday show was as always outstanding. There was a brother here on the unit by the nickname N.O. . . . He was a good dude, and he was a big listener of your show.” N.O. served more than two decades in prison, reports L.A., and died of pneumonia less than six months after his release. “Anyway! Dave, most of the prison population would like (if possible) for you to say over the air: ‘This is for N.O. who was on the Lynaugh Unit,’ then play around 10:45 p.m. when everyone is in their cells ‘It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday,’ by Boyz to Men. Thank you for all that you do Dave. Take care and stay safe and as always, God bless.”
From Mr. 18: “David, I’m a little pissed because other stations keep trying to kick in over your show right now, but as a dedicated listener, I won’t turn the dial, static and all. I love it and I’d like to give you a big time gracias for playing the songs I have been requesting. It means a lot to me and some of the other guys here.” Requests: Smokey Robinson, “Ooh Baby Baby” and “Cruisin’.”
From Dan D Man: “When I heard both of my songs, tears came down and I picked up my photo album and started dancing. Thanks for playing my request, ‘Daddy’s Home.’ I dream of my kiddies all the time. I can’t wait to have them back in my arms. Their grandpa don’t let them write which I understand. I grew up without having my dad around so I know how it is.”
One day last spring, Beebe dialed a number and Daniel Gaitan, a.k.a. Dan D Man, picked up. He was newly released and speaking from the El Paso halfway house where he expected to spend several months. Gaitan, who is forty, was jailed on drug charges for six and a half years, five of which he served at Lynaugh. He’d found work in a furniture warehouse and was holding tight to certain aspirations, and he’d lined up a meat-packing job in his hometown of San Angelo a few months down the line. “The Lynaugh Unit was pretty rough,” he told Beebe. “I never want to go back to that place.”
Night Train Express was a highlight every week for Gaitan and others, important beyond mere entertainment. “Everybody liked it,” Gaitan said. “All types of people liked it, the Mexicans, the white boys, the Black boys—everybody knew Tuesday night. It’s our connection to the free world. I didn’t get mail or correspond with nobody. When I listened to David Beebe, it was my connection to freedom. To hear my name or the songs, I’m not gonna lie, it made me cry. It hits your heart, to hear that somebody cares and takes the time to read your letters.”
“Mr. 18 used to write about the memories,” Beebe responded. “That the memories were like light—show me the light and hope that better times can come again. I’m really proud of you for doing your time. Thank you for letting me know.”
Gaitan has seven children, one of whom is in college. “I’m gonna stay out of trouble,” he promised Beebe. “I used to be wild, doing bad things out there. I’m not going to do that no more. I’m going to be a family man.”
“Did y’all know I was a judge?” Beebe asked.
“Yes, we knew. Mr. 18 told me. The way you talked—we knew you felt us in your heart. You made us feel loved, made us feel wanted. You didn’t make you feel like you were forgotten.”
“Y’all are real survivors,” said Beebe. “That’s the thing I’m proudest of you most is making it through. I hope you can stick with the program. I think about y’all a lot.”
The intercom at the halfway house blared. It was time for Gaitan to go, but, as usual, he had a request. “Can you do a shout-out to Chuckie, Ears, Mr. 18, and Jimmy Jamz?”
“You got it,” Beebe told him. “No problem.”
Thisarticleoriginally appeared in the July 2024 issue ofTexas Monthly with the headline “High Frequency.” Subscribe today.
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