Fandangle History

Over 80 years ago, due to popular response, an Albany High School senior play was renamed The Fort Griffin Fandangle and reproduced by the town months later.  The play was written and directed by Robert Nail Jr., an Albany playwright and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University.  Nail's friend, Alice Reynolds, an Albany native, artist, musician, and graduate of Baylor University, assisted to create a new outdoor style of theater in West Texas.

     Today, over 250 citizens/actors perform, produce, and stage the big show on an acre-sized amphitheater called Prairie Theater.  It has been acclaimed a professional People's Theater by critics.  Fandangle commemorates Fort Griffin, an 1867 military post sixteen miles north if Albany.  Indian tribes resented intruding settlers.  The U.S. government established this fort as protection and the famous Mackenzie pursuits in Northwest Texas against Quanah Parker's tribe started here.

     Below the fort, along the Clear Fork of the Brazos, a town grew attracting Western Cattle Trail drivers, ranchers, and Buffalo Hunters with hides stacked as high as a two-story building.  When cowboys from South Texas arrived, the motley group exchanged money in the gambling saloons creating a desperate, dangerous atmosphere.  Well-known Old West names like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday first met here and drank and gambled with Big-Nose Kate, Hurricane Bill, Hurricane Minnie, and Lottie Deno.

     As time passed, a railroad came to Albany, and Fort Griffin was abandoned, but Bob Nail relives these scenes in his Fandangle with horses, wagons, longhorn cattle, a stagecoach, a train, and citizens of Albany cast as gamblers, can-can girls, settlers, Indians, soldiers, buffalo hunters, and our real-life Shackelford County Cowboys.  Every Fandangle tells a different tale.  Many of the 10,000 people who come to Fandangle return each year to refresh memories of what our ancestors experienced.