If you have a moment, say a prayer, spare some thoughts, light a candle, or burn a joint for Tommy Luke. The traumatic brain injury he suffered in 2017 due to a nasty fall off a roof came back to haunt him this week, when a series of seizures put him in the hospital. In a recent post, his sister Callie Dee said Luke had experienced some kind of sudden neurological incident and was apparently “not coherent,” and though he had no new head injuries, the seizures were serious enough to put him in JPS.
Luckily, on Tuesday, Dee reported in a follow-up post that his status had improved and that he had “progressed positively.” But as of this writing, on Wednesday, he is still in the hospital.
I have a lot of respect for Tommy Luke. The guy can pretty much play any instrument that has strings and probably a bunch more that don’t. Music is his life, and he plays it as easy as breathing. Dee recalls that after his fall in 2017, he spent a week in the hospital before getting back behind the microphone within a month, cracking jokes about the lyrics he couldn’t remember at the time. It didn’t take long for them to come back to him, though, and in 2018, he bought an RV and moved to Nashville, where he made friends with the Music City folk scene, shooting videos and playing music before returning to Fort Worth in 2020, right before COVID.
COVID was incredibly tough on musicians, yet Tommy Luke persisted. Once the country came out the other side of lockdowns and masks, he resumed playing whenever and wherever he could, doing a 90-day tour in 2021 that took him all over the country. And back in August of this year, in a surprise that was equal parts funny, winsome, and strange, Tommy Luke made an on-the-big-screen appearance during the Limp Bizkit concert at Dos Equis Pavilion in Dallas, shown playing guitar for the crew at the side of the stage. Apparently, Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst had seen him play somewhere (Nashville, from what I heard) and asked him to play backstage at their Dallas show.
Tommy Luke, in a lot of ways, is an unsung legend in Fort Worth’s music scene, so, really, falling off a roof and then seven years later finding himself playing for Limp Bizkit at a Limp Bizkit concert at an arena is all part of it. Luke has supported and encouraged a lot of fellow musicians, helping to foster a DIY C&W/folk scene by hosting countless open-mics over the years. The dude has seen a lot of highs and lows, but he is incredibly resilient. Today, I will raise a glass to his health, grateful that I don’t yet have to pour it out to his memory.
