Back in September 2011, I was on road trip across the country, and we stopped to pay our respects to DJ Screw. To date, this continues to be the most challenging difficult cemetery to find to date for me, but super rad and rewarding to find it, and to be there. This is from what i wrote on my travel blog back then. You can find the original posts here and here … Famous for the Houston rap scene, but surprisingly, he’s from and buried in Smithville, Texas - a town in the cuts less than an hour south of Austin. I had a fairly difficult time pinning down exactly the location of the graveyard he was buried in - just had a name of the cemetery and the name of the county. With some research, I found the location of the cemetery on the map, and worked out some directions to the street.
We got off the highway, and ended up making a wrong turn and ending up in downtown Smithville. A cute throwback town with a bunch of antique stores, Smithville was used for shooting a number of movies - Tree of Life most recently. Confirmed my directions with a postal worker we found on Main Street. Also on Main St was a distribution center for essentials to help those displaced by the wildfires that ripped through Texas during their significant drought.
Back on the road to find the cemetery, we ended up on a county road that turned into a dirt road and then back into a real road again. We passed a sign for Cunningham Cemetery, but the sign pointed to the field across the street where there was no road. We turned around and looked at the other side, and there was an arrow on that sign that also pointed to the field. Confused, we kept driving along the road, as it turned to gravel again. After a mile or so of driving on gravel, under an ominous sky, we turned back around to explore again at the sign. There were two driveways, one going to a residence, and another didn’t appear to go anywhere. Against our better judgment, we drove up to the house so I could ask them where the cemetery was. I was careful to keep my hands where they could be seen, and tried to look the least sketchy I could, and hollered towards the house, asking if anyone was home. Did that a couple times, and we got no response, so we turned around and tried the other entrance.
We unlatched the cattle gate to get our car up the driveway, and we drove up a grass and dirt driveway with cactus lining the outside of the driveway. A shitload of large grasshoppers hopped out of the grass as our car approached - some away from our car, and a handful INTO our car. We came to another cattle gate, and drove a distance further and the cemetery finally came into view. We had to open and get through a third cattle grate, and were finally there.
The cemetery was pretty small and very country, including handwritten headstones. Was not hard to to find Screw’s stone. Even if the text on the grave didn’t give it away, it was the only grave that had an empty bottle of cough syrup at it. Luckily for everyone involved, we had brought our own cough syrup, and poured a little out for Robert Davis. RIP
- Paul