My friend, fellow barbecue aficionado, and Austin-based steel guitarist Marty Muse enlisted my help for some portraits to go along with a project he’s working on. Always looking for a reason to mix business with pleasure, we headed down to Smitty’s Market in Lockhart, Texas for some of the best barbecue, available light, and backgrounds you’ll ever find under one roof.

The folks at Smitty’s were incredibly accommodating, giving us access to every part of the building, the interior of which is coated with a deep bronze patina brought on by 70 years of smoking meat inside the building, which started as a general store and butcher shop with a barbecue pit in the back. Available light doesn’t get much better than this, and I soon realized that cracking out the strobes I had brought with me would have been a sin on the magnitude of putting sauce on Smitty’s signature brisket (you don’t need it, trust me)–or, for that matter, using a fork to eat it. Smitty’s isn’t big on entertainment, though; they prefer to keep things simple. So it was fitting that Marty brought his Dobro along, picking and sliding effortlessly through improvised bluegrass licks, entertaining the locals during their lunch hour with the soft acoustic twang of the resonator as I let the light do its own thing and shot away.