Lee Miller

Why collectors care

Lee Miller is the living Austin bootmaker who apprenticed under Charlie Dunn and has owned Texas Traditions since 1986. Collectors meet his name after the Jerry Jeff Walker song and need a way to separate Miller-shop pairs from Charlie Dunn authorship.

He belongs under Bootmakers. Shop continuity, wait-list color, opening-date conflict, and Capitol Saddlery disambiguation stay on the Texas Traditions page.

Biography

Equine Info Exchange (Lynn Ascrizzi, 4 April 2022) and The Daily Texan (30 June 2026) place Miller’s childhood in Rutland, Vermont. Equine Info says he spent time in the shoe department of his grandfather’s clothing store, graduated from Rutland High School in 1972, and wanted to be an archaeologist and an artist. The Daily Texan records that he inherited his first cowboy boots from an older brother at about age ten.

The Austin Chronicle (20 April 2019) reports that Miller heard Walker’s “Charlie Dunn” in 1972 at about age nineteen, sitting in a van in Vermont. Austin Monthly (March 2022) instead dates that first hearing to 1974. After high school he studied drawing, sculpture, and painting, and told people he wanted to make cowboy boots.

He attended the Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology Boot and Saddlemaking Program for two years and graduated in 1976 (Equine Info). A classmate, Steven Craig Martin, later found him in Utah. Equine Info says Miller worked at Randal I. Merrell’s one-man shop in Vernal, then ran a leather-goods and repair shop in Roosevelt while living on the Ute reservation at Fort Duchesne. Permanent Style (June 2013) also places the reservation years in Utah.

In November 1977, after Martin searched about four months, Miller flew from Salt Lake City to Austin. The Dallas Morning News (23 November 2016) describes a skinny, nervous twenty-two-year-old with long hair and wire-frame glasses. Permanent Style’s 2013 interview instead says he joined Dunn “at the age of 18.” Equine Info says Dunn was 79 when Miller arrived and that Miller was 32 when he bought the shop in 1986. Those age tellings do not collapse to one birth year.

Carrlyn answered Dunn’s secretary ad in 1980. They married in 1985. When Dunn retired in 1986, the Millers bought Texas Traditions. Wikipedia’s statement that Dunn retired in 1988 conflicts with that purchase year. Equine Info names a grown son, James, who teaches history in an Oklahoma high school, and says the couple live in a 1930s brick house next to the shop.

People credits / teaching line

The shop was founded so Dunn could train apprentices, and Miller continues that teaching line. Equine Info’s 2022 shop roll names Charlotte Marshall, Dana Perrotti, Jojo McKibben, and part-time Houston arrival Graham Ebner. Earlier 2016–2019 press also names Matt Defer. True West (2006) names Virgile Mourtant and Julia Parmentor. That is not a complete apprentice roll.

Steven Craig Martin apprenticed beside Miller for about three years, then ran Rowell’s Shoe and Boot Repair in Austin for more than twenty years. Equine Info records his death on 4 January 2018 in Georgetown at age 68. Miller has said that without Martin he would not have met Carrlyn or worked for Dunn.

Press-named clients are reputation evidence, not pair certificates. Texas Monthly 2002 names Lyle Lovett, Sting, Slim Pickens, and Arnold Palmer. Texas Standard names Guy Clark, Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, and Tommy Lee Jones. Austin Monthly names Willie Nelson. Equine Info adds David Crosby, Gillian Welch, Harry Connick Jr., Lauren Bacall, and Tommy Lee Jones wearing the shop’s boots in the 1989 film Lonesome Dove. The Daily Texan (2026) names Bill Murray.