On a recent spring afternoon, Manuel Cuevas was celebrating his 91st birthday—at home, surrounded by friends and family. Just days before he was in the hospital with pulmonary issues, but now, he’s gingerly sipping tequila, eating pozole, and sharing stories from his extraordinary life. Cuevas leads me from the front yard, where people are congregating, into his living room, and carefully sits down on a wooden chair.
“By the time I was four-years-old, I had already read The Iliad,” he says matter of factly. He then gestures to a bear-skull dipped in silver, resting on an old piano. “I made that too,” he says, “and the piano is from the set of ‘Gunsmoke.
’” Cuevas, a Michoacán, Mexico native, lives with his wife of eight years, Ofelia Vasquez, in College Grove, Tennessee—a rural town some 45 minutes south of Nashville. I joke that the home he’s lived in since 1988 feels like a museum, and ask him how he’s feeling. “I sleep well, I read well, I enjoy life well,” he offers.
“And, all the while, I lived in the galaxy.” Cuevas is an eccentric man of mystery, with many talents and secrets. He is best known known as a fashion designer and master-tailor responsible for creating cowboy couture suits worn by a who’s who of performers and luminaries over the last seven decades: Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton, John Lennon, and his dear friends Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.
The list goes on and then rolls off the table. “You definitely c.
