Mike Holley didn’t recognize the skinny guy wearing a funky skullcap and eating at Holley’s restaurant, ChuckWagon BBQ, that day. Holley’s wife Frances Holley, who works the register at the family’s Madison eatery, recognized him though. She moseyed over and got his autograph.

After she got back, Mike asked Frances, “Who was that?” She told him it was Billy Gibbons. Mike replied, “OK …” because he had no idea she was talking about the singer/guitarist for ZZ Top, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band known for blues-rock hits like “Legs” and “La Grange.” Looking back now, Mike explains, “I’m more of a George Jones fan.”

Gibbons, whose wife has roots in Madison, has dined at ChuckWagon several times over the years. He always gets the Texas-style beef brisket. When the guitar hero from the greatest band from Texas likes your brisket good enough to keep coming back, you’re doing it right.

ChuckWagon’s brisket is as meaty, tasty and satisfying as a Billy Gibbons guitar solo. They smoke their briskets 12 to 14 hours depending on size, using a mix of pecan and hickory wood.

They used to do mesquite, which is the Texas standard for smoking brisket. Mike would even back truckloads from his home state to use at the restaurant. But that got to be too much, so they substitute pecan to go with the hickory, which is a smoke flavor people in Alabama are used to, from hickory’s common usage in cooking pork barbecue.

The Holleys’ son Stephen Holley started off washing dishes as a kid at the original location in Athens, which opened in 2004. Stephen now runs ChuckWagon’s 8048 Hwy. 72 restaurant in Madison, which they relocated to in 2020 from previous Madison Boulevard digs.

In addition to managing the place, Stephen cooks, carves up and serves meat on the line, like his dad did for years. Stephen says ChuckWagon goes through 50 to 60 briskets each week. Brisket accounts for around 70 percent of customers’ orders, he estimates.

Asked for the key to cooking brisket well, Stephen says. “Low temperature, a good smoke and then just have the time and patience to cook it.”

Sliced up in hearty planks with edge fat adding flavor and lusciousness, ChuckWagon’s brisket is a bodacious eat. Brisket also produces a delish by-product, called burnt ends.

For the uninitiated, Stephen explains. “They’re the back half of the brisket that we put in a sweet sauce and actually smoke it again. So they’re kind of a double cooked, really tender, really sweet, chunks of brisket. They’re fantastic.”

Kansas City is generally credited with originating burnt ends, but Stephen says that’s up for debate: “Texas was really quick if not first. Brisket was absolutely Texas.”

Stephen learned how to smoke brisket from his dad. Mike picked it up back in Pecos, Texas, where he lived for many years. Like many barbecue restauranteurs, Mike started off grilling at home – burgers, steaks and all.

Mike learned how to do brisket from the owner of a local Pecos barbecue joint called Mr. Red’s. ChuckWagon’s peppery, smoky, tangy barbecue sauce – made in a five-gallon pot on the stove each day — is named Texas Red in his honor.

Meat is marquee at a barbecue joint. But ChuckWagon also does some splendid sides. The Southwest mac and cheese involves a five-cheese blend, bacon “rotel” and some secret ingredients.

The baked beans, cooked with bits of brisket in them, are a recipe with history. Mike’s grandfather George Washinton Gray made them that way, and Gray figures into ChuckWagon’s name too.

Gray was part of an epic Western cattle-drive led by Charles Goodnight, a legendary rancher who author Larry McMurtry fictionalized in his “Lonesome Dove” series novels, later made into several TV miniseries. (Goodnight is featured in the series “Streets of Laredo,” “Comanche Moon” and “Dead Man’s Walk.”)

Mike says, “Charles Goodnight outfitted a Studebaker wagon – they made wagons before they made cars – and put a chuck box [a portable, camp kitchen] in the back of it. They would have two wagons with them. One would go out a day’s ride, as far as the herd could travel in a day, make camp, butcher a calf and start cooking. The other wagon stayed with the herd.

“It worked like a food truck. They would have big ol’ biscuits and cut them in half and put brisket on and then drovers [whose job it was to move the herd from one place to another] could pull off from the herd anytime they were hungry. Go up there and get them a brisket sandwich and a cup of coffee or water, stay in the saddle and keep moving. Every night, those drovers got a good hot meal.”

Mike’s grandfather signed on with the cattle drive as a cook. Growing up, his grandfather told him evocative stories from then, including traveling through Native American camps under the cover of night. ChuckWagon’s baked bean recipe dates back to those adventures.

With his six-three frame, mustache, boots, cowboy hat and knack for telling stories in a direct way, Mike Holley is all Texas. He’s lived a few lives, too. Worked for 25 years in Pecos oil fields, working his way up from grunt work to a petroleum engineer on rigs. Later, he had a small construction business for a while.

Before all that, Mike met Frances when he was in the military and stationed in Huntsville, where she was from. They first met at a Shoney’s drive-in where roller-skate-wearing waitress attended to customers out in their cars.

“When I retired from the oil field,” Mike says, “she thought it was time to come home where they had sweet tea.”

These days, it’s easy to find North Alabama barbecue restaurants that do brisket. But when ChuckWagon opened their original Athens restaurant that was not the case.

Back then, area meat purveyors didn’t even carry brisket. They had to special order it for the Holleys and required them to buy 10 cases, about five briskets each, at a time.

“We actually took pork off the menu,” Mike says, “because nobody’s trying [the brisket]. They’d just default to pork. It got to wherever they’d come in and ask for a barbecue sandwich, I’d cut ‘em a brisket sandwich. And if they said anything, I’d just say, ‘That’s all I got.’”

Eventually, Texans who were in Huntsville working in the aerospace field got word about ChuckWagon. Huntsville engineers who’d grown up on pork barbecue got hip to brisket on business trips to Texas aerospace hubs like Houston. “So we finally broke through,” Mike says.

In 2008, ChuckWagon relocated to their iconic Madison location, in a shack-like building at 8982 Madison Blvd. Mike credits Huntsville Times/AL.com coverage in 2008 and 2012 with accelerating the restaurant’s business and notoriety.

He also took things into his own hands. ChuckWagon happened to be located on the north side of Madison Boulevard, not as accessible from the highway as the south side, where several fast-food places were. He went out and bought three big pieces of plywood. He cut out the letters B, B and Q.

Mike then used the letters as stencils he took up on the restaurant’s roof. He ran a paint roller over them. It worked. Redstone Arsenal workers on lunchbreaks and other hungry drivers-by were lured in by the huge “BBQ” on the roof.

The plywood stencils were later placed against the side of the building. To Mike’s head scratching, they later became props for customers’ social media selfies. Today, those same plywood letters adorn a wall inside ChuckWagon’s current location.

Besides barbecue, Mike’s interests include riding his Harley-Davison motorcycle, as well as woodworking. He makes all the rustic interior features for ChuckWagon’s restaurants himself.

After help opening the first Madison location, Stephen wanted to try something besides barbecue for a living. A music lover obsessed with everything from rap to metal to country, he worked in audio/visual and live sound.

After a short stint touring as a roadie for a popular active-rock band, he realized the hard-living road life wasn’t for him.

“After all these late-night teardowns [for live music shows] and early morning- setups, I got to thinking,” Stephen recalls. “You know what? The restaurant business isn’t that bad. And I do enjoy it. It was one of those moments where I had to go and do my own thing first. I came back around 2009 and was like, ‘I’m in.’”

As big as ChuckWagon’s rep is in North Alabama and beyond now, there’ve been stones in their path.

They had to vacate their rustically charming Madison Boulevard space due to issues including a roof leak, broken climate control system, and floor damage caused by tree roots underneath.

In 2018, ChuckWagon opened a south Huntsville location. But the “SoHu” location shuttered in 2022 after the double-whammy of COVID and a big increase in telecommuting cratered lunch business.

They haven’t stopped trying new things either. Recently, they started doing beef ribs on Fridays. Big, juicy meaty ribs that evoke something Fred Flintstone would eat. And they just opened a new location, in Rogersville.

Originally, Mike started ChuckWagon to be a small enough operation he could run the place by himself if he had to. It’s grown to something that, with Stephen at the controls, will outlive him. “It’s good to have something that you built that is gonna keep going,” Mike says.

Besides ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, other celebs to eat at ChuckWagon include NASCAR icon Michael Waltrip. Country music star Vince Gill, too.

As Gill was leaving the restaurant, Mike fell in behind him and said, “I sure do like what you do in music” Gill stopped to chat with Mike and Frances a few minutes. Before he left, the singer, now a member of classic-rock band the Eagles, said, “Did you see Dwight Yoakam?”

Turns out Yoakam, known for crooning country hits like “Guitars, Cadillacs” and acting in films like “Sling Blade,” and come to ChuckWagon with Gill that day. With a chuckle, Mike says, “While I was talking to Vince Gill, he snuck out.”

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