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‘Browsing through the honky tonk bin again  …  This time another classic genuine original. Don Walser was Real country, a yodeler and had a fine tenor voice. Check him out and enjoy’

rŌbert

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THE LIFE OF DON WALSER

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Don Walser was born in Brownfield, Texas. A roots musician since he was 11 years old, Walser became an accomplished guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. He started his first band, The Panhandle Playboys, at age 16, and shared bills with another aspiring Texas singer, Buddy Holly.

As rock’n’roll began to skyrocket in popularity, Walser opted to stay in the Texas Panhandle, raise a family and work as a mechanic and later as an auditor for the National Guard, rather than move to Nashville and pursue a recording career. As a result, he had little following outside Texas for the first part of his career. However, he never stopped playing and became widely known in Texas. From 1959-61 Walser had a group called The Texas Plainsmen and a weekly radio program. For the next three decades he was always in bands and played a heavy schedule. He wrote popular original songs such as “Rolling Stone from Texas”, which received a four-star review in 1964 from Billboard magazine.

As time went on, Walser also became known for maintaining a catalog of older, obscure country music and cowboy songs. He keep alive old 1940s and 1950s tunes by country music pioneers such as Bob Wills and Eddie Arnold, and made them his own in a style that blended elements of honky tonk and Western swing. He also was known for his extraordinary yodeling style in the tradition of Slim Whitman and Jimmie Rodgers.

In 1984, the Guard transferred Walser to Austin, a center of the burgeoning alt-country music scene. He put together his Pure Texas Band and developed a strong local following. Walser opened for Johnny Cash in 1996. In 1990, Walser was “discovered” by musician and talent scout TJ McFarland.

In 1994, aged 60, Walser retired from the Guard. Able to devote himself fully to music for the first time in his life, he was immediately signed by Watermelon Records, and released his first LP, Rolling Stone From Texas, produced by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. His extraordinary vocal abilities earned him the nickname “the Pavarotti of the Plains” by a reviewer for Playboy magazine. Because of his Austin base, he attracted fans from country music traditionalists, and alternative music and punk fans. His band later became the opening act for the Butthole Surfers.

Don Walser was voted “Best Performing Country Band” at the Austin Music Awards, was voted top country band of the year by the Austin Chronicle in 1996, and received an Association for Independent Music “Indie” Award in 1997. He also received recognition in mainstream country, and played the Grand Ole Opry on October 30, 1999, and again in 2001. In 2000 he received a lifetime “Heritage” award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he and the Pure Texas Band played at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He also received cameo roles in feature movies with honky-tonk settings, such as The Hi-Lo Country (1998), starring Woody Harrelson.

In September, 2003, Don Walser retired from live performances due to health issues. Three years later, Walser died due to complications from diabetes on September 20, 2006, 6 days after his 72nd birthday.

“I hope I never offended anyone, especially my friends. I like to think that I stood by my friends and that I never gave any advice to someone that I didn’t live by myself. I’ve tried to live my life like an open book. I done about as good as I could, you know. I might have done a few little things differently, but not much. As for the music business, I ain’t got too much to say about it. Music to me is not like it is to most folks.” 

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Texas Music Cafe features live performances from singer-songwriters all over Texas and beyond. Over 20 years of unknowns and locals alongside the legendary icons of Texas music reside in our archive. Donald Ray Walser (September 14, 1934 – September 20, 2006) was an American country music singer. He was known as a unique, award-winning yodeling “Texas country music legend.”

Quotes about Don Walser

“Perhaps the last of God’s great pure country singers, with a national and international following among those who like the real deal” — John Morthland

“This man’s voice is a national treasure and qualifies as high Texas folk art. … When it comes to evocative, classic country music, it doesn’t get much better than this” — Erik Hage, Allmusic

“Nothing less than pure country music incarnate” — David Courtney, Austin City Search

“Country music’s greatest yodeler” — Texas Music Group

“A Texas country music institution” — Jerry Renshaw, Austin Chronicle

“Simply one of the great voices and nice guys of our day” — tunefan.com

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Song for My Father

The house that Don Walser built, 1934-2006

BY MARK RUBIN, FRI., SEPT. 29, 2006

Photo By Todd V. Wolfson

Let me state it plainly: If you find yourself singing onstage in Austin, Texas, with a guitar strapped around you, wearing a Western shirt, cowboy boots, and a hat, then you do so at the good graces of Don Walser.

You may come from someplace else, and chances are you were still in high school when Don was holding down Monday nights at the late Henry’s Bar and Grill on Burnet Road. If you only got here in the last decade or so, you could conceivably be forgiven for not knowing your debt to the man. Those of us who knew and played with Don Walser were irrevocably touched by his music and his outsized personality.

Austin has a reputation for being the place where the hippies met the rednecks, but that was long ago, and pot-smoking, long-hair “cosmic cowboy” country acts fronted by three-named singer-songwriters went out right about the time of George Strait’s first Top 10 hit. By the time I got here, from Oklahoma via Dallas in 1989, the local country music scene had gone from “cosmic” to “creepy.” The clubs overflowed with a veritable cornucopia of middle-aged hippies-gone-country, firmly stuck in the fast-fading glow of tired groupies, cocaine habits, and better times. It was a scene so insular and cliquish that no one in it was the least bit aware of the latest musical movement taking root here, one that rejected wholesale everything that had come before it. To my knowledge, nobody from the “songwriters guitar pull” at Headliners East was found at the Cannibal Club right down the street. I’m reckoning I was the only guy in town witnessing sets by Rusty Wier and Poison 13 in the same evening.

True, punk rockers down here liked to wear cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and tended to name-check country “outlaws” like George Jones and Johnny Cash. Yet a pitiful few would cop to knowing how to two-step and most certainly wouldn’t be caught dead – or be welcome for that matter – at any of Austin’s then C&W joints. All of this changed in time, and Don Wasler was at the heart of that evolutionary shift.

Paul Leary, guitarist for the Butthole Surfers, first told me about Don. I met Leary when he produced a single for my band the Bad Livers in 1990 and then took us out on tour as the Surfers’ opening act. He knew I was a fan of traditional country and told me he had heard of a wonderful steel guitarist who played at a little “hole in the wall” joint once a week up on Burnet Road. Established punk rockers were always on the lookout for some cool local dive where they could drink in peace away from the hipsters. The Carousel Lounge and its savant blind pianist had already been overrun by the hooples, but this place, Henry’s Bar and Grill, showed great promise. My bandmate Danny Barnes, who put himself through college playing guitar in honky-tonks all over Central Texas, told me he knew the place well and had played there many times before. 

That sealed it. I must go.

On my first visit there, I nearly had an asthma attack from decades’ worth of cigarette smoke without proper ventilation. It was ultra dark, cool even on the hottest summer day, and as big as a postage stamp with a ceiling so low you had to stoop to sit in a corner chair. I walked in early one Monday evening, and when my eyes finally adjusted, I peered across the room, plastered in a dizzying array of literally thousands of snapshots of country music singers. Leary and his party were sitting at a table near the center of the dance floor. 

Sugar Moon (l-r): Don Keeling, Walser, Howard Kalish, and Sam Roberts at Henry’s (Photo By John Carrico)

Crammed into the corner next to the bathroom was a trio of pickers: a slight, skinny man on an ancient electric bass; a silver-haired gentleman hunched over a pedal steel guitar; and between them, perched on a stool, was a big man strumming a big Gibson guitar. I will never forget they were playing George Jones’ “Window up Above.” I turned to Leary. 

“That sounds just like the original record,” I blurted.

“It ought to,” he replied. “That’s the guy who played it.” 

I had come for the steel guitar, but it was the otherworldly bel canto coming from the singer that held my rapt attention. It was a sound so pure and controlled that it completely overshadowed the otherwise genius playing of country steel legend Jimmy Day. And the choice of material was a C&W fan’s wet dream: Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Johnny Bush, Freddie Hart! At the set break, James Henry, the club’s convivial owner and the man who took all those photos on the walls, introduced himself and then called over the singer. That’s how I met Don Walser.

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Henry’s Meets Emo’s

As time went on, word got out that there was real, live country music going down at this dive in Central Austin on Monday nights. It was at Henry’s that I met Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a fine steel guitarist in his own right. He was in town doing preproduction for a Butthole Surfers album and had become so enamored of Don Walser’s Pure Texas Band that he stayed a month longer than planned just to see four more shows. It was also at Henry’s that Don got the Bad Livers one of our first local gigs. (We didn’t go over so well, actually, but Mr. Henry put an extra $20 in the tip jar to make us feel welcome.) For many years to come, I made it a point to bring out-of-towners there to show off “country music in its native environment,” as if it were some kind of an anthropological reserve, which in many ways it was.

Becoming a regular, I got to sit at Henry’s private family table and hobnob with the band members. If I was really lucky, bassist “Skinny” Don Keeling would take a break to dance with his wife, and I’d get to play bass with the band. My old pal Ed Miller (not the Scot) drove down every Monday from Fort Worth with his tube-powered reel-to-reel tape recorder just to capture the sounds of the place. (Someday we’ll find someone who wants to release it.) The house’s local character, “Cowboy,” would make his patented bellow and Mr. Henry would have to shut him up and maybe drag him out to the parking lot to cool him off. I got asked to dance by all manner of lovely ladies, most about my grandmother’s age, smelling of rose water and Kool unfiltereds. It was all part of the floor show on Burnet Road, but it was the good-natured country singer with the encyclopedic set list that we all came to see.

Beyond his immeasurable vocal talents, Don filled the dead air between songs with the most easygoing and natural repartee, a style of elocution well known to previous generations of music fans but sadly absent in the entertainment business today. If Don thought he was something special, he never let on about it. Sometimes he seemed just as amazed by his gifts as we were, often ending a particularly virtuosic yodel tune with a little laugh, as if he himself were surprised he pulled it off so well. In his mind, he was simply leading a honky-tonk combo, no different from the ones he cut his teeth with out in West Texas growing up. He was blissfully unaware that simply being that made him as special as could be. My weekly pilgrimage there became a master’s course in old-school musicianship and show business.

Over time, Walser’s Pure Texas Band added a fiddle and then a drummer, playing a style of country music that had for all intents and purposes been pronounced dead by the very culture that spawned it. Hipsters and punk rock freaks turned up at Henry’s with regularity. There were as many “kids,” as Don called the purple-hair-and-pierced crew, as there were “cowboys” now. It was hippies and rednecks all over again, only this time the punk rockers played the roll of newly minted C&W fans.

The John Deere Tractor Song (l-r): Phillip Fajardo, Kalish, Keeling, Walser, Floyd Domino, and Scott Walls, the classic Pure Texas Band lineup (Photo By John Carrico)

And why not? Playing hardcore honky-tonk, drinkin’, cheatin’-heart songs was every bit as subversive and counterculture as the latest Henry Rollins project, if not more so. Somewhere around the house I have a poster for a gig at the Austin Music Hall in 1991, promoting the Butthole Surfers and openers the Bad Livers and Don Walser & the Pure Texas Band. A bill such as that may have appeared to the outside world like some kind of goof being perpetrated, a postmodern laugh at the audience, but they’d be wrong. Unlikely as it might have seemed, all three bands were playing to essentially the same audience now.

When Henry’s was leveled in favor of AutoZone’s parking lot, the logical and natural progression was to thus decamp the residency to the then-bastion of punk credibility, Emo’s. There, Walser was able to connect personally with a whole new generation of music fans who took the sincerity of his music completely at face value. Some punters may have come out to see an old hillbilly sing at a punk rock bar, but the force of the music and the honesty of the man resonated deeply in this generation that, to this very day, drives around with beloved Pure Texas Band stickers stuck next to other punk rock band endorsements on car bumpers.

It was this new appreciation and veneration for musical elders that eventually brought Johnny Cash to Emo’s in 1994, years after Walser and his band had opened the door. At the same time, the scent of a loyal following lead to opportunities at other venues, even ones where country music was the currency. With his profile buoyed by the popular press, Don now packed dance floors regularly at Jovita’s and even the vaunted Broken Spoke. Today, too few remember that he was packing them in at Houston’s bygone Emo’s long before the two-steppers paid any attention whatsoever.

This acceptance for traditional country music and the ready support of both rockers and rednecks is a confluence we take for granted today in Austin. Those reading this who, like me, go out into the clubs and lead a little combo playing trad Texas dance music, singing the old songs with fiddle and steel, you need to take a moment and realize that you stand in a house that in many ways Don Walser built. That’s why as we mourn him now, we must take time to remember what he accomplished here, even if – especially if – he himself probably never realized his true and lasting influence.

Yet just as certain as we took him for granted, it was just as quickly that he faded from our scene. He left the stage one day, in what seemed like a blink of an eye, and it was suddenly like he’d never been there. Very few people I run into today ever saw or heard Don in person, much less own one of his albums. I fear in time that Don will be best remembered as the disembodied yodel in a Bill Chapman Autos TV spot than as the great musical force he was. And more’s the pity. That speaks more about our local culture’s inability to appreciate its actual treasures than it does about Don himself. For his part, Walser constantly looked to the “young” folks to pick up the torch and soldier on, to learn the old songs and play them well, get the folks dancing and show them a good time. And to make new songs, ones that tell stories and unfold the truth of life. 

There’s a lot I could tell you about Don’s late-blooming career: the making of his albums and the controversy spurred when his producer found his band unfit for the recording studio; his eventual recognition by the Nashville “establishment”; the movie about his life story that never got made; the appearances on national television, the Grand Ole Opry, a presidential inauguration, and the main stage of the National Folk Festival; photo shoots with Annie Leibovitz and recording sessions with the Kronos Quartet; managers and booking agents; and the long list of musicians who traveled far and wide to learn his music and pay their respects to him.

It’s a truly amazing and unlikely story. But I’ll leave its dissemination to the music historians. You see, I’m not too good with those sorts of particulars when I’m as emotionally attached to someone as I was to Don Walser. Truth is, friends, I feel like an orphan today.

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CONTINUE MARK RUBIN’S OP/ED PIECE IN THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE

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Walser Across Texas

From the honky-tonks of the High Plains to the mosh pits of Austin, 61-year-old yodeler Don Walser is country’s unlikeliest king of cool.

By John Morthland

March 1996

IT’S SAID THAT THE BEST THING about country singer Don Walser is his voice, a wiry tenor that has earned him the nickname “the Pavarotti of the Plains.” But to really appreciate him—to get the full effect—you have to see him in action.

Between sets one Tuesday night on the patio at Jovita’s Cantina in South Austin, the six-foot-two-inch, 350-pound, 61-year-old Walser sat on his stool behind his microphone, greeting a representative mix of fans. A middle-aged man had a photo to be autographed. Accordionist Ponty Bone wanted Walser to meet a musician friend visiting from Los Angeles. A little boy in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt asked the title of a yodeling song Walser had just done. A pair of amply tattooed men in Converse sneakers were curious where he was playing later that week. A fan near his own age; a fellow musician; a tyke who looks so small next to Walser that he could seemingly fit into the man’s boot; some young rockers—they’re all the same to him, and each got his undivided attention.

When Walser’s band returned to the stage, he repositioned himself on his stool and gripped the neck of his guitar backward, as if the instrument were a club, with one of his arthritic hands. He immediately set a mood by playing what felt right at the moment—he has no set list—and sustained it tune after tune. He started with one of his own songs, “Fuzz Dixon,” about an oil-field roughneck he used to know in his hometown of Lamesa. Next he did a couple of requests left over from the first set: Johnny Bush’s d.t.’s admonition “Green Snakes on the Ceiling” and Bob Wills’s Western swing classic “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” On Lefty Frizzell’s “Long Black Veil,” Walser’s voice shifted into a keening, desolate wail that cut through the night like the West Texas wind. Then, on Elton Britt’s “Cowpoke,” he moved from falsetto to yodel so cleanly that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began—a mystery as wondrous as how such a high voice can flow from such a huge frame.

Walser, who says he “must know thousands of songs by now,” is a human jukebox of Western swing, honky-tonk, and Western, the three strains that Texas has contributed to country. He performs them with natural, guileless ease and none of the residue of revivalism usually attached to such music. That’s because they’re not oldies to Walser—they’re just good stories about things that remain true for any era. They were “test-marketed” over decades on jukeboxes and small-town honky-tonk stages, not in some focus group last week, and they were built to last. So is Don Walser; what you see is exactly what you get.

In his easygoing way, Walser defies a culture shaped around niches. He’s a lifetime musician who only launched his career in earnest in 1994, when he retired from the National Guard after 45 years. He’s a teetotaling Mormon who can talk admiringly of an alcoholic friend whose life improved immensely when he switched to marijuana. He’s country according to the genre’s traditional definition, and thus has benefited from its recent resurgence of popularity, though he fits into the current crop of Nashville pretty boys like a trusty, beat-up pickup truck in a parking lot full of shiny stretch limos. And while he’s hardly what you’d call an outlaw, Walser has been swept up in the return-to-roots movement that has reinvigorated the careers of artists like Johnny Cash—and so he turns on crowds of people who not long ago would have scoffed at the idea that they’d ever love a song called “Yodel Polka.” Indeed, his most loyal fans include the Butthole Surfers, Austin rockers who’ve been pursuing their own noisy, neo-psychedelic path since the punk era; they’ve landed Walser and his Pure Texas Band a semi-regular slot at Emo’s, the Austin grunge emporium, where purple-haired People in Black toss themselves around the mosh pit to the sound of his honey-dripping yodel.

In the past year or so, Walser has been working as many as 21 nights a month, and the word has been spreading. He’s toured both coasts. He’s been featured on the Nashville Network, ABC’s PrimeTime Live, and assorted nationally broadcast music shows. In December 1994 he was profiled on National Public Radio’s popular news programs Fresh Air and All Things Considered—and within two weeks, sales of his Rolling Stone From Texas CD jumped 50 percent (from 20,000 to 30,000, on an independent label, Watermelon, where sales of 10,000 are considered good). “It’s just amazing that all this is happening,” says his wife, Pat, whom he married when he was seventeen.

But it is happening, and Walser’s new CD on Watermelon, Texas Top Hand,which is in the Rolling Stone mode, suggests he has yet to peak—his modest demurrals notwithstanding. “I’d like to get some money, don’t get me wrong,” he declares. “But my motivation for this is to spread that old music. I’m just trying to do my part to keep it alive.”

Don Walser was born in Brownfield, and his family (including three sisters) moved to Lamesa when he was nearly a year old. His mother died just before his twelfth birthday, so he was raised mostly by his father, a night superintendent at a cotton oil mill. Required to entertain himself most of the daylight hours, he turned to the music and movies of West Texas. “I had the old radio to keep me company—I listened to all the good old music they had back then,” he recalls. “And there were three movie theaters. I’d see them old shoot-’em-ups, all the white-hat guys.”

Walser taught himself guitar in his early teens, which explains his “wrong” grip; nobody showed him the right way. He practiced singing by spending afternoons hidden in a tree in his front yard, adding a new dimension to the oft-used description of country music as a “high, lonesome sound.” Bashful, worried that the neighbors were annoyed but aware that they couldn’t identify him as long as he remained hidden, he often stayed there past dark. (Years later, a neighbor told him that folks used to sit out on their porches and listen. They knew exactly who it was.)

Fibbing about his age, Walser enlisted in the National Guard when he was fifteen. The next year, he put together his first band, the Panhandle Playboys, and two years later wrote his first song, “Rolling Stone From Texas.” In 1959 he left Lamesa to work for the Guard as a mechanic and then a unit administrator in places like Midland, Port Neches, Abilene, Snyder, and Sweetwater. Despite his duties—not to mention his busy home life; he and Pat have two sons and two daughters—he performed on the weekends. In 1977 he was reassigned to El Paso, where his band played weekends on behalf of city tourism (he also toured Canada and Germany once each for the state).

By then, however, country radio had grown slick and soulless, and Walser gave up on it, opting instead, as the saying goes, to dance with the girl that brung him. “I pretty well quit trying to learn anything off the radio,” he remembers. “Besides, most people hadn’t heard those old songs before, so they sounded new. They’re such beautiful gems. I tried to write my own songs in that same vein.” Walser’s sound was so retro that when he took his one stab at Nashville, he was told his music had been dead for twenty years—and this was back in the seventies.

Still, he stood fast; the small, weekend-warrior scale he was working on didn’t seem like the consolation prize to him that it usually does to others. “Back then, if you really wanted to make it, you had to starve for a couple years,” he says. “But I had young kids and I just couldn’t do my family that way. I don’t regret it, ’cause I got to play VFWs and weddings and private parties. I got to know the people and what their favorite songs were. I know the big stars don’t get to do that: They got a set list and they do the same songs over and over. That’s no fun.”

The story could have ended there, with an ol’ boy playing what he calls “Top Forty music from forty years ago” for friends and neighbors. But as his Guard career wound down, he began thinking more about music, and about Austin; though he had never even performed there, he’d heard it was “where all the great musicians are.” In 1984 he transferred to Austin to become an internal auditor for the Guard. He kept playing, mainly on weekends. He quickly became the favorite act of the crowd at Henry’s Bar and Grill, then the hippest country room in town. And his band occasionally expanded to take on legends like steel guitarists Bert Rivera, who had played with Hank Thompson, and Jimmy Day, who had played with Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Willie Nelson. (The lineup of today’s Pure Texas Band includes bassist “Skinny Don” Keeling, drummer Phillip Fajardo, steel guitarist Scott Walls, fiddler Howard Kalish, and, often, Floyd Domino on piano.) Walser seemed to have found what he wanted.

And then, in 1990, it got a little weird. Jeff Pincus, at the time the bass player for the Butthole Surfers, discovered Walser and began taking the rest of his band to Henry’s. The band’s influence got Walser a regular gig at Emo’s—a nightclub where, needless to say, he’d never been before. “Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into here?” Walser asked himself after walking in on his first night. But when he started yodeling, the crowd started two-stepping. “They got pierced bodies and orange hair, but they are lovable kids and they come give you a hug and they hug my wife,” he says. “They treat us like the king and queen, and they love that old music.”

Eventually, he shared a bill with the Butthole Surfers. “It seemed like a really cool thing to do,” recalls Surfers guitarist Paul Leary. “Don is so charming that anyone who sees him sing will be captivated. All he had to do to play to our crowd was put on his black hat instead of his white hat.” Walser’s set went well, and because he’d still never heard his benefactors’ music, he decided to stick around for their show. They tried to discourage him, but he popped in earplugs and stood just offstage. “I found out why they didn’t want me to stay,” he says with a giggle. “It wasn’t the music—it was what went on with the music. They had a couple screens up there. One of ’em had a naked lady, and the other one had an operation goin’ on where they were changin’ a man into a woman.”

After his residency at Emo’s, Walser could play just about any club he wanted; his local audience grew in all directions at once. And, suddenly, he found he was in demand outside Texas. His music and demeanor disarmed fans just as readily in the alternative and roots rooms of New York and Los Angeles as in the hipster hangouts of Austin or the traditional dance halls of the Hill Country. He even grew to be admired in Nashville.

Last year, on the heels of his NPR exposure, he toured the South and Midwest, as well as both coasts, with Austin folkies Butch Hancock and Tish Hinojosa and San Antonio conjunto artist Santiago Jimenez, Jr.; though Hancock and Hinojosa boasted much larger followings to begin with, Walser’s sets usually incited the most hooting and hollering from audience members and critics alike. That response helped sell even more copies of Rolling Stone From Texas and generated strong advance word on a two-CD Archive Series set released in mid-’95, featuring tracks culled from cassettes he had recorded to sell from the bandstand after he came to Austin.

Now comes the new record, which, like Rolling Stone, was produced by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. Walser’s relationship with Benson is just about the only hint of controversy in his career. Some complained that their first collaboration resulted in too many outside musicians, mostly from the Wheel, supplementing the Pure Texas Band. The new one follows the same course. To those who argue that if the band ain’t broke the producer shouldn’t fix it, Walser responds that he’s gratified to be working with someone of Benson’s stature—and besides, modern technology and recording techniques make those old songs sound even better.

“There’s a great need and a great yearning for that music,” Walser says. “I suspected it all the time, but now I know ’cause I’ve been out there.” Or, as fiddler Howard Kalish puts it, “America needs Don Walser.”