Austin Music in the '40's
Victory Grill, Skyline Club, Elm Grove Lodge opened in the wake of WWII
Austin’s reputation as a music mecca was established in the ‘70s, with the Armadillo World Headquarters and the “progressive country” scene, but its time of prominence goes back to 1910, when John A. Lomax- a University of Texas administrator- created a national fascination for folk music with Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. The book preserved such now-standards as “Home on the Range,” “Streets of Laredo,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” Git Along Little Doggies” and “Jesse James.” Blind musician/teacher Henry Lebermann (the grandfather of future City Councilman Lowell) and wife Virginia were hired to transcribe those songs and 20 others into sheet music from crude field recordings on wax cylinders.
Son Alan started working with his father at age 18 and eventually eclipsed the old man in the field of musical preservation and education. Based in Austin and curating the Archive of American Folk Song in D.C., the Lomaxes lived to keep songs of the working-class people alive, road-tripping all over the country, then all over the world. They found and recorded “House of the Rising Sun” in Kentucky, “Sloop John B” in the Bahamas, and Muddy Waters at Stovall Plantation in Mississippi.
Their greatest find came in July 1933 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary with a prisoner called Lead Belly, who played a 12-string guitar and sang in a powerful baritone. If the Lomaxes hadn’t hauled a 350-pound disk recorder, powered by two 75-lb batteries, from Austin to Angola, La., “Good Night, Irene” might’ve rotted behind bars or escaped into thin air. Instead, the recording was archived at the Library of Congress and in 1950 helped launch the folk music revival when the Weavers took it to No. 1 on the charts for 13 weeks.
Lead Belly’s recording of “Rock Island Line” would have an even greater impact, when covered by Lonnie Donegan in England in 1955. That sped-up and washboard- driven version gave birth to skiffle, which influenced an entire generation of British musicians who weren’t yet musicians. “We all went out and bought guitars,” said Paul McCartney, who formed the Quarrymen with John Lennon in 1957. Lead Belly learned the song from a recording John Lomax made of Arkansas prisoners in 1934.
But neither John Lomax nor Huddie Ledbetter, whose professional association lasted less than a year due to monetary issues, would live to see the broadness of their influence. John Lomax died of a stroke in 1948 at age 80. Lead Belly passed away the next year from ALS (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”) at age 61.
Lead Belly’s final concert was in homage to his former mentor at Hogg Auditorium on the University of Texas campus on June 15, 1949. It was recorded live by KUT and released in 1973. Their collaboration had ended with a knife pulled, but Lead Belly couldn’t forget what John A. Lomax had done for him.
Lead Belly isn’t the only musical giant to give his final concert in Austin. Hank Williams sang at the Skyline Club twelve days before he was found dead in his Cadillac in Oak Hill, West Virginia at age 29.
Between the time it was built in July 1946 until its demolition in the expansion of Braker Lane in 1989, the Skyline held more musical history than any club in Austin. Best known today for being the site of not only Hank’s swan song in Dec. ‘52, but Johnny Horton’s in Nov. ’60, (both married to the former Billie Jean Jones at the times of their deaths was an eerie coincidence), the 500-capacity roadhouse on the old Dallas Highway is also where Austin punk legends Scratch Acid played their first show in 1983 on a bill with TSOL, Big Boys and Butthole Surfers. Elvis Presley performed at the Skyline in 1955 after previous appearances that year at Dessau Hall and the Sportcenter (later site of the Armadillo World Headquarters). The Skyline at 11306 N. Lamar was also the second location of Soap Creek.
During its honky tonk heyday, such acts as Johnny Cash, Louvin Brothers, George Jones, Lefty Frizzell, Webb Pierce, Marty Robbins and Loretta Lynn played the Skyline, backed by a house band that included Larry Corder on guitar and Henry “Poochie” Hill on bass. Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb and Hank Thompson brought their own groups.
The Skyline was hardcore country, but such local acts as Dolores and the Blue Bonnet Boys, Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters (from Taylor) and Grouchy and the Texans always threw in a couple polka numbers each night to get the Germans and Czechs on the dancefloor. Wednesday was 10-cent beer night and every night was don’t-give-Maybell-Crumbley-any-lip night. The waitress was as much the boss as was Warren Stark, who opened the club as a 22-year-old just out of the service with his father Charles, who also owned Model Grocery at 1101 Red River St.
Raised on the Capitol View Dairy farm off far east Slaughter Lane, the three Stark siblings- Gerald, Margaret and Warren- inherited the Skyline after their father died of a stroke in 1955. Oldest child Gerald, whose disability had the family move from Houston to Austin so he could attend the Deaf School, lived behind the club and handled maintenance, while Margaret took money at the door and Warren booked and handled talent. The way he handled an increasingly erratic Hank Williams, was to drive up to Dallas to personally deliver him to his Dec. 19, 1952 Skyline show.
According to brother and sister opening acts Tommie and Goldie Hill from San Antonio, the Skyline show was one of the best they’d played with Williams. Hank did two sets and, according to Chet Flippo’s essential biography, threw in a few gospel songs, which was rare for Hank at a honky tonk. He had an inkling he’d soon meet his maker.
Hank had spent the day with Austin country singer Jerry Green, who he knew from the Louisiana Hayride, and Ernest’s son Justin Tubb, who was attending UT. They visited the Hays Record Shop at 916 E. First St., then they dropped him off at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. “He was trembling something fierce,” said Green, “but when he played, he did a fine job.” Ol’ Hank did sing a few songs at a party for the musicians union in Alabama a few days later, but the Skyline was his final concert.
The Skyline closed in 1977 and became the second location of Soap Creek in 1980, for about a year before the Majewskis moved “Dope Creek” to South Congress. The punks rented the barren Skyline for random concerts in 1983, but it otherwise sat vacant. Warren Stark passed away from a stroke at age 61, four years before the wrecking ball would take down his family’s building, but leave the memories intact.
After the end of WWII, roughly half of the student body at UT- about 10,000 discharged military personnel- attended on the GI Bill. They were older, of drinking age, which made for a nightlife boom in Austin.
A pair of war vets, R.D. Edwards and Joe Sanders, opened the swanky Club 81 on the San Antonio Highway (4700 S. Congress today) in March 1946, booking big bands of R&B (Jimmy Liggins, Johnnie Simmons Orchestra) and Western swing. The Statesman called it “the costliest club ever built here,” but less than two years later it burned to the ground. Another Club 81 opened several blocks south in 1955, but it wasn’t affiliated. The San Antonio Hwy was US 81.
Also opening in March ‘46, just five blocks from Club 81 was the Trocadero, sporting a similar upscale dining/dancing format. They packed in 2,000 (with no room to dance), to see the 33-piece Harry James Orchestra in September ‘46, but closed before the year was up.
In the nine years before the big bang of rock ‘n’ roll, the music scene was dominated by Western Swing and country bands including Jesse James and All the Boys, Leon Carter and the Rolling Stones, Doug and the Falstaff Swing Boys, Leon Hawkins and His Buckaroos, Hub Sutter and the Galvestonians, and Buck Roberts and the Rhythmaires (featuring Johnny Gimble).
But Dolores and the Blue Bonnet Boys stood out because it was that rare country band led by a woman who wasn’t the main vocalist. Far from a novelty, Dolores Fariss wrote songs, chose outside material, played piano and ruled her group of talented musicians like Bob Wills in a skirt.
Rule No. 1 was no drinking before or during a set. And Fariss was also clear that she didn’t like her musicians showing off. “Dolores was very commercial-minded, and she called the shots as to what we played,” says the band’s fiddler, Bill Dessens, who joined the Blue Bonnet Boys in 1949 while still in college at Southwest Texas State in San Marcos. “Her motto was ‘Keep it simple, boys.’ She’d say that whenever me and (twin fiddler) Joe Castle would take off on a crazy course. We used to get together in the basement of Joe’s church and learn songs like ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy,’ but Dolores didn’t care for that hokum (jazz).”
Rather than tour the dancehalls and VFW halls all over Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, Dolores and the Blue Bonnet Boys rarely ventured outside Austin, where they played every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at the Skyline. The group also performed at Dessau Hall twice a month and the Buckholts SPJST Lodge in Milam County about four times a year. They knew how to make the people dance.
There was more money out on the road, but the Blue Bonnet Boys stuck to Austin and environs because drummer Lee Fariss, Dolores’s husband, had a successful home construction business with his wife’s father, Alfred Hanson.
The Hansons, of Danish descent, came from Hutto, where Alfred had a polka band featuring teenage daughter Dolores on piano. Lee Fariss also had a band at the time, Lee’s Bees, in which drummer Fariss was the only member who wasn’t blind. Lee and Dolores met at a Hansons polka gig in 1930 and married the next year. First son James was born in 1934; then came Don in 1940.
The group publicized its shows by playing live on KVET (AM 1300), which signed on the air Oct. 1, 1946, the same year Dolores put together her Blue Bonnet Boys. Before KVET, there were two stations in town – the Lady Bird Johnson-owned KTBC (AM 590), a CBS affiliate, and ABC-aligned KNOW (AM 1400), headquartered in Norwood Tower. KTBC featured Jesse James and His Boys, with fiddler Harry Choates often sitting in, every day at 1 p.m. Dolores was KVET’s answer.
Lyndon Johnson, then a rookie U.S. congressman, encouraged several of his closest associates, including future Texas Gov. John Connally and future U.S. Rep. Jake Pickle, to pool their resources and launch a third station, before NBC could enter the market. Better that competitors be friends than enemies. Because the new station owners and 10 investors ($5,000 each) were all veterans of World War II, they went with the KVET call letters.
In 1948, KVET expanded its market by hiring African American DJ Lavada Durst, who Connally heard announcing Austin Black Senators games at Disch Field, and Lalo Campos to host two Spanish-language music shows every day. With his captivating “Dr. Hepcat” persona, Durst had as many, if not more, white listeners than Black.
When honky tonk took over, with its electric guitars and pronounced beat, the Farisses disbanded the Blue Bonnet Boys in 1955. Dolores went on to work as a dietitian for the Del Valle school district and lived to be 80. Lee Fariss made it to 90.
THE VICTORY GRILL
During a time of segregation (anytime before 1964 in Texas), the black community found safe havens away from the white gaze in church, at the barber shop and at the juke joint. Just as touring religious singers had “the gospel highway” of connected gigs and places to stay, R&B entertainers traveled the “chitlin circuit.” Before they became mainstream acts, B.B. King, Ike & Tina Turner, Joe Tex and many more made their livings playing clubs like the Victory Grill. The Grill also spawned a local blues scene that included Erbie Bowser and T.D. Bell, the Grey Ghost, Jean and the Rollettes, Major Burkes, Blues Boy Hubbard and more. A singing soldier from Fort Hood named Bobby Bland, came down every weekend in the early ‘50s to take top prize in the talent show.
Waco-born, Bastrop-raised Johnny Holmes moved to Austin to attend Samuel Huston College on a track scholarship (pole vault), and opened the Grill the day after V-J Day- August 15, 1945- as a small icehouse and burger stand on E. 11th. He wanted a place where Black soldiers could celebrate Japan’s surrender. Two years later, he moved to the current building at 1104 E. 11th St. and opened it as a classy restaurant, with waitresses in starched maroon shirts. But when he built the Kovac Room (named after a club in Alaska from his travels) in 1951, Holmes created a near-perfect nightclub, with a nice stage and dancefloor, café-styled booths and a bar of glass bricks with red, green and blues lights shining through. This was a 350-capacity place for the acts not yet big enough for Doris Miller Auditorium or City Coliseum.
East 11th Street, with Tony Von’s Show Bar on the next block from the Victory, and Shorty’s jazz club across the street, was The Stroll on the Eastside in the late ‘40s/ early ‘50s. That Shorty’s faced away from the sun in the afternoon, and had an awning for rain, made it where the prostitutes hung out. At night the strip lit up like someone dropped two blocks of Harlem in the middle of Texas. The Victory Grill and Charlie’s Playhouse (which took over the Show Bar location) fought it out to be Austin’s Apollo, and Charlie’s won when it stole Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets by paying $12 a man instead of the $10 they were making with Holmes. When it came to food, the Victory got heavy competition from Southern Dinett, a soul food joint that opened a block away in the late ‘40s.
Lining up talent was his favorite part of the job, while the restaurant business was just wearing him down, so after the Victory Grill had been open only seven years, Holmes moved to West Texas, handing club management to “Big Mary” Wadsworth. His best musician friend B.B. King, had bemoaned that there was no place to play between San Antonio and El Paso, nine hours away, so Holmes opened the Cobra in Big Spring, which held 1,100 people, then expanded to Odessa.
He retained ownership of the VG, however, and returned in 1965, after Wadsworth opened her own club, “Big Mary’s” at 1808 E. 12th Street. Tough times in the ‘70s closed the Kovac Room first, then the cafe. The Grill sat boarded up for years, but through the efforts of Tary Owens and others, the club reopened with Holmes in charge in 1987. It had one good year, then a fire. The ailing building was marked for the bulldozer in 1990, until Black community leaders stood up for East Austin history. Holmes family friends R.V. Adams and Eva Lindsey did their best to keep the Grill afloat until it was included on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998 and can never be town down. But it’s not just the building, but the community-building that made 1104 E. Sixth Street special.
Johnny Holmes passed away in February 2001 at age 83. His family still owns the Victory Grill, where consistency is intermittent.
MURDER AT THE LODGE 1947
Long before it was Soap Creek Saloon, the building three miles from town and up the hill from Bee Cave Road was the Elm Grove Lodge. On June 17, 1947 it was the site of a murder, when Arnold W. Barrier, who managed The Windmill club on the San Antonio Highway (far South Congress), was badly beaten by brothers- Elmo "Blondie" Wright and Chester "Curley" Wright - and died three days later. Lodge owner F.B. Cochran and his 18-year-old son Brooks were also pistol-whipped, and the phone lines were cut so the cops couldn’t be called.
It was a Tuesday night and the club hosted a small wedding party that Barrier crashed with his son-in-law, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter, arriving in a dump truck. This was all in the Statesman report. The wedding band was Steve Lightsey and His Rural Rhythm Kings, who often played at the Windmill. Lightsey testified that one of the Wright brothers (whose sister was the bride) sucker-punched Barrier, then the other brother pistol-whipped and stomped him. During the drunken party, Curley had been held down and had lipstick applied against his will. The cackling was probably echoing in his mind when he went psycho on Mr. Barrier.
And you thought the strangest thing that ever happened in that building was when a roadie from the Grateful Dead dosed the entire Soap Creek crowd with LSD!
Claiming self defense, the Wrights said they saw Brooks Cochran hand Barrier, who they had bad blood with, the pistol shortly before the fracas just outside the front entrance. They hit Barrier before he could shoot them. Cochran testified that he didn't give Barrier the gun. But sent to Huntsville in 1952 on burglary charges, he confessed to the prison chaplain that he had lied because "he was afraid of Bill Suhr."
Suhr was an ex-con who'd built up a successful excavating company. His sister became a widow when Barrier was killed. Suhr hired attorney Polk Shelton as special prosecutor against the Wright brothers and two other defendants. A year after the Wrights were convicted, Bill Suhr was shot to death by former Austin clubowner V.E. "Buster" Davis, after he'd shown up at Davis's house after midnight with Orville Barrier, the brother of Arnold. The shooting was ruled justifiable.
The Windmill Club, which opened at 5500 S. Congress Avenue in 1945, later became Big Gil’s. It’s currently home to country dance club Sagebrush.