East Side Stories: Black Radio and Barrelhouse
Dr. Hepcat, T.V. and Fud Shaw kept Austin music from being full lily
The first Black music DJ in Texas, Lavada Durst was hired by KVET in 1948, which proved to be a good move by station co-founder John Connally. Rosewood Ramble was the top-rated radio show in town for all races during the late ‘40s to mid-‘50s era when R&B was becoming rock n’ roll. “Dr. Hepcat,” his public personna, also promoted R&B package shows like the one featuring Fats Domino, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, the Clovers and Little Willie John at City Coliseum in March 1956.
Before radio, Durst colorfully announced Negro League games at Disch Field on Town Lake near the Coliseum. Calling a high pop fly, for instance, Durst would say the ball “asked the moon if it was really made of cheese.” In the stands one day was Connally, the future governor of Texas, who had just started a radio station with a group of other WWII veterans, hence the name KVET.
During the mid-‘50s, Durst played exclusively Black artists with one exception- Elvis Presley- which is why the crowd was racially mixed at Presley’s first show here- March 17, 1955 at Dessau Hall. Black listeners just assumed he was one of them.
Also a piano player of note, Durst wrote “Let’s Talk About Jesus,” the biggest gospel hit of 1951, for his fellow New Mount Olive Baptist Churchgoers, the Bells of Joy. But because he was a bluesman, he gave songwriting credit to singer A.C. Littlefield. You didn’t mix secular and spiritual back then, though Ray Charles would three years later with his career-launching 1954 hit “I Got a Woman.”
Durst (b. 1913) came of age during the boogie woogie craze of the 1930s with such Austin contemporaries as Boots Walton, Grey Ghost, and Baby Dotson. But perhaps his greatest influence was the barrelhouse player Robert “Fud” Shaw, just four years older, who moved to Austin from Fort Bend County in 1935 to play juke joints and run numbers in the wake of Prohibition’s repeal. “I could sit there and throw my hands down and make them gals do anything,” Shaw said of those times when a piano was all the band you needed. “I told ’em when to shake it and when to hold back. That’s what this music is for.”
A second marriage in ‘39 demanded legitimate concerns, so instead of numbers, Shaw ended up running a popular BBQ/ grocery joint, first on West Lynn in Clarksville, then at 1917 Manor Road. Everyone called it the Stop n’ Swat, though the official name was Shaw’s Food Market. Shaw kept an old upright piano there and practiced when business was slow.
Rediscovered in 1963 by Houston musicologist Mack McCormick, who recorded Texas Barrelhouse Piano that year in Austin, a 54-year-old Shaw displayed little rust when he started playing in public again. He teamed with Janis Joplin at the Texas Union Ballroom in May 1966, a month before she debuted in San Francisco as the singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company. Shaw played the Kerrville Folk Festival in its first 14 years before a heart attack took him away in 1985 at age 76.
Durst, who passed away 10 years later, also had a life change in ‘63, quitting his radio show after a 15-year-run to join the Baptist ministry. He kept his job as athletic director for the Rosewood Rec Center until retirement age, and remained a minister at Mount Olive the last 32 years of his life.
The other prominent Black DJ in town was Tony Von, whose show didn’t cross over like Hepcat’s, nor did it try. His audience was the East Austin community, stretching up to Taylor and east to Elgin. He didn’t just play “race” records, but let everyone know what was going on. Folks in West Austin didn’t care about bake sales and barber shop openings on the Eastside.
“This is Tony Von, the only colored T.V. on the radio,” the mellow, mesmerizing voice rolled out of the 1260 slot on the AM dial six days a week from 1954 until tragedy was a sad silencer 25 years later. His real name was Tony Von Walls, and his radio nickname was “the Master Blaster,” but most everyone knew the irrepressible KTAE disc jockey and concert promoter as T.V. When Clifford Scott’s sax on Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” came skronking out of the speakers at 4 p.m. weekdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays, a community gathered together.
“Tony WAS Black radio back in the day,” said local blues artist Major Lee Burkes, whose regional hit “Break These Chains” got its earliest airplay on Von’s show. “Communication was sometimes quite difficult back then so I’d listen to T.V. to see where I’d be playing that night.” Reflecting the neighborhood, Von played gospel and blues side-by-side.
The Austin scene’s reputation was built not just by the players and singers, but club owners, disc jockeys, journalists and record store owners. Tony Von performed all those duties. Radio was his calling, plus he opened a couple of nightclubs- Show Bar and Club Exclusive- and a record shop on “the Cuts” (popular slang for East 11th Street) in the early ’50s. After selling his share of the block to Charlie Gildon in 1958, Von moved full time to Taylor, where he opened another record shop that he could plug on the air. He also brought such acts as James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner to Doris Miller Auditorium, and occasionally wrote for the Capital Argus, a Black publication. Von put a lot of miles on his car driving on U.S. 77 between Taylor and East Austin.
“Tony had all the connections,” Burkes recalled. He didn’t make much money on KTAE, but used those airwaves to his advantage in business. Many of the biggest names in R&B played for a pittance at Von-promoted shows (which translated into tons of airplay), while Von provided the backing band- usually Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets, featuring Burkes, to keep the expense down. If you liked a song Tony played, you knew it was in stock at Von’s record shop. He hustled to stay solvent.
On the air, however, he was the personification of laid-back. “Be cool, be back and remember one fact: We love you,” is how T.V. signed off each day. “Austin truly was ‘the live music capital of the world’ back in the ’60s,” Burkes said. “These days, it’s not even close to how much music was going on in East Austin, and Tony Von had a lot to do with it.”
A native of Dallas, Von joined the Army in 1942 with no idea what he would do when he got out. While being treated for ulcers at a V.A. hospital in New Mexico in 1948, a bored Von volunteered to be an announcer on the hospital’s intercom system and found his husky vocal talent and natural delivery. He graduated from Huston-Tillotson in 1952, the year the two historically Black colleges in East Austin merged.
Back in Dallas, Von got his radio start at Top 40 pioneer KLIF, but it didn’t work out because Von wouldn’t embrace the corny, stereotypical “Jackson the Jiver” persona radio legend Gordon McClendon had devised for him. He was a veteran with a college degree, goddammit!
Von moved back to Austin- and his girlfriend- to work at KTXN, where his “Blues for Breakfast” show led to an offer by KTAE owner Gillis Conoley, up in Williamson County, who was looking for a replacement for Jukebox Jackson in the afternoon. KTAE specialized in country and rockabilly, but the station also made time for R&B and Spanish music (Chicano DJ George Martinez followed Von’s show at 5:30 p.m. for 10 years).
In a 1977 interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Von laid out the inclusive philosophy that made his show a forerunner of community radio. “I have always believed in playing anything by everybody, anybody and nobody,” he told writer Ronald Powell.
Two years after the Statesman story was published, Von met his tragic fate at the hands of ex-con James Earl Pullins. Von was working in his record shop on East Walnut Street (“The Line”) the evening of June 20, 1979, when an intoxicated Pullins stood in the middle of the street and fired a shotgun in the air. Von came out with his pistol and told Pullins to put the shotgun away. Instead, he shot Von in front of the Soul-Ful Club. The black music entrepreneur was 57.
Having served two prison terms for armed robbery, this third strike against Pullins ensured a life sentence, so prosecutors didn’t try him for murder, thinking his guilty plea on an aggravated assault charge would put him away for good. But after only 10 years in the joint, Pullins was paroled in 1990 because of prison overcrowding.
Ten years for taking the life of someone who brought unity to his community.
The Brooklyn band TV on the Radio doesn’t even know about the original, having taken their name from British DJ Tommy Vance. But the catchphrase was born on the second floor of a building in downtown Taylor in 1954.
The radio support of Dr. Hepcat and Tony Von were a big reason touring R&B acts didn’t skip Austin on their way from Houston to San Antonio. Those early Black D.J.s also provided an outlet, a connection, for Austin musicians who would otherwise be lost. The interest in Black music their radio shows cultivated continued to have impact on a music scene incubated in East Austin juke joints and carried all over the world.
Oh man! Michael, you are on a roll this month. More good stuff. This was my active research area for a long time, but I've not really had the time—nor funding—to dig like I used to. Too spread out with this organizational stuff, culture politicking, and struggles with the City. The big picture stories are still accessible in my head and in previous research and writing, but you continue to pull up fine detail that even I don't know or recall. Really impressive and timely work. I look forward to reading more.
You have clearly moved beyond being a generic music journalist; you've become a damn fine cultural historian in the process. You continue to write/publish material that I find useful in my work...and I'll continue to share it far and wide. I so appreciate your dedication to collecting and telling these important stories.
--h
Cool article, man!
If you know, what's with the super-heavy duty tonearm used by Dr Hepcat at KVET 1953?