Made In Heaven: Supernatural Hancock Band

"I ain't never seen no Texas like Austin," patriarch Tommy said on arrival in 1980.

My first musical encounter with “Keep Austin Weird” was shock rocker Dino Lee and the White Trash Revue, obviously. Equally strange, though from the opposite side of the social spectrum, was a consciousness-craving group from Lubbock, who mixed country standards with radio R&B without a wink. The Supernatural Family Band suggested that the Partridge Family came of age in a Colorado ashram. They played traditional music as if they were bouncing notes off a higher power. I once took acid at a SFB show and felt completely normal.

Tommy and Charlene Hancock were major players in the Lubbock music scene from the early ‘50s, but the group’s greatest musical influence was living for years in Rocky Mountain cabins without electricity. The kids played and sang to entertain each other, as their parents- who used to front the Roadside Playboys western swing group - taught them honky tonk. Cherubic Guru Maharaj Ji was their spiritual adviser for a “Country and Eastern” sound that stood out because the musicians were just so dang full of joy. They brought enlightenment and Harlan Howard songs every Thursday night to a biker/redneck bar on North Lamar called the Shorthorn. Next door was the Stallion Drive In with big, cheap, chicken-fried steaks with yellow gravy. No block on Austin in the early ‘80s felt more like the late ‘50s. The Shorthorn was where the McDonald’s is now across from the TxDOT complex.

The Hancock family (no relation to Butch) moved to Austin in 1980 to show that country music doesn’t need to wear shoes. Patriarch Tommy X, as he would change his name, sawed out fiddle tunes on the dance floor while sparkly headband-wearing Charlene played basslines and melodies on the keyboard and her daughters Conni, Traci and Holli traded guitars, keyboards, pedal steel and percussion amongst themselves. Young Joaquin Hancock played drums. They were tight and loose at the same time. Oh, I almost forgot- the first few times I saw them they had Lonnie Fucking Mack on guitar! That was around the time Stevie Ray Vaughan was producing Mack’s Strike Like Lightning at Arlyn in ‘85. John X. Reed, Ponty Bone and Tomas Ramirez, Conni’s boyfriend, augmented the band.

The Hancocks, with older half-brother Louie in black hat, in Colorado, where they had a weekly gig at the Jigger Junction bar.

The family was the star, but Conni and Traci were focal points. Three years older, Conni wrote most of the original material and stood in the middle, while Traci was the ace instrumentalist and probably the first country musician to play synthesizer. She’d sing Chaka Khan, followed by a Mexican folk song. Later, the accordion was her primary instrument, which went well with the fluent Spanish she taught herself as a tyke so she could talk to her babysitter Lorna.

Conni was so young and talented, with pop star looks, that a move to the next level seemed eminent, but she had no interest in a solo career. Joe Ely had a theory about that: “When you’re born in paradise, where do you go on vacation?” In a 2015 interview, Conni said “Faded Love” and “Maiden’s Prayer” (both by Bob Wills) affect her emotionally to this day because her mother sang them to her in the womb. In searching for the Divine Light, the family found it in music.

After Tommy Hancock moved to Presidio in ‘89 and the band broke up, Charlene, Conni and Traci Lamar put together the harmony-driven Texana Dames, a popular band for 20 years until cancer felled Traci in 2012.

Tommy Hancock passed away on New Year’s Day 2020 at age 90. He learned to play fiddle in the Army during WWII, and became obsessed with the instrument, but dancing was his passion the last four decades of his life. He even wrote a book about it: Zen and the Art of the Texas Two-Step.

He learned to two-step at the Cotton Club, where his friends Buddy Holly and Sonny Curtis opened for Elvis Presley in 1955. Every country musician of note played in that club on the outskirts of dry Lubbock, and when it burned down in the late ‘50s, Tommy salvaged the sign and built a new Cotton Club. The Maines Brothers Band was one of many who got their start at the Cotton, where Lloyd Maines studied Willie Nelson’s steel player Jimmy Day from the side of the stage. But the almost-nightly fistfights got to be too much for the peace-loving Hancocks, so they gave the club to Joe Ely to run circa 1969, and headed for the tranquility of Questa, New Mexico, then to Colorado in 1973. Like the Partridge Family, they toured in a converted school bus, painted green and blue like the mountain skyline. Their guitarist during that period was often fellow Lubbock consciousness-seeker Jimmie Dale Gilmore. With Steve Fromholz, Townes Van Zandt, Michael Martin Murphy, John Deutschendorf and others escaping the heat, Colorado was lousy with Texas singer-songwriters in the ‘70s. But none were on a Rocky Mountain high like the Supernatural Family Band.

Tommy and Charlene got married in 1955.

Like so many musicians before and after them, the Supernaturals were just passing through Austin (on the way to Florida) and never left. No city and band were more right for each other. "We were just so happy that we'd lucked out and found Austin," Charlene Hancock said of that period when the band fell right in with the Alvin Crow/Marcia Ball crowd, and attracted every Lubbock musician from miles around. I interviewed the family matriarch at the Broken Spoke in 2002, when her charming CD From There To Here, compiling 50 years in the music business, was a license to get nostalgic. "I couldn't bring myself to listen to all that old stuff at first," she said. "But when I finally did, it just brought back so many fun times."

The Hancocks put out their own records long before that practice became common. Then again, no label back in Kenny Rogers' heyday would've signed a country band that covered Earth, Wind & Fire, no matter how much the boys drooled over Conni. "Tommy always encouraged the kids to play the kind of music they liked. Conni liked the blues, so we worked that into the set. Traci was on a big Stevie Wonder kick, so we did some of his songs."

Charlene Condray received similar encouragement in her teen years in Lubbock from her mother Punkin. "My mother was really the best singer in our family, but she didn't have the ambition or the wherewithal to pursue a music career," says Hancock. "But I did."

As a 14-year-old, Charlene sang every Saturday afternoon on a local TV show. She was also tight with Buddy Holly and that Cricket crew and recorded at the famed New Mexico studio of Holly's producer Norman Petty. Some of those Petty-produced numbers, such as "Do You Remember?" and "My Summer Heart," posit Charlene as a cornfed Connie Francis. "Norman didn't have any sense of humor," she said, "which made the whole process kind of a drag. But you couldn't beat the sound of that little studio."

Tommy Hancock wrote those songs for Charlene after he hired her to be the "girl singer" in his Roadside Players country dance band. She was only 15 at the time, nine years younger than Tommy, but they fell in love and two years later were married. Charlene soon became pregnant with Conni and by the age of 23 had four kids.

"My mom had to, basically, give up her musical career to raise a family," said Conni. "But she didn't give up her music. My parents figured out a way to make it work for the best of everybody."

Family love was the hook. When you saw the Supernatural Family Band you wanted what they had. Which was really weird for me at the time.

Supernatural cover of Sly and the Family Stone 1976.