The Original T. V. on the Radio
Tony Von told East Austin What's Goin' On for 25 years before his 1979 murder
“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 at 4 p.m. every weekday and at 2 p.m. Saturdays from 1954 until tragedy was a sad silencer in 1979. 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 soul concert promoter as T.V. When Clifford Scott’s sax on Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” Von’s opening theme, came skronking out of the speakers, a community gathered together.
He played gospel and blues side-by-side, just as nightclubs and churches were often next door to one another in East Austin. But more significantly, at a time before cell phones and pagers and emails, Von was how Austin’s Black community knew what was going on. He’d plug shows, give birthday greetings and announce events, often in free-form rhyme. “Tony WAS Black radio back in the day,” said local blues artist Major Lee Burkes, whose regional hit song “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.”
Austin’s reputation as a town where live music is a way of life, 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 the Show Bar and a record shop on “the Cuts” (popular slang for East 11th Street) in the early ’50s. After selling the club to Charlie Gildon, who changed the name to Charlie’s Playhouse in 1955, 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, Sam Cooke 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 back and forth from East Austin to Taylor.
“Tony yielded a lot of power,” Burkes recalled. “He had all the connections.” He didn’t make much money on KTAE, but used those airwaves to his advantage in business. Many of the biggest names in black music played at Von-promoted shows for free (which translated into tons of airplay), while Von provided the backing band, which was usually Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets. If you liked a song Tony played, you knew it was in stock at Von’s record shop. He always seemed to be working three angles at once.
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, where he worked at the Hall Street Fish Market after a year of college, 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 to 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!
“Tony the Fired” moved back to Austin 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 got his pistol and told Pullins to put the shotgun away and Pullins moved on down the street. He returned a couple hours later, however, and found Von in front of the Soul-Ful Club. Two blasts from the shotgun killed the black music entrepreneur. He 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 such joy to others, through the radio and concerts and records.
Tony Von is not quite as big a local radio icon as KVET’s Lavada Durst, whose “Rosewood Ramble” was the top-rated radio show in town for all races from the late ‘40s to the early ‘60s. 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 67 years ago.
Durst was hired in 1948 by future Gov. John Connally after he heard Dr. Hepcat, the jive-talking alter ego, announce the Negro League games at Disch Field. Calling a high pop fly, for instance, Durst would say the ball “asked the moon if it was really made out of cheese.”
He played exclusively Black artists with one exception- Elvis Presley in 1955- which is why the crowd was racially mixed at Presley’s first show here- March 17, 1955 at Dessau Hall. Hepcat’s Black listeners just assumed he was one of them.
Also a piano player of note, Durst wrote “Let’s Talk About Jesus,” a huge 1951 gospel hit for his fellow New Mount Olive Baptist Churchgoers, the Bells of Joy. Because he was a bluesman, however, he gave songwriting credit to singer A.C. Littlefield. You didn’t mix secular and spiritual back then.
Durst came of age during the boogie woogie craze of the early 1930s with such Austin contemporaries as Black Tank, Boots Walton and Baby Dotson. But his greatest influence was the barrelhouse player Robert “Fud” Shaw who moved to Austin from outside Sugarland in 1935 to play juke joints and run numbers in the wake of Prohibition’s repeal. A second marriage in ‘39 demanded legitimate concerns, so instead of numbers, Shaw ended up running a popular BBQ/ grocery joint at 1917 Manor Road that everyone called the Stop n’ Swat, though the official name was Shaw’s Food Market.
Rediscovered in 1963 by Houston musicologist Mack McCormick, Shaw started playing in public again, including with Janis Joplin at the Texas Union Ballroom in 1966, her last concert in Austin before she moved to San Francisco to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. He and wife Martha ran the grocery store until an 1974 retirement to tour blues-crazed Europe with his barrelhouse style that many thought had become extinct. He played the Kerrville Folk Festival 14 years in a row before a heart attack took him away in 1985 at age 76.
Durst quit his radio show, which was as popular in West Austin as East, in 1963 when he became an ordained Baptist minister. He passed in 1995 at age 82.
Dr. Hepcat and the Master Blaster were a big reason touring R&B acts didn’t skip Austin on their way from Houston to San Antonio. They 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 by W.C. Clark, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Grey Ghost, Major Burkes, Fud Shaw and more.