Music
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.
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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.”
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