Austin Country

Dolores and the Bluebonnet Boys were one of the most well-known country western bands in Texas during the 1940s and 1950s. The band was led by Dolores Fariss on piano and joined by her husband Lee who played drums and sang. Other members of the Blue Bonnets included: Al Boyce, steel guitar; Robin Yolle, string bass; Joe Castle, violin; Aubrey Cox, guitar; Jim Collins string bass; Carl Little Cotton, violin; and Sunny Raines, guitar.

Dolores was born in Hutto, Texas on April 18th, 1912. Her father Alfred was Danish and her mother Judith Hanson was Swedish. Dolores lived most of her life in the Hyde Park area of Austin, Texas. She graduated from Austin High School and went to Nixon Clay Business School. At the same time, she played the piano in her father’s polka band.

James Lee Fariss was born in Austin, December 9, 1907. He met Dolores in 1930 when she was playing in her father’s band. They were married in 1931.

Dolores organized her band, The Blue Bonnet Boys, in the early 1940s and they toured central Texas. They became the house band for many years at the prestigious Skyline Club, in Austin.

In addition to her skilled performances, she was a gifted composer. She wrote and released a number of recordings on 4-Star, Lasso and Macy labels. These songs included: Austin Waltz, My Bonny Blue Eyes, Think of Me, and A Broken Heart.

Dolores’ handwritten copy of the lyrics to her composition Austin Waltz is displayed in the lower right corner of this panel.

Dolores and Lee stopped playing professionally in 1955. After retirement from the music scene, Dolores worked as a dietician for the Del Valle School District.

Dolores died April 9, 1993, nine days before her 81s birthday. Lee died on July 9, 1998 at the age of 91.

Jody was born April 28, 1933 in Lockhart, Texas. His father, Charlie Clyde, and Mom, Addie Mae, both played fiddle and encouraged Jody and his brothers and sisters to learn how to play music. When he was in the fourth grade his family moved to Austin in April 1943.

Jody stopped school when his father died of prostate cancer in 1950. He returned to school and worked part-time for Fred Wond’s Take Home Food Grocery Stores. He also began to work for R.W. Byram, Oil & Gas Consultants in 1951 where he still works in 2010. From June 1952 to February 1957, he was “Slick” Geezinslaw with the Geezinslaw Brothers. In 1957 when Sammy Allred went into the military service, Jody joined “Doug Hullum and His Swing Boys” as a guitarist and featured singer.

In 1958 he started his own band, “The Round-Up Boys” and became the house-band at the Skyline Club and over the next eight years, backed up well-known artists as George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Charlie Walker, Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Slim Whitman, Johnny Horton and others.

In the late 1960s Jody joined the 10-piece group “The Country Sounds” and fronted the group as vocalist. In 1989 he joined the “Star Dusters” that had played in Austin for over seventeen years.

Jody and his wife Maida lived in Austin. He died on May 25, 2020.

Willie Nelson is Texas’s iconic musician, singer, songwriter, author, poet, actor, activist and businessman. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on April 30, 1933, but was raised by his grandparents in the rural central Texas town of Abbot along with his sister Bobbie, a pianist who is a member of the Nelson Family Band.

Willie sang and played guitar like both his grandparents and began his musical career as a radio station disc jockey on a Fort Worth station hosting Country music shows and as a musician in singing in local honky-tonks. In 1958 he wrote what have become standards in Country music: Funny How Time Slips Away, Hello Walls; Pretty Paper, and Crazy.

After writing Family Bible and Night Life he moved to Nashville in the early 1960’s, and joined Ray Price’s band the Cherokee Cowboys as a bass player. Price, a huge name of that era, made Night Life his theme tune.

Willie became disillusioned with the smooth Nashville sound and in 1972, retired and moved to Austin, Texas. He performed at the Armadillo World Headquarters and started a new, intense Country genre that became known as the. Outlaw Movement. He was a member of the “super group” The Highwaymen that released three popular ‘outlaw’ albums from 1985 and 1995. Other members of the group included Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash.

Willie has continued to act, write, record, and tour. He has released 72 studio albums, 10 live albums, 37 compilations, and 27 collaborations and on the soundtracks of two movies, 35 music videos, 110 singles, and 33 #1 singles. He has written 337 songs that have been recorded by himself and numerous other stars.

Several of his iconic songs are Always on My Mind, On the Road Again, Whiskey River, Bloody Mary Morning, and his 2017 hit Still Not Dead.

Willie won one Oscar, eight Grammys, and numerous awards from the Country Music Association, and from the Academy of Country Music. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993, and Texas Music Hall of Fame in 1998; was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998; inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2015.

Willie Nelson just celebrated his 91st birthday in April 2024.

Jerry Jeff Walker was born Paul Crosby on March 14, 1942, in Oneonta, New York. As a youngster, he learned to sing and play the guitar. At 16 he quit high school and wandered the country, making money by singing in bars. He returned home in 1959 to finish high school. 

He toured the east coast, playing in coffee houses and small clubs. Touring took him to college campuses as well and on one such tour, Walker met Bob Bruno in Austin, Texas. The two formed a folk-rock band, Circus maximus and recorded their debut album in 1967.

Walker later teamed with folk artist David Bromberg to sing and record an original composition “Mr. Bojangles” which caught the attention of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who turned it into a legendary hit single. Walker’s version of the song brought him a contract with Atlantic Records.

In the early 70s Walker formed the four-man Deaf Cowboy Band. They released an album in 1973 entitled Jerry Jeff Walker, which produced a hit single, “L.A. Freeway”. His next album Viva Terlingua was recorded in the Ghost town of Luckenbach. Several more albums and a new group, “The Lost Gonzo Band” met with mixed success. Walker then formed the Banditio Band, got a new business manager, his wife Susan, and formed his own record company, Tried & True Music. Recent albums include Gypsy Songman, Live From Gruene Hall and Navajo Rug.

In 2004, Jerry Jeff released his first DVD of songs from his past as performed in an intimate setting in Austin, Texas. He had an annual birthday celebration bash in Austin at the Paramount Theater and at Gruene Hall in Gruene which brought some of the biggest names in country music out for a night of picking and swapping stories under the Austin skyline. Jerry Jeff Walker died on October 23, 2020.

Donald Ray Walser was born September 14, 1934 in Brownfield, Texas. A roots musician since he was 11 years old, Walser became an accomplished guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. He started his first band, The Panhandle Playboys at age 16 and shared bills with another aspiring Texas singer, Buddy Holly. From 1959-61, Walser had a group called the Texas Plainsmen and performed with them on a weekly radio program.

 For the next three decades he was always in bands and played a heavy schedule. He wrote “Rolling Stone from Texas” which received a four-star review in 1964 from Billboard magazine. Walser kept alive the old 1940s and 1950s tunes by country music pioneers such as Bob Wills and Eddie Arnold, and made them his own in a style that blended elements of honky tonk and Western swing. He was also known for his extraordinary yodeling style in the tradition of Slim Whitman and Jimmie Rodgers. In 1984, he put together his Pure Texas Band in Austin and developed a strong local following. He opened for Johnny Cash in 1996. 

At age 60, Walser devoted himself totally to his music for the first time in his life. He made his first LP, Rolling Stone From Texas produced by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. His extraordinary vocal abilities earned him the nickname “The Pavarotti of the Plains”. He was voted “Best Performing Country Band” at the Austin Music Awards, voted top country band of the year by the Austin Chronicle in 1996. He played the Grand Ole Opry in 1999 and again in 2001. In 2000, he received a lifetime “Heritage” award from the National Endowment for the Arts and also played at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

In September 2003, Don Walser retired from live performances due to health issues. He died on September 20, 2006 due to complications from diabetes.