This Week in Texas Music History, Western Swing Pioneer Adolph Hofner is born
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By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On June 8, 1916, Western swing bandleader Adolph Hofner was born in Moulton, Texas to parents of German and Czech heritage, and Adolph and his brother Emil grew up speaking Czech. The family moved to San Antonio, where the brothers started a band with Simon Garcia called the Hawaiian Serenaders. Fiddler Jimmie Revard heard them play and built a new group, the Oklahoma Playboys, around Adolph’s Bing Crosby-like croon. Revard’s Playboys first recorded in October 1936 at the Texas Hotel, and a rivalry heated up between the Playboys and the Tune Wranglers as to who was San Antonio’s hottest swing band. That is, until Adolph Hofner formed his own group in 1938, combining his pop croon with brother Emil’s twangy steel guitar and a repertoire rich in popular German- and Czech-language standards.
They had their first hit with the record “Maria Elena” on Bluebird, and then switched to Decca Records in 1941. World War Two put a dent in their plans, though, as a German-American country singer named Adolph was not the most marketable commodity.
Hofner recovered in the postwar years both due to the period’s unlikely polka boom and a high-profile deal Hofner struck with San Antonio-based Pearl Beer. His band became the Pearl Wranglers, eager brand representatives, and would carry the name through the 1990s. Adolph Hofner played a role in the popularization of such standards as “It Makes No Difference Now” and may have been the first to record dancefloor favorite “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” which Hofner claimed to have learned from an old man in New Braunfels. Hofner’s band was also among the first to incorporate drums fully into the western swing ensemble, an important step in bringing the instrument into country music. Even without this list of “firsts,” Adolph Hofner stands as a prime example of Western swing’s melting pot philosophy, a musical rendition of Texas’s diversity through its inclusion of country and blues, polka and ranchera, and so much more besides.
Sources:
Jean Boyd. Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012.
Martin Donell Kohout in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
