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Holley: Southpaw fiddler made his mark with country music legend

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Country singer Bob Wills made "San Antonio Rose" a hit.
Country singer Bob Wills made "San Antonio Rose" a hit.

Mention the name Joe Holley to almost anyone, and I'm pretty sure you'll get the same reaction: Great guy! So talented! Never met a stranger.

Now, I think I better mention pretty quick that I'm not referring to yours truly. The Joe Holley I have in mind isn't even a relative, as far as I know, despite our mutual Central Texas family heritage and our left-handedness. The other Joe Holley was a southpaw fiddler who played with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys in the '40s and '50s. His lightning-quick licks helped put the juice in Wills' trademark "Western Swing."

Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel have done their part to keep the Bob Wills spirit alive, but only a dwindling few recall that era when Wills truly was "still the king." He was a farmboy from Turkey, Texas, a restless son of the Depression who yearned to slough off his heavy cotton-picker's sack, strike out for the big city and make music that got couples on their feet and dancing. As a band leader-songwriter-fiddler, he did just that. He drew huge audiences eager to hear his inventive amalgamation of Appalachian fiddle tunes, African-American blues, big-band swing, conjunto, cowboy music and jazz. What you'd hear from Wills and the Playboys - first in Texas and Oklahoma and then in California - was music like you'd hear nowhere else.

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"They were making this up on the fly. That's what's remarkable about it," said historian David Stricklin, son of Al Stricklin, a longtime piano player for Wills and his Light Crust Doughboys and then the Texas Playboys.

Country boys

The nation's best-selling recording artist in the early 1940s, Wills was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, three decades after his death. "Until Hank Williams came along, it was just Bob Wills," Willie Nelson has said. "He was it."

Earlier this week, I tracked down the son of the other Joe Holley in Clovis, Calif., a little town near Fresno. At 67, James Holley is a former country-western band leader, a bass player and a radio announcer who's lived in or around Fresno most of his life. A gregarious man whose announcer's dulcet tones filtered through the phone, he told me that Wills discovered his dad in Fort Worth in 1941. Joe Holley, 24 at the time, was playing the fiddle with a small band making a studio recording that day, and the sounds of his virtuosic playing wafted into the next studio, where Wills and the Texas Playboys happened to be recording. The band leader's ears perked up. When Joe's group took a break, Wills introduced himself and offered the young man a job. "I can pay you $30," he said.

"A month?" Joe asked.

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"A week," Wills told him.

Both men had grown up poor - Wills in Kosse, the little town east of Temple where he was born, and Turkey, where he grew up; Holley on a farm outside a little Palo Pinto County community called Lone Camp, near Stephenville. Like a lot of country folks, both men were around music from birth - the radio, friends and relatives playing at home, at Saturday-night dances. Joe taught himself to play the mandolin at age 5. Once he mastered the fiddle, he picked up his first paying gig at age 13 in a country dance hall.

"As a lefthander on a righthand-strung fiddle, he had to play everything backward," James Holley said. "He played what he heard on the radio. His four brothers wouldn't let him play in the house, so he'd go out in the barn and play for the horses and cows."

'First, second string'

At 16, Joe left school and went over to nearby Mineral Wells, where he wrangled a job in the kitchen of the Crazy Water Hotel, where visitors from Dallas, Fort Worth and beyond came to take therapeutic baths in the hot, smelly mineral waters; toss down handfuls of Crazy Water Crystals to keep the system running smoothly; and take in the big bands that played the Crazy Water and the nearby Baker Hotel. It wasn't long before Joe was playing fiddle in a kitchen-crew band.

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At age 17, in 1934, he moved to Fort Worth and caught on with Pinky Meyers and the Dixie Rhythm Boys. He later played with Elmer Scarborough and the High Flyers, Papa Sam Cunningham and the Crystal Spring Ramblers and Ocie Stockard and the Wanderers.

When Wills signed Joe that day in Fort Worth, he didn't have an opening for a fiddler, so he arranged for the flashy southpaw to move to Tulsa and play for his brother's band, Johnnie Lee Wills and and His Boys. "It was sorta like first string, second string," James Holley said, "although they were making good music."

Joe joined Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in 1944 in California. Wills called him "Jody," and on records you'll hear Wills interspersing his trademark "Aaah-ha" with "Aaaah, Jooody!" Like a jazz musician walking a dangerous, ad-hoc tightrope, Joe would respond to his leader with a frenetic energy that left listeners breathless.

"He was a great improviser," Ray Benson told me via e-mail. "His take-offs or solos were always 'hot' in the vein of Joe Venuti, but in Joe's own style." Benson recalled jamming with Joe in the 1970s.

"He was so fast," Stricklin says. "Since he and Bob played with opposite hands, they could face each other while they played, but when they played duets, Joe had to slow it down so humans could hear it, not just dolphins."

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From tour to table

Joe stayed with Wills longer and traveled more miles than any other Texas Playboys fiddler. In Joe's day, the band played the California circuit, the Southwest, the Midwest, on the road in their black-and-white bus for weeks at a time. He also appeared in a half-dozen Bob Wills movies for Republic Pictures and played countless times on radio and TV. In later years, after he had left the band officially, he opened with the Texas Playboys at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and in 1982 was featured at the American Folklife Festival on the National Mall.

The traveling ground him down. In 1961, he quit the band, quit the road. He and his wife Ferba Jean - they had met at a Bob Wills dance in LA and married in Tijuana in 1944 - settled in Fresno. "He bought a mom-and-pop meat market," his son said. "Bob loaned him the money."

Joe still played, often with a Texas musician named Dave Stogner, who had a Fresno TV show sponsored by Coca Cola. "Stogner's the guy who invented 'Things go better with Coke,' although he didn't get a penny for it," James Holley claims.

Joe Holley ascended to Hillbilly Heaven on July 25, 1987, succumbing to respiratory lung failure brought on by pneumonia. He was 70. (Ferba Jean, 90, still lives in Fresno.)

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"He was a real good guy," Joe's son says. "I don't think I know anybody who didn't like him. He knew how well he could play, but he didn't make a big deal out of it."

James Holley also told me that Buddy Holly (Holley) was a cousin, but he didn't know the precise family connection. I'd be proud to claim Joe Holley as a cousin - and we probably are - but that connection's also a mystery.

One more thing: James and I are pretty sure we're not related to Nehi Holley, a San Antonio fiddler-singer with the Texas Top Hands who's known for his rendition of "Whiskey River" and his short stature.

Joe Holley has been the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle since 2013. A native Texan himself – from Waco – he’s been an editorial page editor in San Diego, Calif., a contributor to Texas Monthly, a speechwriter for Gov. Ann Richards, a staff writer for The Washington Post and an editorial writer for the Chronicle from 2012 to 2017. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 for a series of editorials on gun control and the Texas gun culture and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2022, as part of the Houston Chronicle editorial team that produced a series of editorials on Donald Trump's "Big Lie."
He’s the author of six books, including Hometown Texas, a collection of his weekly “Native Texan” columns; Hurricane Season: The Unforgettable Story of the Houston Astros and the Resilience of a City; and Sutherland Springs: God, Guns and a Small Texas Town, published in 2020 and recipient of the 2021 Carr P. Collins Award, presented by the Texas Institute of Letters in recognition of the year’s best work of nonfiction. The book explores the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2017.