Music and Mayhem on Main Street:
R.D. Hendon and his Western Jamboree Cowboys in Context
Part 6: "A New Beginning"
The Hendon brothers were fast learners. The Sphinx Club had been a good education in how to run a night club, but it was strictly a small-time bar. Nobody made any money. The idea that money could be made with a country and western club in Houston had been demonstrated with the opening of two large ballrooms devoted to the music, Jerry Irby's Texas Corral on South Main and Old Spanish Trail, and Cook's Hoedown Club at 603 Capitol downtown (just a few blocks from the Sphinx) in 1948. Both had a capacity of around 2,000 people, and it was not unusual to draw crowds of 500 to 1,000 on a Tuesday or Wednesday night. Smaller venues such as the Hayloft Club, Hagee's, and the Sixth and Studewood Club dotted the landscape, and could also expect crowds well into the hundreds every night.
By this point, country music had taken over completely in Houston. This would have surprised anyone who had basked in the city's night life during the pre-World War II era, when pop orchestras had dominated the scene. The trend toward country music was driven, to a large degree, by the thousands of rural immigrants pouring into the city on a yearly basis. But the urban generation born in the 1920s had grown up hearing country music on the radio, as well, and to them, pop music had become rather stale and passé by the war years. Country music was simultaneously old and new, and thought to represent emotions and experiences more "real" and closer to home than pop. It was imagined to be "authentic"; pop music was artificial, cooked up in far-away laboratories. It lacked the common touch. (It should be noted that nothing in the sociology of America is ever simple, and plenty of rural people loved pop music and loathed country, also.)
The triumph of the rural had not been complete, however. Most bands leaned more toward Bob Wills' style than Roy Acuff's. They tended to include drums and at least one horn. The piano – an instrument that hard-core Southern purists like Hank Williams despised – was absolutely essential for most bands in Houston and Texas generally. This was drink-and-dance music – just like pop music – not sit-and-listen music. Pop-styled vocalists such as Dickie McBride, Floyd Tillman, and Charlie Harris generally prevailed over those with country accents, and helped ease country music's dominance among city-born audiences.
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It isn't known exactly when the Hendon brothers made the transition from the Sphinx Club to the Main Street Dance Hall several blocks to the north, but various clues indicate that it was most likely sometime in 1950, or early 1951 at the latest. They kept the neon sign of the old club, but renamed it the Western Jamboree Club to signal that country and western music would be exclusively featured. Most people never learned the new name, and instead called it by its street address (105 1/2 Main), during both its years of operation and in interviews decades later. This was in part to prevent confusion with the other Main Street Dance Hall, about seven miles away near Hermann Park, which also was known by a colloquial name, "The End o' Main Club." (It, too, featured country music after the war.)
The Sphinx had been a private club so that mixed-drinks could be served legally. It had also limited live music only to the weekends. The move to 105 1/2 Main was necessary to get a larger, beer-drinking crowd interested, and that crowd could only be retained with a band that played six nights a week, not just weekends. Hendon had no money, but given the supremacy of country music by this time, it would have been easy for him to have obtained bank financing for such an idea. It was almost impossible to lose money on a country music dance hall that served beer and wine in Houston.
After refurbishing the club, R.D. next had to assemble a new band. The South Texas Cowboys had apparently split up when the Sphinx club closed. Vocalist Johnny Cooper moved to Bandera to join the Bandera Ranch Hands, steel guitarist Joe Brewer left to play with Byrd & Bingo before joining Eddie Noack's new band, and lead guitarist Chet Sky-Eagle went elsewhere.
The new band would be named after the club: the Western Jamboree Cowboys. Charlie Harris (lead guitar and vocals), Grover Cleveland (vocals), Fred Deaver (rhythm guitar), and Don Brewer (drums) all came back to open the new club. Augmenting these Sphinx Club veterans was a new steel guitarist, Jay W. Ingham. Incredibly, R.D. still refused to hire a pianist, fiddler, or bassist, even though the much larger stage at 105 could accommodate them. Piano may have been considered essential for every other band, but not for Hendon. (Eventually, J.T. "Tiny" Smith was hired on bass, and pianist Theron Poteet was involved for a brief period, appearing on "No Shoes Boogie.")
"The original band was the best of all the bands that he ever had," Joe Brewer said. "Jay Ingham, Charlie Harris, Don Brewer – to me, the band never really sounded as good as it did (in 1950)."
R.D. Hendon. "He wanted to be a hit. He wanted recognition."
Only Fred Deaver lived to recollect this transition period.
"It was a dump," was Fred's frank memory of what the dance hall looked like before the band moved in. "It looked like a dump. And R.D. hired an artist to paint the entire wall in a huge cattle drive scene. But that was the only décor that was in there. (It had) subdued lighting. Tables all the way around on either side on the dance floor." Although it was much larger than the Sphinx, the Western Jamboree was still tiny compared to Cook's Hoedown or Jerry Irby's club. "Sixty, 70, 80 couples could dance there. On Saturday night we filled the place up. Maybe 300 people.
"There was no air-conditioning. It was hot as hell. Of course, after they drank a little bit, it didn’t seem to make a difference. The building was very live. There were two big windows that opened – you could fall right out of the bandstand. Don Brewer sat in the back right by those big windows. We always warned him not to get too excited and fall out. He could very easily have just flopped out of the window."
At the Sphinx, R.D. had never appeared on stage with the band. But the move to the new club had brought a change over him. Now he imagined himself becoming a country music star in his own right. In his mind, he was a bandleader by virtue of the fact that he hired the band and managed the club. The band were his employees. The situation, he reasoned, was not much different than that of W. Lee O'Daniel in the 1930s. O'Daniel was not a singer or musician, but by buying time on the radio and hiring a band, he was de facto"leader" of the band. The band wouldn't exist without him.
This made a certain sense in the context of 1930s radio sponsorship and advertisement, and O'Daniel was only the most famous example of this somewhat common (now forgotten) tendency of that era. It did not make sense in the context of a 1950s night club, however. Hendon was not a salesman for a flour company. The band did eventually land a radio spot, but the product Hendon was offering was the Western Jamboree club. Thus, he was not the conventional radio salesman of the O'Daniel type.
Such eccentricity would have been better tolerated had R.D. viewed it all with self-effacing good humor, but instead he demanded to be taken seriously by his employees, the band. Making an awkward and embarrassing situation worse was his fighter mentality. Nobody said anything about how ridiculous it was, since they knew criticism would be met with instant dismissal from their well-paid job at best, or a broken nose or cracked rib at worst.
"I think R.D. really enjoyed fighting," Deaver said. "Because the least little provocation – man, he’d throw the guys out of there. I mean, down the steps, head first. They didn’t tolerate any stuff up there. All the rough stuff – they did it." In other words, the club's rough reputation was established by R.D. and his brother E.J., not the clientele.
R.D. did not sing with the band. Instead, he tried to emulate Bob Wills. Deaver: "He would get up on stage, clap his hands, stomp his foot, and go 'Ah-Ha' and all that stuff. He wanted attention. It was embarrassing as hell. No one liked what R.D. did. But we had to put up with it – he signed our checks.
"He wanted to be a hit. He wanted recognition. He was a very insecure person, in my opinion."
The new club thus got off to a rocky start. There had been no fights in the Sphinx Club; now, fights became a regular part of the club environment. One would think this would have hurt the club's reputation, but it seems to have done the opposite. The Western Jamboree became so infamous for its fights that patrons most likely came to the place expecting to see brawls as part of the entertainment.
It became too much for Deaver, who either left the band or was fired in 1950. He sold his guitar soon afterward, never returned to the club, and never played music again. Lead vocalist Grover Cleveland left the group around the same time. But the new year would bring new faces to the group, along with a promising contract with 4-Star Records.