Adolph John Hofner (June 8, 1916 – June 2, 2000) was an American Western swing bandleader and singer.
He was born in Moulton, between Houston and San Antonio. His father was part-German and his mother Czech; he spoke Czech as his first language, and the first music he remembered was that of polka bands playing for community dances. Soon the gramophone introduced him to more mainstream idioms, including the then popular Hawaiian music.
"That's what got me and my brother started on strings," Hofner recalled, "Hawaiian guitars." He and Emil, who was two years younger, took a guitar course, called themselves the Hawaiian Serenaders and began playing in San Antonio clubs, where the family had moved, for 40 or 50 cents a night.
"I even changed my style of singing to try to sound like Milton," said Hofner. "So I got into this western [music] because that's what was paying off, but I kept my popular right along with it." He joined another swing band, Jimmie Revard's Oklahoma Playboys, and toured with them through the Rio Grande valley - but their music was too jazzy and modern for small-town taste, and they ended up, as he remembered feelingly 40 years later, eating "boloney for breakfast, dinner and supper."
The scout, Hofner recalled, aimed to make another Crosby out of him - and, indeed, his recording of Maria Elena had the same ambience of wide, sunlit plains as Bing's Don't Fence Me In. At the same 1940 session, Hofner made polka recordings for Bluebird's foreign-language catalogue, the band's up-to-date sound of twin fiddles and amplified steel guitar curiously contrasting with Adolph and Emil's close-harmony duets in Czech.
In 1941, Hofner made what he believed to be the first record of the exuberant Texas dance tune, Cotton-Eyed Joe. That, and other hit records, put him on the circuit of dance-halls around Los Angeles, catering to the thousands of Americans who had deserted the southwest for war work in the shipyard factories of southern California. Concerned about the effect of his name, he
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carefully billed his personal appearances as by Dolph Hofner & His San Antonians, but his new label, Okeh Records - after initially promoting him as the "husky he-man, leader of one of the west's outstanding string bands" - nervously cut back his releases, and soon let him go.
The late 1940s and early 50s saw a revival of polka music in Polish, Czech and German communities throughout the United States, and Hofner, back in San Antonio, concentrated on playing the tunes of his youth, in settings that evoked his varied musical experience, partnered, as ever, by Emil, playing his little Rickenbacker steel guitar.
In 1950, he gained the sponsorship of Pearl Beer, and, for the next 30-odd years, his Pearl Wranglers band-bus was one of the familiar sights of San Antonio. He broadcast on station KTSA, put out records of both swing tunes and polkas on the local Sarg label (giving an early recording opportunity to the teenaged Doug Sahm), and played regularly at the Farmer's Daughter.
It was in that beautifully preserved, 50s-styled dance-hall that he and the Wranglers were filmed in 1986 for a Channel 4 series, The A To Z Of C&W. The band's great days were plainly far behind them, but when Hofner sang, or talked on camera to the presenter Hank Wangford, he exuded the charm that had once made him a hillbilly heartthrob.After 61 years gracing the stage, Hofner suffered from a stroke and could no longer perform. He died from lung cancer on June 2, 2000, in San Antonio, Texas, just six days before his 84th birthday.
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His many honours include induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame, Texas Polka Music Association Hall of Fame, Country Music Association of Texas Hall of Fame, and Western Swing Society Hall of Fame.
(Info mainly from Tony Russell ~ The Guardian)
Adolph's Beautiful America from Geoff G on Vimeo.