Texas Jim Lewis (October 15, 1909 - January 23, 1990) was a country and western singer, bass player, film actor and radio and television performer.
Born James lewis Jr. in Meigs, Georgia, USA, his mother died when he was five and his father remarried and raised two more children. In 1919, the family relocated to Fort Myers, Florida, where Lewis stayed until 1928, when he relocated to Texas. Joining a medicine show, he began singing and also acquired his nickname. In 1929, radio work with a musical trio beckoned at WTAW in College Station, Texas.
By 1930, the family were in Detroit and he returned home and played local bars with 14-year-old Jack Rivers (in reality his half-brother Rivers Lewis). In 1932, he returned to Texas where, until 1934, he played with the Swift Jewel Cowboys in Houston on KPRC. Returning to Detroit, he joined Jack West’s Circle Star Cowboys and also worked on WJR. He then formed his own Lone Star Cowboys, which included Jack Rivers and Smokey Rogers and moved to New York, where they remained for five years.
With a repertoire of western swing and popular numbers, they played a residency at the Village Barn (1935-37), various theatres and clubs and made regular radio appearances. Vaudeville tours took him coast to coast and even a trip to England. They recorded for Vocalion Records and between August 1940 and February 1944 cut almost 40 sides for Decca Records. They ranged from the gentle ‘Molly Darling’, to the comedy of ‘When There’s Tears In The Eye Of A Potato (Then I’ll Be Crying For You)’ also his million-selling hit, "Seven Beers with the Wrong Woman." They also recorded numerous transcription discs and toured as far as California.
He appeared in several films including admen From Red Butte (1940), Pardon My Gun (1942), Law Of The Canyon and The Stranger From Ponca City (both 1947). He also successfully recorded ‘Squaws Along The Yukon’, several years before the Hank Thompson version and had a number 3 US country hit, ‘Too Late To Worry, Too Blue To Cry’, on Decca Records, in 1944.
Lewis became noted for the strange musical instrument that he called Hootenanny. It comprised washboards, motor horns, cowbells, sirens and guns that actually fired. When Lewis was drafted in 1942, Spade Cooley became leader of the band. When he returned to the music in 1944, he formed a new band, opened a club and toured until 1950, when he relocated to Seattle. Here he presented a radio show and then established his Rainier Ranch and his very popular Sheriff Tex’s Safety Junction children’s show.
Most of his recordings at this time were children’s records including “Safety Songs,""The Hootinanny Song," and "Ophelia, The Cow". By 1957 KING-TV's innocent kiddie programs, KING's Klubhouse (with Stan Boreson) and Wunda Wunda (with Ruth Prins), must have seemed more predictable to the station's management -- for all of his talents, Lewis's fabled Wild West temper, propensity for ribald humour, and habit of blasting his smoky, blank-firing .44 pistol is rumoured to have played some role in the decision to retire Safety Junction.
That was when Lewis moved on to Tacoma's KTVW, where he hosted the Sheriff Tex Show for a while and in 1958 relocated the program up to Vancouver B.C., where it aired for several more years and was syndicated for broadcast in five languages. Throughout the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, Lewis (and Jack Rivers) led a country dance-band -- Texas Jim Lewis and the Apple Knockers -- at a downtown nightclub called the Golden Apple Restaurant (906 1st Avenue), and several of his old Decca recordings were surreptitiously reissued (as bootlegs) by the house label, Golden Apple Records. Building that combo up to a full Western Swing band, Lewis continued working area nightclubs up into the 1970s.
From there Lewis' musical career began to wind down, but on April 21, 1985, he was saluted by the Seattle Western Swing Music Society at a big celebration at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. That tribute event marked Lewis's 55th year in showbiz and it was a great reunion for many old-time Northwest country musicians and their fans.
Meanwhile, that same year saw some distant fans -- way over in Germany -- launch a three-LP series of vintage (but previously unreleased) radio transcription recordings by "Texas" Jim Lewis and the Lone Star Cowboys on Cattle Records, which have given a whole new generation the opportunity to hear a great band in their prime.
Texas Jim Lewis died January 23, 1990, age 80.
(Edited from AllMusic, History Link.org & The Encyclopedia of Country Music)