Amarillo’s Music History

Is Amarillo a music town? It depends who you ask, and it depends when you ask the question. Like the water level in a playa lake, our music scene has definitely risen, fallen and occasionally evaporated over the decades. But there’s no denying that the High Plains has produced its share of talent.

The late, great J.D. Souther, who passed away just last year at the age of 78, grew up here, dropping out of Amarillo College to perform with his band, The Cinders. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, legendary producer Norman Petty—the “King of Clovis”—maintained a regional connection to Amarillo, attracting local musicians as well as luminaries like Buddy Holly & the Crickets to Petty Studios. “Sugar Shack” songwriter Jimmy Gilmer was born in Amarillo in 1940 and died here in 2024. Terry Stafford, who co-wrote George Strait’s hit “Amarillo by Morning,” was raised in Amarillo. Longtime Texas singer-songwriter Joe Ely hails from Amarillo, too. Susan Gibson, whose song “Wide Open Spaces” became a massive hit for the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks), was a prominent figure in Amarillo’s 1990s music scene and beyond. (Don’t miss Gibson’s reflection about this period on page 33.)

In fact, the list of influential local musicians is long, from contemporary pianist Jim Wilson to John Rich of Big & Rich to CCM artists Trent Monk and Michael Neagle of Monk & Neagle. All have claimed ties to our city. As guitarist Hayden Pedigo once explained to Brick & Elm in a 2023 interview, there’s power in telling people you’re from Amarillo. “That’s an identity,” Pedigo said. “I think it makes me different than everyone else.”

With that identity in mind, we wanted to hear some of these stories, so we convened some of the city’s best storytellers and musicians for insight on Amarillo’s music history. This isn’t a comprehensive look at any genre, performer, location or decade—but a glimpse into the city’s musical history, told by some of the people who lived it. 

[Note: Quotes have been compiled from multiple interviews and conversations, in person and over the phone, and edited for space and clarity.]

Carlton Scales and the Aviatrix Club

Dr. Nicholas Scales and Maggie Scales Peacock are two of the children of Carlton Scales, a long-time big band musician, orchestra leader and club owner who brought countless luminaries to Amarillo to perform in the 1940s and ’50s. Decades later, Nick is a professor of double bass and music business at West Texas A&M University, a member of Polk Street Jazz and the Martinis, and plays for the Amarillo Symphony. His sister, Maggie. is a multi-instrumentalist who has played for decades with the Amarillo Symphony, Amarillo Little Theatre productions, the band Young Country, the Clyde Logg Band in the 1970s and 1980s, and much more.

Nick Scales: [Carlton] got his playing career started at The Nat. He tried to go to WT and he got kicked out because he was playing in dance bands and they didn’t like that he was playing dance music. We’ve got a recording from NBC Radio from before his club opened, running his big band from the Amarillo Country Club, where they’d do these broadcasts from across the country. You hear, “You’re listening to the Carlton Scales Big Band on NBC Radio on Sunday night at the Amarillo Country Club. That was like 1939 or so.”

That year, Carlton bought a drive-in cafe called the Aviatrix, located on Amarillo Boulevard, and transformed it into the area’s most elaborate ballroom—a dance hall, supper club and musical venue all at once. Located on Route 66, the Aviatrix Club was one of the first buildings on the east side of Amarillo visible to musicians traveling across the country. It seated around 500 people, attracting Amarillo Air Base personnel and other Panhandle residents.

Nick: It was a lot like The Nat, The Avalon and other places. It was a black-tie place where they could serve a full meal. My dad ran the band there. I think he mostly just called it the Carlton Scales Orchestra. My dad’s band was really strong, and he had people playing in it like Bob Dorough^*, who did all the “Schoolhouse Rock!” He was stationed in Amarillo as a kid, and his first regular band gig was with my dad’s band at our club.

Route 66 was the circuit and those bands came through. They didn’t have any way to communicate other than send somebody in advance months ahead of time and say, “This band is going to be coming through here. Are you interested in booking them?” Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, The Dorsey Brothers—together, and then The Dorsey Brothers separately after they fought—they all played there.

I [grew up] with all these stories about my dad having to reserve an entire hotel for Duke Ellington to try to avoid a racist hotel owner that didn’t want him staying there. My mom once walked in on Louis Armstrong in his boxer shorts [in his dressing room at the Aviatrix]. She was a pianist and singer and just walked into the wrong dressing room.

The Scales family lived next door to the club in a sprawling house, which still stands behind a metal garage building and auto shop on the Boulevard. Thanks to Carlton Scales, that home has hosted private concerts by some of the most famous musicians to ever perform in Amarillo.

Maggie Scales Peacock: I was pretty young, but I remember musicians coming to our house to jam after they’d play at the club. There was music all hours of the night. I remember being in there, as a child, and being bounced around on different people’s knees. They’d pass you around. It was a very unique childhood for sure.

Nick: There was a giant den with a full-size bandstand and PA system so people could just jam at the house and play in our living room. They’d leave the club and go over and [Carlton would] cook and they’d just hang out and play music all night. That’s the house I grew up in.

The Aviatrix Club burned down in 1952 after being struck by lightning, destroying a collection of signed photos, recordings and memorabilia from some of the greats who had played there. The house survived, but Scales didn’t have insurance for the club.

Nick: Harry James [and his band] had been booked to play there. He agreed to play somewhere else and donate proceeds to help with rebuilding. They rebuilt [a replacement club in the same place] out of cinderblocks. They believed Big Band would keep going and rebuilt everything with all the money they had. But right after that, rock ‘n’ roll hit. Dad didn’t pivot well. He blamed rock ‘n’ roll for ruining his life.

He could deal with Western swing. Bob Wills played there. We had really cool marquees from the ’60s of Willie Nelson playing there in a suit and short hair. Johnny Paycheck played there, Red Steagall. Charlie “Sugartime” Phillips and his band played there into the ’80s.

Charlie “Sugartime” Phillips grew up on a farm near Farwell, near the New Mexico border, and became one of the biggest singer/ songwriter names to come from this area. He recorded multiple sessions with Buddy Holly’s producer Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. One of those recordings was Phillips’ song “Sugartime,” which eventually became a No. 1 pop hit for the McGuire Sisters in 1958. Phillips performed in this area with his band “The Sugartimers” well into this century.

By the time the Aviatrix Club closed in the 1980s, weekend performances were attracting around just a few dozen people. It sold and became a hub for Tejano music. 

Nick: My dad wasn’t really as sad about [selling it] as I thought he would be, because [the new owners] packed the place. There were a thousand people there, listening to these bands and dancing. He said, “The place is alive again.”

The Days of Lady Cool Breeze 

Ruby Lewis was the first female radio disc jockey in the Texas Panhandle as well as the first Black radio disc jockey. Born in 1922, she debuted in 1954 at KAMQ-AM and played R&B and jazz music on Saturday evenings, starting at 8 p.m. in an office downtown. Her listeners knew her as “Lady Cool Breeze,” and her DJ booth was visible from the street. 

Amarillo resident Johnny Turner, now in his early 80s, knew her in person and listened to her on the radio. A 1963 graduate of Carver High School, he grew up just a block away from Ruby Lewis and her family. 

Johnny Turner: It was the music that she was playing that we were after. That’s what you cared about—the music. If it’s the first time we heard it, it was through her. [Soul duo] Sam & Dave, the Temptations, Bobby Bland. I remember one time at West Texas State, [a concert promoter] brought Sam & Dave to town. We went down to see them, and [Lady Cool Breeze] was kind of the master of ceremonies.

Amarillo resident Roscoe Wiley, now 75 and retired, also remembers listening to Ruby Lewis in the 1960s. At the time, Roscoe was a student at Amarillo High School.

Roscoe Wiley: I didn’t know her. I was just a teenager. I just knew her from the radio, and I knew her kids. She played mostly Black people music—R&B, soul music, some jazz. Some hard rock a little bit. But music from Motown. 

Johnny: She would get the records when they first came out, before we had heard it. And we would hear [the music] on her show, and then we’d go down to Go-Low’s [on Polk Street] to buy it. It was a music store. It was the main deal. She would say, “Go-Low has this.” They carried all kinds of music. Because when you go in there, you might have a white guy buying country and western. I’ve still got 45s from Go-Low’s.

Roscoe: She played good music. We would blast it on the radio, riding around in our cars.

Johnny: Some of the artists, she would let you know they were going to be in town. Places like the Aviatrix Club out on Amarillo Boulevard. People like James Brown played in that room. They’d be passing through, going from Dallas or Oklahoma City or whatever. She would go, “I might see you down there.”

Later in the 1960s, Johnny joined former Carver classmates Herb Johnson and Don Lamar to form a local music promotion business.

Johnny: We kind of went into that business a little bit. We called ourselves the Knights of Soul, the K.O.S. Brothers. We brought some bands in from Oklahoma City. We brought in Al Green. We would book those hotels off I-40, like the Camelot hotel. Some of these groups, we would get a better price if it was a two-night stand—book here in Amarillo then go to Lubbock. We might have 700 people [at a concert]. We did that for six or seven years. 

But Ms. Ruby Lewis, when you had someone playing music, you kind of thought Lady Cool Breeze would come. She dressed very nice. She had a real nice personality. She was one of those people everybody knew.

Ruby Lewis worked in local radio until 1987 and was inducted into the Texas Panhandle Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 1995. She passed away in 2016.

Norman Petty and Origin Stories

Brick & Elm spoke to some of the city’s rock-and-roll mainstays—a few in person, gathered together, and some in separate interviews—to create a sprawling conversation about what it was like to play live music here from the 1960s into the ’80s and ’90s. 

Scott Nelson: When I was 3 years old, I’d look at my hands and I just knew I was going to do something with them. I was in love with melody. I mean, not a girl named Melody, but music. I saw the marching band and I saw the sousaphones, them swinging those bells when they marched. I thought, ‘I’ve got to do that.’ 

My older brother was 10 years older than me, but he played in a band in 1959 with Jimmy Gilmer. 

Andy Chase Cundiff: Is that right? Wow!

Scott: They practiced in our garage. And Jimmy Gilmer, well, he was the most-recorded male vocalist at Norman’s for about 10 years. 

The late Jimmy Gilmer was known as the most-recorded vocalist at Norman Petty’s influential studio in Clovis. Jimmy Gilmer and The Fireballs recorded multiple hits in the early 1960s, and Gilmer’s 1963 hit, “Sugar Shack,” was the last of three No. 1 hits recorded there. A native of Amarillo, Gilmer passed away in September 2024 after a two-year journey with Alzheimer’s disease. 

Woody Key: I was born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, and moved to Amarillo in 1965. I got a guitar for my 13th birthday from Sears. I was trying the guitar out at Sears and I look up and there’s about five or six people standing around, looking at me. And I thought, this is what I want to do.

Chuck Alexander: Mine was when the girls screamed at the Beatles.

Andy: I’m pretty sure I had a guitar before I had a girl, for sure.

Woody: I played around with the neighbors and guys down the street. [Our band] The Underground Press was formed in 1967 and we played all the way through high school—1967 to 1970—and me and Scott made our bones in that band. Every day after school, we would all meet and rehearse for two or three hours. That’s where we learned our discipline. 

Scott: The premiere of the Beatles was a huge thing because when they came out, they had great songs, they had great harmonies, they looked great. It was a tipping point for me because I wanted not only to be in a band, I wanted to figure out how they came up with these songs. I wanted to know how they recorded them and the whole process. I had been taking guitar lessons from Steve Dodge at Nizzi’s [Music Shop]. And Steve Dodge played in a band called The Cinders, and they had a regional hit called “Good Loving’s Hard to Find.” That band was Steve Dodge, Charlie Bates and this cat J.D. Souther. J.D. played drums. He went on to huge success.

Souther was born in Detroit but raised in Amarillo, and attended Amarillo College. He began his career with The Cinders, who recorded at Norman Petty Studios, before moving to Los Angeles in 1969. He formed the folk duo Longbranch/Pennywhistle with Glenn Frey, then played a central role in the formation of the Eagles. Souther became one of the most acclaimed songwriters of the 1970s, writing hits for the Eagles—including “Heartache Tonight”—and working with artists including Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt. The uncle of Brick & Elm columnist Maggie Burt, Souther passed away just a few months ago.

Scott: My first band was with that guy right there. [He points at Woody Key.] He was the first musician I played with. The Underground Press played parties, we played at the country clubs for the Jubilante and Tarantella dance clubs. 

Woody: We played every little town around here. [It seems like] they had a teen dance every weekend. And the [Amarillo] Air Base—you could play an afternoon Saturday at the Airman’s Club at the air base, and then you could play a gig that night at the Dumas YMCA or somewhere like that.

Scott: We used to have, maybe a couple of times a week, free shows that we would play at Elwood Park. There was a stage out there in the middle of the park. We had hundreds of people out there, and it wasn’t just The Underground Press. The Hysterical Society would be there, and other groups like Euphoria.

Scott worked for Norman Petty as a session musician for several years. Eventually, Woody left the Panhandle for the West Coast before returning to Amarillo around 1972, when he formed the band Piper. Woody and Scott both ended up recording and playing with the artist Jay Boy Adams between 1977 and 1982, who recorded two albums for Atlantic and opened for bands including ZZ Top and Willie Nelson. 

The Moon Palace and Sneakers

While Woody and Scott toured with Adams, they missed the heyday of one of Amarillo’s most beloved historic music venues: The Texas Moon Palace. Located on Georgia Street near what’s now an AutoZone (901 S. Georgia St.), the honky tonk became an Amarillo hot spot and the center of the local music scene. Maggie Scales Peacock played the fiddle for the Clyde Logg Band, which spent several years as the house band at the Moon Palace.

Maggie: I was a Symphony musician and played violin and orchestra. In 1976, the summer after I graduated from high school, my brother invited me to the Colorado Mining Co. [a club in downtown Amarillo]. The Clyde Logg Band was playing there, a bunch of Western swing. I thought, that’s like jazz! They needed a fiddle player at the time and got me sitting in with them. When Steve Howe opened the Moon Palace, he wanted the Clyde Logg Band as the house band. We would play every night unless they brought in a guest artist.

From the late ’70s into the early ’80s, the Texas Moon Palace hosted guest musicians like Terry Stafford, Jerry Jeff Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughn, George Thorogood, Asleep at the Wheel and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Andy: I was a military brat, and my father was stationed in Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1970s. I worked in radio and worked for Norman Petty in the ’70s as a studio musician. Scott [Nelson] and I have that in common. [At the Moon Palace], I was just a spectator, but they had some very cool acts come through there. It was just a wing-ding. You could go to the Moon Palace and catch Emmylou Harris or Graham Parsons. Crystal Gayle played there. It was like our own version of [Austin’s famous] Armadillo World Headquarters.

Maggie: This was the hot place in town and we were the No. 1 band at the time. We’re always saying we wish we had a place like that now. People who didn’t go thought it was rough. You know, “We hear there’s fights.” But we had really good bouncers. It was kind of a basic working-class place where everybody went to have a drink and dance. Dancing was a big thing there. Everybody danced. Everybody went there to blow off steam.

Maggie went on to play with other bands including the Electric Cowboys, Maggie Scales & Texas—which served as the house band at Camelot and happy hour band at the Caravan—and then Young Country. Meanwhile, Woody returned to Amarillo in the early 1980s.

Woody: Jackie Anderson and Bob Flesher had been playing together forever, since junior high, and [after I moved back] I went to Steak & Ale one night and they were playing. When they went on break, they said, “Hey, would you like to play?” 

That led to the establishment of one of the city’s longest-tenured and most influential bands, Anderson Flesher & Key (AFK), who performed together throughout the 1980s. Chuck Alexander also entered the local music scene during this period.

Chuck Alexander: I grew up in Gruver and Guymon, then I moved to Amarillo around 1980 to go to WT. One of my teachers asked me what I wanted to be, and I said I wanted to be a rock star. He said, “Great. I can’t teach you that here. Get on the road.” And so I did.

We formed a band called Krakt through the ’80s. We were a good ol’ rock band. We played everywhere—the high schools, all over the Midwest: Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. We played a Shoe Carnival opening at 8 in the morning. When you’re young and hungry, you’re gonna play. 

In 1986, I remember there were 14 albums of original music [by local artists] that were released that year. We had a really good following. We played for more than 5,000 people at FunFest one year. Amarillo people are really good to the arts. They’ll come out for you.

Woody Key and AFK were, for a time, the house band at Sportz, a venue at 2424 Hobbs Road that has since become Hoot’s Pub. Then in 1988, Anderson, Flesher & Key opened a nightclub called Sneakers at the intersection of Paramount and Olsen. Sneakers became known as one of the best music venues between Dallas and Denver.

Woody: AFK played at Sportz, we played Fritz’s, we played Cafe Ritz, which was formerly Rhett Butler’s—which was a big music bar here. We played for 10 years, and by the end of that 10 years we were bar owners. 

By ’86 or ’87, our audience was getting older. Going to bars and listening to music wasn’t quite the priority it had been in the past. [Operating a club] was a real awakening for me and the other two guys. We at first decided it was going to be our home base to be a house band, [but] it turned into a venue for other bands from around the U.S. It was built to be a music club—great seating, great stage, great PA system. Our first major act was Joe Ely. He opened the place up, word got back to Lubbock, then to Austin. We started getting calls from a lot of agents. As far as live music clubs in Amarillo, it was the best.

During its heyday, Sneakers hosted local bands, but the broad popularity of Amarillo College’s FM90 brought in a variety of national touring alternative bands played on local radio.

Woody: We probably had 50 FM90 shows over the course of the place being open. Tribe, Tripping Daisy, The Judybats, Candlebox. Delbert McClinton was probably the most famous artist in my eyes. He and Bonnie Raitt had just won a Grammy [Award for their duet on “Good Man, Good Woman”].

Chuck: You know, Sneakers was an incredible thing, the bands that they brought in. Sportz was an incredible thing. When they built Sneakers, [AFK] left Sportz, and we became the band that took their place. So Sportz was a big development thing [for Krakt], learning how to perform. And Marty’s [at 34th and Georgia] was a great place at the time. Marty’s had jazz in the front and someone like us in the back, with two different types of music going on in the same club. 

More Origin Stories

Andy Chase Cundiff, a humor columnist for Brick & Elm, has been part of the local music scene since his radio career brought him to Amarillo in the 1990s.

Andy: I was with a band that started in 1987 as the Panhandle Band in Clovis. Some personnel changes around ’89 prompted us to change names to Route 66. Sometime in the early ’90s we found out that at least a dozen other bands went by that name, so we changed it to 66 Nomads.

I also played a short stint with Vic Fontana & The Automatics. I’ve been in a ton of bands since then and have a solo thing I do three or four nights a week. 

Sneakers remained open until 1994, hosting prominent local bands like The Blue Johnnies, Vic Fontana & The Automatics, and the Electric Gypsies. That same period saw the rise of Susan Gibson and her band, The Groobees. Susan found success in the late 1990s as the writer of the hit song “Wide Open Spaces,” made popular by the Dixie Chicks [now The Chicks]. Singer-songwriter Mike Fuller arrived in Amarillo in the early 1990s.

Mike Fuller: I was born in upstate New York near the Canadian border, then raised in Albuquerque. We moved here in 1993. I came here with Hastings, and then worked as a music buyer for about 10 years with them. My first [local] gig was OHMS, when I met you. [He nods at Chuck Alexander.] You invited me to a songwriters’ circle, either in the back room at Marty’s or at Boondocks. That’s how I met all these guys. After Hastings, I worked for Warner Brothers and then at High Plains Public Radio, from 2010 to 2015. Then I was the program director at FM90.  

Chuck: I met Mike playing at OHMS and he played this song, “Fruits of Our Labor,” that just blew me away. I went up to him and said, “You don’t know me, but that is the best thing I’ve ever heard,” and got to be friends with him. That was late 1993, early 1994. [Around the same time], I started up a band called Insufficient Funds. And then a bunch of the guys I went to school with were jazz guys. We started the band, The Martinis, which is a jazz band. 

Mike: OHMS felt pretty good for several years. I got that gig through Johnny Rose. We were working together, and Johnny was moving to Nashville. So I sat in with him his last night at OHMS, and he introduced me to Mary [Fuller, owner of OHMS (no relation)]. That’s how I got that gig.

It was a live music place back in the ’90s, until they changed from a cafeteria format at dinner. That’s when they stopped doing live music all the time inside the dining room. But that felt like home for quite a while. [These days], my favorite [venue] is Chalice Abbey. You can’t get a better room than that. There’s really no other listening room in town.

A Changing Music Scene

Most of these musicians continue to play music—together, as solo acts, and in occasional reunion bands, songwriting circles and other events. But they say the way Amarillo relates to music has changed.

Woody: In the mid-1960s and ’70s, people were interested in going to hear bands and listen to live music because it was more of a novelty back then. Today, [with Spotify and social media], it’s complete saturation. To me, music has less value to the average person today than it did 20 or 25 years ago.

Chuck: It’s been this roller coaster, up and down. Right now, live music is more of a restaurant/bar vibe than a club vibe. That’s not bad. It’s just what it is right now. That I can still play music at this age and people still want to hear it? People give up their time and their money because they think enough of you to come see you play? I don’t even have words for that. That’s the biggest compliment I can think of: People giving up their time.

Mike: I have more phone numbers of places that I used to play and that are gone. In my opinion, it’s been way too much of an ebb and flow that you just can’t think it’s always going to be that way. The scene has always been up and down, and we ride it out. I’m grateful. My kids have never gone hungry. I’ve always been able to find a gig somewhere. It’s just not the same place. It changes constantly.

Chuck: I was in New York City in the early 2000s and Les Paul used to have a house gig at the Iridium every Monday night. I saw him there and he was signing autographs after. I went up to say, you know, “thank you, Mr. Paul, for your guitars.” He heard my accent and said, “Where are you from?” I told him Amarillo, and he said, “Got a minute? I want to talk to you about Amarillo.” He told me about the places he played—it would have been like the Aviatrix in the 1950s—and the radio stations where he did interviews here. He’s a legend, and he remembered Amarillo.