Back (standing) left to right - Travis Bowden, Elmer Bowden, Harley Redfern, Eddie Brooks

Front left to right-  James Ellis Williams (not band member), Curtis Bowden

In lieu of biographies, we would share this interesting, brief history of Linden’s The Bowden Boys Country/Western Band of the mid1930’s as told by Curtis Bowden, the only surviving member of “The Little Band That Quit Too Soon”.

The Bowden Boys Country/Western Band

If we start at the very beginning, we would have to start with my brother Elmer. My Dad had an old violin (we called it a fiddle) that had belonged to his dad. Dad could play it, but not too well, but Grandpa was a very good fiddle player. Since he didn’t live with us, the old fiddle was neglected until Elmer took a liking to it, and we could see that he had a special talent for it.

One summer one of Dad’s brothers, Uncle Benton, visited with us and got very interested in Elmer’s playing and bought him a new fiddle. He also bought me a guitar and Travis a mandolin. At that time, Elmer was ten, I was twelve, and Travis was fourteen years of age. The new instruments also had instructions for beginners just learning to play. We took off from there and soon had other boys wanting to play with us.

Mr. TJ “Jeff” Blackburn lived out in our area, and he would come over to our house and play with us. He had an old banjo, and he was pretty good on it. Mr. Jeff was making syrup in several old wash pots and was selling it as fast as he made it. He wanted to build a small syrup factory in Linden, but couldn’t get any help with the local bank. The bank in Jefferson agreed to finance him, so he built his syrup factory down there. And it’s still in operation.

It didn’t take us long to tell which boys had the talent and desire, and we put Harley Redfern on banjo and Eddie Brooks on mandolin, and we had our band. When Eddie took the mandolin, Travis switched over to the guitar, and I bought what was known as a steel guitar and learned to play it. Some musicians now call that instrument a dobro, but back then it was a steel guitar.

A young man named Ed Farmer took an interest in our band, and we made him our manager. Ed was a pretty good salesman, and he soon had us a weekly thirty-minute program on KCMC radio station in Texarkana with a lot of local merchants as our sponsors. We did this for quite some time while playing at theaters, country dances, etc. Ed had some contacts in Corpus Christi, and we did a show at the Convention Center. As I recall, the convention hall seated fifteen hundred, and there were about one thousand people there. The tickets were twenty-five cents, and I remember having to give them fifty dollars for use of the convention hall. So we cleared about two hundred dollars, which was pretty good back then. You have to consider that those were very hard and uneasy times, with not much money. Adolph Hitler was on a rampage and global war just over the horizon. Also, those years were known as The Big Band Era, with orchestras like Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and many others headlining the music scene. The string bands and country music were put on the back burner, but survived, and I’m sure always will.

I don’t remember just when, but Ed Farmer, our Manager, got married and moved away from Linden. I don’t know where he heard us play, but a man named Hermann Roth (who was in the business of promoting musicians) talked us into being our next manager. He was a German with a very German accent, but had quite a few contacts. He soon had us a spot as the lead-in band for Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys at the Crystal Palace in Ft. Worth, Texas. It was on a Saturday, and he got us a thirty-minute radio program on station WBAP in Ft. Worth advertising the show. It’s been too many years for me to remember the dates, but we had another show as a relief band for Bob Willis’ Band at a New Year’s Eve party and dance at a place called The Caddo Night Club down on Caddo Lake. We wound up doing most of the playing, since by around 10pm, Bob and his bunch were out on the dance floor drinking and having fun. Tommy Duncan, Bob’s piano player and vocalist didn’t drink, and he played with us. We were to quit at midnight, but when we would try to stop playing, some of those who thought they had more money than they needed would give us another ten or twenty dollar bill, so we stayed until about 2am and made quite a bit of money.

Travis had quit the band that year, and although we were playing a lot, we had to get rid of Mr. Roth, as he was getting most of our money. We got Morris Ed Baker as our last manager, and like Ed Farmer, he was a pretty good salesman. He got us a lot of dates at places like new movie theater openings, country dances, all kinds of parties, etc. I suppose we should have continued our playing, but shortly after Travis quit, Eddie Brooks, our mandolin player, came down with a kidney disease and had to quit also. Since the doctors didn’t know what to do for him, Eddie died at a very young age. Instead of trying to replace Eddie and Travis, we decided to just hang it up. Tommy Duncan made this remark about us to a very good friend of ours named Joe Martin, who was a relative of Bob Willis. He called us “The Great Little Band That Quit Too Soon”. That was quit a compliment, coming from Tommy.

Music has continued in the Bowden family. My son, Mike, started out with nephew Richard’s band, Shiloh, and went on to play over two year with Linda Ronstadt, then fourteen years with Emmy Lou Harris. When she quit her tours, Mike played with Patty Loveless for ten years. Of course, most of you from the Linden area know what my nephew, Elmer’s son, has accomplished. After many years with Sandy Pinkard and known worldwide as Pinkard and Bowden Comedy Team, Richard moved back to Linden and is doing wonders towards his goal of making Linden into “Music City Texas”. My grandson, Alex, has a group of young boys that are developing into a pretty good band - SO THE TRADITION CONTINUES…..

Curtis Bowden
January 26, 2005