he Civic Lubbock, Inc. Board is pleased to announce the upcoming inductions into the West Texas Walk of Fame for 2016.  The honorees are: Ponty Bone, Terry Cook, The Flatlanders and Sonny West. The induction ceremony will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 15 in the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center Theater located at 1501 Mac Davis Lane.

Ponty Bone, musician, bandleader, and singer/songwriter, is known as an authentic Texas accordion King. He is a master of the accordion and has gained an international reputation. Writers from all over the world have paid homage to Ponty as one of the real innovators on his chosen instrument.  Ponty began studying the accordion at the age of five and hasn’t put it down since. While attending Texas Tech, he fell in with the local musical community as a result of a chance introduction to then teenager, Jimmie Dale Gilmore.  At the time, Lubbock was home to a generation of musicians who later carved out a major niche in Texas music. In the early 1970’s, Ponty started playing with Lubbock’s country music patriarch and visionary Tommy Hancock and his Roadside Playboys at the legendary Cotton Club and later played with Hancock’s Supernatural Family Band.  In 1976, he was hired by Joe Ely and spent seven years playing and touring with the Joe Ely Band, including recording five albums.  He has also shared the stage and studio with such varied musicians as The Clash, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, Jerry Jeff Walker, Robert Earl Keen, Gary P. Nunn, and Omar and the Howlers, just to name a few. In 1982, Ponty formed his own band, The Squeezetones.  The band went on to tour the US, Canada, Europe and Mexico over the next two decades and released three albums to critical praise; Easy as Pie, My, My, Look at This, Dig Us on the Road Somewhere.  In 2001, Ponty Bone and The Squeezetones released Fantasize which was picked by the Austin American-Statesman as one of the top albums of 2001.

Internationally-renowned opera singer Terry Cook was born in Plainview, Texas and graduated from the Texas Tech University School of Music. After leaving Texas Tech, Terry sang with the Santa Fe Opera and then joined the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists in Chicago. In 1982, the Metropolitan Opera Music Director invited him to join the Met’s Young Artist Development Program and he made his Met debut in 1983.  Terry is especially known for his frequent portrayal of the title role in the famous Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess having performed the role with the Houston Grand Opera at Opera Bastille in Paris, La Scala in Milan and the Tokyo Opera, as well as New York Harlem Productions’ tour of Germany, Norway, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark.
As a bass-baritone, Terry has appeared with most major opera companies and symphony orchestras around the world, namely those in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, London, Milan, Rome, Tokyo, Madrid and Cairo and has performed in Austria, Spain and Norway.  Terry has appeared in more than twenty productions at the Metropolitan Opera including La Traviata, La Fanciulla del West, La Gioconda, and Un Ballo in Maschera, Aida, Carmen, Salome, Parsifal, and Porgy and Bess. He has also performed with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, and Atlanta, Seattle, Detroit, Baltimore and Houston symphonies. Terry performed at the White House for President Reagan and for “Live at the Met” on PBS.   Terry and his family divide their time between their homes in Germany and New York.

In January of 1972, a newly formed grassroots band The Flatlanders (comprised of the nucleus of Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock) traveled to Tommy Allsup’s Odessa, TX studio at the urging of a local radio DJ. The 14 songs recorded on reel-to-reel tape arguably marked the birth of alternative country music. After playing some gigs, recording a promotional single of “Dallas” and performing at the Kerrville Music Festival, the group broke up in 1973 as they began to pursue solo careers.  The Flatlanders re-grouped in the mid-late 1980’s for a reunion at the Kerrville Music Festival and garnered a surprisingly strong posthumous reputation for a band that had no records (other than a promo single) released and barely played outside of Lubbock. In 1991, Rounder Records issued the 1972 sessions as “More a Legend than a Band”.  Joe, Jimmie Dale and Butch continued to reunite for occasional Flatlander performances.  In 1998, they contributed to the sound track of “The Horse Whisperer” and in 2002, they released their follow-up album, “Now Again” on New West Records.  In 2004, they released “Wheels of Fortune” and “Live ‘72”, a live recording of the then-unknown country band performing at a honky-tonk in Austin.  The Flatlanders appeared in the 2005 film, “Lubbock Lights”.  In 2009, they released the album, “Hills and Valleys” and appeared as musical guests on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”  In 2012, the Flatlanders released “The Odessa Tapes”, an album of previous unreleased recordings culled from the 1972 recording sessions.  The Flatlanders were voted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame in March of 2016.  While Joe, Jimmie Dale and Butch have all been inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame previously for their solo careers, this induction celebrates their accomplishments collectively as The Flatlanders. 

Sonny West, who has lived a life of music and written two of the best known songs from our part of the world, was born in 1937 alongside Highway 84 just outside of Shallowater.  He spent his childhood moving with his itinerant farming family all around the American West, returning to Levelland in 1956.  By then an accomplished musician and singer, after getting his first guitar at the age of 14, he began playing gigs in and around Lubbock, often appearing on KDAV’s Sunday Party, where he met another young singer, Buddy Holly.  Sonny cut his own first recording at Norman Petty’s studios that same year, a 45 single of “Rock-Ola Baby” b/w “Sweet Rockin’ Baby” (Nor-Va-Jak WA1956), which is considered by many to be among the finest two-sided rockabilly records ever released. He cut a demo track of his composition “All My Love”, which Petty passed along to Buddy Holly and The Crickets who recorded it soon after under the title “Oh Boy!”  In 1957, Sonny and fellow musician Bill Tilghman co-wrote “Rave On”, recorded the next year by Buddy Holly and The Crickets.  An immediate hit, the song has become a classic rock-and-roll anthem over the years, having been recorded by artists ranging from John Lennon to Ricky Nelson to John C. Fogerty to Nanci Griffith to Zooey Deschannel.  Although West stopped pursuing a music career in the 1960’s, he continued to write songs and record demos.  Since moving to Abilene in 2000, Sonny has returned to music with a flourish, appearing at the Clovis Music Festival, the Winter Dance Party at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa in addition to overseas bookings in the UK, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.  He has also recorded and released several CD’s during this period, the latest being, “Sweet Perfume” in 2011 which includes two songs that date to 1958 when Buddy Holly asked Sonny for new material.

West Texas Walk of Fame
In the late 70s, Larry Corbin, Jerry Coleman, and Waylon Jennings initiated the idea of an award for famous artists and musicians from the West Texas region.  In 1983, Civic Lubbock, Inc. began their tenure as the custodians of the “Walk of Fame” with the induction of Mac Davis.  The West Texas Walk of Fame honors those individuals with a strong connection to Lubbock and the West Texas area who have devoted a significant part of their lives to the development and production of the performing and visual arts and whose body of work has been influential nationally in one or more of these areas.

Past “Walk of Fame” Inductees include:

1979  Buddy Holly
1980  Waylon Jennings
1983  Mac Davis
1984  Jimmy Dean, Ralna English, Bobby Keys
1985  G. W. Bailey, Barry Corbin
1986  Jerry Allison, Sonny Curtis, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan
1988  Tanya Tucker
1989  Joe Ely, Roy Orbison
1990  Gatlin Brothers, Bob Wills
1991  “Snuff” Garrett
1993  Maines Brothers Band
1994  Virgil Johnson of the Velvets, Buddy Knox
1995  Glen D Hardin, Gary P. Nunn
1996  Cecil Caldwell, Woody Chambliss, The Hometown Boys, Paul Milosevich, Bob Montgomery, C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield
1997   Terry Allen, George Ashburn, Dan Blocker, Glenna Goodacre. Los Premiers, Dirk West
1998  Don Caldwell, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock
1999  Jane Prince Jones, Ed Wilkes
2000  Eddie Dixon
2001  The Fireballs, Delbert McClinton
2002 Suzanne Aker, Brad Maule, Pete Morales, Helen Wagner
2003 Alvin G. Davis, Billy Walker
2004 Clif Magness, Richie McDonald
2005 Angela Strehli, Agnes Torres
2006 David Box, David Gaschen, Jennifer Smith
2008 John Gillas, Mary Gillas
2010 Bill Griggs
2012 Charlene Condray Hancock, Tommy X. Hancock, Lloyd Maines, Jesse “Guitar” Taylor
2014 Jay Boy Adams, Lew Dee and Diana Dee, Andy Wilkinson, Jaston Williams
2015 Joe Harvey Allen, Natalie Maine
(News release from Civic Lubbock, Inc.)