Adolph Hofner

Adolph Hofner once changed his first name for the war. The Handbook says he briefly became Dolph to avoid association with Adolf Hitler, and in 1945 he took his Texans to Los Angeles for three years of radio and nightclub work. He and his brother Emil grew up speaking Czech; the family moved to San Antonio in 1928, and the boys played polkas as teenagers. Their trio, the Hawaiian Serenaders, was cut off halfway through its first broadcast. In 1949 Hofner renamed his band for Pearl Beer; he often sang polkas in Czech.

What the plaque says

Adolph Hofner Adolph Hofner was born in Moulton in 1916 and became an early pioneer of the musical genre called western swing, popular in the late 1940s and 1950s. His musical repertoire encompassed western swing, pop, blues, country, jazz and traditional Czech folk songs. Hofner first came into musical prominence in the late 1930s with the Oklahoma playboys. In the early 1940s, he and his younger brother Emil (nicknamed "Bash") formed their own band. In 1941, Hofner became the first to record the popular fiddle breakdown, "Cotton-Eyed Joe," for Okeh Records. The song has become a Texas dance hall standard. "Maria Elena," another folk ballad recorded in 1940, became Hofner's first and biggest hit. In 1950, he signed with the Pearl Beer Brewing Company and changed the name of his band to Adolph Hofner and the Pearl Wranglers. In the San Antonio area, Adolph had a radio show starting in the mid-1950s and played with his band every Saturday night for more than twenty-five years at the Farmer's Daughter Dance Hall until 1993, when he suffered a stroke. Adolph and bash recorded for such major record labels as Columbia, Decca, Imperial and for the smaller Sarg Record Label in Luling, Texas. Hofner died on June 2, 2000, and at the time of his death was survived by his wife, three children and various grandchildren. His peers recognized his pioneering work in western swing. Both Adolph and Bash were inducted into Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame, the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame, the Texas Polka Music Association Hall of Fame and the Country Music Association of Texas Hall of Fame, among others. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 8.1 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 9.8 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 15 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 16 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• Moulton — 0.3 mi
• St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church — 0.5 mi
• Moulton's World War II Observation Tower — 1.2 mi
• Old Moulton — 2.1 mi