Legendary Texas musicians Jimmie Vaughn, David Grissom, Joe Ely and others tore it up for five hours at Antone’s world-famous blues club in downtown Austin last month. Cause for celebration - the owner of 40-year-old Heart of Texas Music in Temple, Ray Hennig - turned 80 on Dec. 16.
By helping struggling musicians find affordable equipment, Hennig’s stores played a significant role in growing Austin into a musician-friendly town that now calls itself “The Live Music Capital of the World.”
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, Clifford Antone may have played lead guitar with his blues club, taking chances by booking nascent bands, but Hennig was like the steady bass player - always in rhythm without much fanfare. Using Hennig’s amplifiers and guitars, these musicians gained experience, exposure and record deals.
“I came along and would loan them instruments,” Hennig recalled at his Austin store last week. “Clifford (Antone) would say I’ll try to see that you get them back. And we got most of them back. I’d even loan them drums, and everything, so they could stay and play.”
Working with guitar instructor Rufus Mooney, Hennig opened his first music store in McGregor about 1960. At the time, he also built custom homes with his brother. But the new venture was an immediate hit. Hennig sold his half of the family business, and used the proceeds to open a shop on Franklin Avenue in Waco. The Temple location came next, operated by Jimmy and Margie Deer, on Interstate 35 near where the Little Joe Hernandez museum is currently located.
Hernandez and his band would roll in from a tour, head straight to Hennig’s shop, and workers would re-tool their sound system. Little Joe’s son, Ivan, now 45, remembers in the early 1980s when he was a roadie in charge of the sound system.
“Ray’s crew, his employees would stay there with us till three, four, five in the morning, making sure our sound system was in correct, tip-top condition so we could make our tours in time,” Hernandez said. “They were just really, really good people to us. They did all that work for Dad (Little Joe) and it wasn’t just once or twice, it was several times.”
Dennis Hardwick now manages Hennig’s Temple store, located on 31st Street. He’s worked at Heart of Texas Music for a quarter century.
“When Ray started in this business, he helped out people who couldn’t afford it,” Hardwick said. “He’d just let them take something, and said pay me when you can.”
In the early 1960s, Austin musicians traveled to Hennig’s Temple and Waco stores for good deals on instruments and sound equipment for their shows. Hennig said the musicians were plagued by speed traps along the way, so he eventually closed the Waco store, and in 1974 opened the one he runs today in South Austin.
About that time a skinny kid from Dallas began hanging around the shop, borrowing guitars because he never had any money. Hennig just called him Stevie, but the world came to know him as four-time Grammy Award-winner Stevie Ray Vaughn.
“Music wasn’t our thing. I just liked him as a person, not as a musician,” Hennig said. “He’d come in here in the mornings and be here all day long. It was the same thing, day after day.”
After closing the shop for the evening, Hennig said he’d often drop off Vaughn at an Austin nightclub where he would sit in with other musicians.
Hanging out at the store one day, Vaughn picked off the rack a ’59 Stratocaster that had belonged to Chris Geppert (Under the pseudonym Christopher Cross he hit the charts with hits “Ride Like the Wind” and “Sailing.”) and said he liked the way it felt.
“It was completely trashed out,” Hennig recalled. “I said, man it probably doesn’t even work. ‘What would you want with an old wore-out piece of junk like that?’”
So they took the old Strat to a workbench in the back. Hennig rebuilt it and traded it even money for Vaughn’s guitar - which was probably borrowed from Hennig also. Vaughn dubbed it Number One, and later called it First Wife. He played it on Grammy-winning albums and at concerts across the world. A fan site devoted to Vaughn’s legacy suggests it is “perhaps the most recognizable guitar in the world.”
Still in the afterglow of last month’s celebration, Hennig says sons Steven and Shane, and his wife of 33 years, Mary Jo, have played an integral role in Heart of Texas’ longevity. The family has outlived many competitors only to see large national discount stores now enter the market.
But Hennig is not about to close the guitar case and walk away. With gray curly locks and an effervescent smile, he still loves the business and relishes his role in Texas music history.
“I’ll probably die at 110,” Hennig said, nodding toward the showroom. “Right here.”
