Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
James Wallace Adams, known as Jay Boy Adams (born c. 1949), is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist from Lubbock and San Antonio, Texas, known particularly for his talent for storytelling in his songs.
Early years
Adams was born in Fort Worth but reared in Colorado City, the seat of Mitchell County south of Snyder in West Texas, where his father was the local Chevrolet dealer. Upon graduation in 1967 from Colorado City High School, he entered the University of North Texas at Denton, then North Texas State University, which is known for its arts and music curricula. There he met Don Henley, later with the singing group The Eagles. Adams went to Dallas, to hear the guitarist Bugs Henderson, who played an impact on Adams's musical development.
With hopes of a musical career of his own, Adams left UNT after two years to join the band "Hayseed", then performing in Houston. From 1969 to 1970, he played at clubs in Midland. He had also attended Howard College, a community college in Big Spring, Texas, with the goal of improving his grade-point average so that he could re-enter a university. Meanwhile, he lost his draft deferment during the Vietnam War.
In March 1972, a friend secured Adams a spot with the ZZ Top band in Lubbock. That summer he gained entry to Texas Tech University in Lubbock to study music and English. The ZZ Top club manager, Bill Ham, soon invited Adams to play for the band at the Municipal Auditorium in Dallas. By 1976, Adams had signed with Atlantic Records, which in 1977 released his first music. By 1980, the contract was nonrenewed. Adams is known for his ability for storytelling in song, a mixture of blues, rock and roll, country, and folk music. In those years, Adams often spent more than half of the year in concert tours. He performed not only with ZZ Top, but the Allman Brothers Band, Marshall Tucker Band, Joe Cocker, and Bonnie Raitt. In the Cocker band for a time was a saxophone player, Bobby Keys, originally from Slaton in Lubbock County, who began touring with many bands as a young teenager. Keys and Adams had not previously met but toured together for a time with Cocker.
Later career
By 1982, faced with mounting family obligations, Adams left the music business and avoided music clubs and concerts for most of the following fifteen years. Instead, he operated and still maintains the company, Roadhouse Transportation, which leases touring coaches to such celebrity singers as Celine Dion, George Strait, and Bruce Springsteen and even the Dallas Cowboys. He did for a time make a few annual musical appearances in Lubbock, and in 1986 played at the Cattle Baron’s Ball there with Reba McEntire. He moved his family to a ranch in the Texas Hill Country and his business to the town of Comfort in Kendall County, part of the San Antonio Metropolitan Statistical Area. One evening Adams and his wife, Mary F. Adams, attended a show in San Antonio to hear the musician Lee Roy Parnell, who invited Adams to join him on stage. Thereafter, Adams's desire to perform in public was renewed and became irresistible.
In 1999, Adams joined George Strait's national tour. He toured Europe with the Tejano group, the Texas Tornados. He became the co-manager of the popular singer Pat Green, whom Adams met when Green came looking for touring accommodations. By 2007, Adams released the album "The Shoe Box", which reached No. 5 on the Americana chart. The album offers ten new Adams selections and three from the late 1970s. "The Shoe Box" produced three top 10 single songs the Texas Music Chart, where it was posted for some two years. Singer Stephen Stills, an avid listener of "The Shoe Box," declared Adams "a great musician and a storyteller in the true Texas tradition" and invited him to join Stills' national tour.
In 2005, Adams was featured on Bob Phillips's Texas Country Reporter syndicated television anthology series, with an explanation for his return to professional music.
On March 12, 2011, Adams performed in concert at the landmark Texas Theater in Sweetwater in Nolan County, near his hometown of Colorado City. It was the first concert in some seventy years at that facility, which had originally been designed for musical programs but converted to films after its opening.
Since August of 2011, Adams performs regularly at the Dog and Pony Grill, in Boerne, Texas, and other markets throughout the state. The current lineup of Adams' band, The Roadhouse Scholars, include Sam Hendricks on Hammond B3 and piano, Mark Butzirus on drums, and Ronnie Leatherman on bass guitar. It is commonplace to see other musicians join Adams on stage. Currently Adams splits his time between Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and plays regularly when in Santa Fe with a host of local and transplanted musicians from various parts of the USA. He is frequently seen performing in most of the popular night spots in Santa Fe that include El Farol, Evangelo's, and The Cowgirl.
Adams is an artist through Wounded Bird Records. He has also recently joined forces other musical veterans in the rock group, Brothers of the Southland. Though his touring coach business is based in Kendall County (San Antonio), Adams kept Lubbock as his musical home. "Lubbock is the capital of West Texas. There has been so much talent come out of there, and really . . . none of it has been very commercial. Buddy Holly wasn't commercial when he [first] came out of there." Among those to whom Adams was referring was Don Allison, an area musician associated with various genres of music and a long-time producer at the Cactus Theater in Lubbock, where Adams has also frequently performed.
