Meet the Band: Don Ricketson
“When I was 8 years old, my brother had an old Gene Autry guitar. All the strings were broken except the bottom 2. My Granny helped me tune the 2 strings up and I found out that I could make a pretty mean G, C and D chord on just 2 strings. I ran around in the house driving everyone crazy singing Little Brown Jug using those three chords …aah… a star in the making!”
Don Ricketson plays steel guitar at Cadillac Dance hall with Eddie Shell & the Not Guilties
Known as the Best little dance hall in Texas, Cadillac Dancehall has a storied cowboy history on Dos Conchas Ranch, bringing country music and an old-time hill country experience to thousands every year. Hosted by house band Eddie Shell and the Not Guilties, they invite country and dancehall legends monthly. The performance delights Marble Falls crowds (and beyond!), entertaining with a large repertoire of country, Rock n Roll, a little blues and R & B - and even a few Eddie Shell originals.
We’d like to introduce the talented members of the band. Meet Don Ricketson.
On my 13' birthday, 1949 my Dad bought me a little 6 string lap steel guitar with a matching amplifier. I had loved that beautiful steel guitar sound listening on the radio to singers like Hank Williams and Eddie Arnold and many others. I didn't have anyone to teach me anything, so I was on my own. There were a couple of older High School boys that played regular guitar and mandolin (Carlos Harlow & Kenneth McCloud) respectively, so I tuned my steel up to a regular open E tuning with their guitar. That worked pretty good so I could use the steel bar and slide up and down the neck and make any chord that they could so man we started swinging. We also found a fiddle player in high school (Lee Simpson) that fit right in. We played around for anyone that would listen to us and even played a few school dances and later a few clubs. After high school I joined the Marine Corps.
Fast Forward a few years to 1956... After I got out of the Marines I got a call from a band in San Angelo Texas and soon joined in with Jimmie Fletcher and The Drifting Ranch Hands. Lee Simpson was already playing with him them. We played all around West Texas, but mainly in San Angelo. Jimmie Fletcher was always the hottest thing going around there in those days. He had toured with the Carlisles earlier in his career and knew how to jump and sing and react to the music beat like Bill Carlisle. He can entertain the crowd and people loved him for that. At that time we were playing 5 or 6 nights a week with a Sunday afternoon Matinee, always a Sunday Matinee. Sometime around 1956 a friend of Jimmie's (Bill Scott) that he had known earlier in El Paso, who was also a booking agent, called and wanted to book us in a club in Juarez Mexico called the Chinese Palace. So Jimmie decided to try it. The Chinese Palace was a high dollar club in downtown Juarez. It had an upstairs balcony all around the dance floor. It had a dance floor with hydraulic system that raised the floor up about 4 feet high where the entertainers could do their floor shows like dancing and juggling etc. and their Mexican house band played for them then lower it back down afterward. That's where we came in. After all the floor shows their house band would leave and the The Jimmie Fletcher country band would come on. Not with a Mexican audience. All the clubs in El Paso closed at midnight so all the customers left El Paso and headed over to the Chinese Palace. That was an experience for sure. Jimmie's first wife (Billie Ruth) always played piano with us and we always had to tune our instruments with a danged piano whether it was in tune or not. No two pianos were ever the same.
When they were making the "Giant" movie in Marfa Tx. Chill Wills would stop by on his way back to Hollywood. Sometime he would come up and sing some old old cowboy tune with us. The Mexicans called us the Vaquro Mariachis. That's Mexican for cowboy musicians I think. They all liked us. We had a bouncer friend named Toro. He would have taken a bullet for any of us. They gave the band rooms at the Swanky Riviera Motel. Lots of cool things happened there too. Like they had a swimming pool and our guitar player (Buddy Smith) jumped off the high diving board into a wooden life preserver and it came up under his arms and we had to wake half the motel to find a hack saw to cut it off of him - that kinda stuff. In 1957 when the Russians put up the sputnik satellite we stayed up all night watching a streak in the sky we thought was the satellite. When the sun started coming up we'd been watching the glare of a guy wire on a High line pole. That was fun. Me and Buddy had a parrot that lived in our motel room that was mean as hell and he hated us. I won't go into that other than to say he died one night after he got into our tequila. My good friend Buddy Smith (bless his heart) died a few years after that in an automobile accident while working with Claude Gray. After Mexico we came back to San Angelo and played in all the different clubs there for several years.
While at the Dixie Club there, I got to back Marty Robbins. Wow, that was the first highlight of my career back then. After a few years that band started parting ways and I went to work in 1961 with Charlie & Donnie and the Country Ramblers at the Boots and Saddles Club. There we backed Buck Owens and Don Rich. They were about to go on a tour overseas and asked me if I would be interested to go with them. That was my second highlight. I had just married my lovely wife, Bonnie Low, so there was no way I could do that but I stayed there with the house band a couple more years. Then we started parting ways.
Fast forward again...Bonnie and I moved to Austin where I played with a few local bands including a few jobs with Clyde Barefoot Chesser, Soon we moved back to Llano, our old hometown. I had been playing around with some local boys at Willbern's Hillside just east of town. There was a man and his wife had been coming in the last few times we played and just sat around listening to the music. One night he called me over to talk at intermission. He said that they are from Dallas and he is a construction contractor and he is going to build a dance hall in Llano and he wants me to play steel and the bass player (Oscar James) to play bass and see if we could get a good band together for his new club. I thought at the time that he was full of bullcrap and blowin smoke. Nobody's got enough money to do that, so I just kinda forgot about it. The next week he came in and said my name is O.K Jones and my wife is Rachel and I just bought the old Sheppard hospital building and my construction crew is headed down from Dallas this week to get started rebuilding it into a nice nightclub for my wife. It's going to be called the Ramblin' Rose Ballroom. There's going to be murals on the walls and paintings of my 2 daughters, a huge hardwood dance floor, speakers in the ceiling, several tons of air conditioning and it will seat several hundred people and he wants me and Oscar to put a band together. Wow, I thought of my old buddy Jimmie Fletcher. He was the best band leader and front man and singer I'd ever known and he would be great, but he was still in playing in San Angelo at the Boots & Saddles Club and it would probably take a lot of money for him to quit playing there 5 nights a week and come to Llano for three nights a week (Fri, Sat., and Sunday Matinee) at first. Mr. Jones said no problem, I'll go to San Angelo and talk to him... So he did and came back and said I just hired Jimmie Fletcher. He's going to be great and he'll bring a drummer (Bill Gold). Now if we just had a fiddle player. Aah, how about our old buddy Lee Simpson. But he was now driving a truck for Stein lumber company in Austin and lived in Jollyville. To make a long story short, Oscar and I went to Lee's house and it was easy. He was ready to make a change back to Llano anyhow, so the Ramblin' Rose Band was formed. We had steel, fiddle, bass, drums and guitar. The Rambin' Rose opened in the fall of 1966. O.K brought the big band Dewey Grooms from the Long Horn Ballroom in Dallas for the Grand Opening. All Went well. At first the Rose was open 3 nights a week, but Fridays weren't all that great so O.K. cut it down to just Saturday and Sunday Matinee with the same pay for the band. O.K. Jones knew what he was doing. Back then all the surrounding towns like San Saba, Mason, and Brady to name a few were dry with no liquor or beer, so everyone from those places came to Llano to party because boy were we wet. And party they did.
There were many more folks that came from surrounding towns than local. O.K would be at the door welcoming them in and patting them on the back when they left. He was a good boss and he always treated the band great. He even bought me a new Double Neck11 string 10 pedal ZB steel guitar. We backed many Nashville Stars at the Rose. My favorites were folks like Loretta Lynn, Charlie Pride, Tex Ritter and many more. O.K, also booked full bands like Merle Haggard, Ray Price, George Jones (he didn't show), Ernest Tubb, and Hank Thompson among many others. All that went great for several years, but there was some hanky panky going on I suppose. Lots of couples went on to get hooked up for life others went the other way. Sometime around 1972, Mr. O.K. Jones done something that Mrs. O.K Jones found out about that she did not like at all and stuff started hitting the fan. She soon divorced Mr. Jones and she ended up with everything including the Rose and the Cold Creek Ranch and gave the whole shebang to her daughter Carol. Everything started going downhill after that and nobody lived happy everafter. Carol was not real customer friendly and it showed. We still played the house band for a couple years and she booked other outside bands as well, but by around 1974 she folded and Jimmie Fletcher went back to San Angelo and later bought a nice place at Camp Wood on the Neuces Lake and the rest of the band booked around Central Texas with Tommy Burney as the front man and singer so that went well for the next few years. After that I played with Mark Scott and Southern Comfort awhile. In 1985 I joined Kelly Spinks and Miles of Texas for several years. We played all over the central and west Texas area. 1993 or so I joined Jimmy Sims and the Georgetown Opry for 6 years and played with many Nashville starslike Bobby Bare, Rex Allen Jr., Johnny Gimble, and Fiddlin' Frenchy Burke and many others. 1999 I joined the Tracy Pitcox Llano Opry and played the house band for 15 years until 2014. I backed Stars like Little Jimmy Dickens, Hank Thompson, Ferlin Husky, and Whispering Bill Anderson - those kind of folks.
Sometime before that I had met my good friend Bode Barker. He was a fine upstarting musician and we started playing around a few local gigs. Soon he had met a lawyer in a court case that was playing some guitar and wanted to have a get together and jam session at his place in Marble Falls in his barn sometime. His name was Eddie Shell a Criminal Defense Lawyer. So Bode invited me to come along and play steel guitar with them every Wednesday night. At that time Joel Green was teaching Eddie some guitar stuff. I think he died later that year. That went on for once a week for several months. One night Eddy said, You know. I have an old barn and chicken pen on the other side of my 800 acre pasture. I think I will fix it up and make a nice dance hall out of it. We'll call it The Cadillac Bar and Dance Hall and my band will be “The Not Guilties." Pretty clever huh?
So that's what he did. Then to top it off he put an old green Cadillac with a blinking red light on top (when the club is open) on a dirt pile pedestal just inside the rock entrance to club. Now just named the Cadillac Dance Hall with a nice kitchen and pavement all the way to the club, it's been pretty successful.
That was started around 2010 and at this writing Sept. 2022 Eddie is enlarging the building with a nice indoor band room and restrooms and the future looks bright for the Cadillac Dance Hall. The band members have changed somewhat from time to time for various reasons, but the three originals of myself, Bode, and Eddie have always been there with a full band to play the best country & western dance music in the Texas Hill Country. We've had some pretty good Stars at the Cadillac too. Like my favorite, Darrell McCall, Tony Booth. Fiddlin' Frenchy Burke and Leona Williams to name just a few.
I've been lucky to have been in the right places at the right times. I've had a pretty good run with my music career. Never being a famous steel guitar player and never wanted to be, but doing the music I like, playing in the places I like and being with people around me that think musically alike and I've played on stage with about every Nashville Star that's anybody. Like my buddy bass player Joe Daniel once told me; “There might be somebody play better than you, but they don't need to” So… that's good enough for me.
