Don Walser, a unique, award-winning yodeling "Texas country music legend"^*, was born Donald Ray Walser on September 14, 1934 in Brownfield. A roots musician since he was 11 years old, Walser became accomplished as a guitarist and a vocalist, and also became a songwriter. He started his first band, The Panhandle Playboys, at age 16, and shared bills with another aspiring Texas singer, Buddy Holly.

As rock'n'roll began to skyrocket in popularity, however, Walser conservatively opted to stay in the Texas Panhandle to raise a family and work as a mechanic and auditor for the National Guard, rather than move to Nashville to pursue a recording career. As a result, he had little following outside the Lone Star State for the first part of his career. However, he never stopped playing as an avocation, and became widely known in Texas, no small market. From 1959-61 Walser had a group called The Texas Plainsmen and a weekly radio program. For the next three decades he was always in bands and played a heavy schedule. He wrote popular original songs such as Rolling Stone from Texas, which received a four-star review in 1964 from Billboard magazine.

As time went on, Walser also became widely known for maintaining a catalog of older and sometimes more obscure country music and cowboy songs, keeping alive old 1940s and 1950s tunes by country music pioneers such as Bob Wills and Eddie Arnold, making them his own in a style that blended elements of honky tonk and Western swing. He also was known in country music circles for being an extraordinary yodeling stylist in the tradition of Slim Whitman and Jimmie Rodgers.

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