After returning to my hotel room at the end of a day walking and photographing the streets of Paris, I opened my cell phone and read the Facebook post of Blue Door owner Greg Johnson.
“Terry Buffalo Ware, the great Okie guitarist and among the best friends I’ve ever had, has left us,” Johnson wrote.
Ware, 76, died Aug. 5 after a year-long bout with cancer. His death ended a 60-year career as a versatile guitarist spanning progressive country, rock and roll, red dirt Americana and blues.
He had performed as lead guitarist for Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmy LaFave and John Fullbright, among others. “Buff” was the often-requested sideman for hundreds of touring musicians, and he led the local bands The Shambles and The Sunday Flyers.
Terry was a central figure in multiple music genres in Oklahoma and one of Norman’s most important residents. He was a friend to many — including me.
“The reason this is so hard, is that Terry wasn’t always standing in the center of the frame. He was the thing that held the frame together. This is like some connective tissue in our music community has broken,” said Shari Jackson, executive director of The Depot’s Summer Breeze Concert Series and the Norman Music Festival, which hosted many of Terry’s local performances. “I think everyone who knew him felt like they were one of his best friends. You always felt like the special one in the room. I don’t know how he did that.”
A week before, when I was about to pack my bags for my trip to France, a friend had given me a heads up. Terry was not doing well. He had entered hospice. It would only be a matter of days.
The last thing I crammed into my bag was Man with Guitar and Amp, the autobiography Ware had recently published, which I’d begun reading shortly after his book signing event at The Depot on June 18. I had read up to the point in the book where Ware wrote about a whirlwind trip to Paris for a one-night performance with folk singer Joel Rafael on a riverboat docked on the Seine.
Reading Greg Johnson’s Facebook post nights later landed like a gut punch. It is one thing to know a friend is gravely ill, likely terminal. It is something else when finality becomes reality.
A couple of hours later, my cell phone rang. It was 2 a.m. Paris time. I knew what it was about. Bob Thompson, who owns and manages Norman’s Midway Deli — the place where I first met Terry and his guitar playing songs a decade ago — was calling.
“I don’t know if you have heard, but Terry has passed,” he said, the somber tone of his voice from 5,000 miles away as clear as if he were sitting next to me.
My conversation with Bob was like others I’ve had in the days since. The words to express the loss did not seem to flow.
How do we sum up the loss of one of Oklahoma’s greatest musicians? For those who knew Terry, words like kind, humble and generous come to mind. And funny. And helpful. But all that seems inadequate in describing him.
Maybe it’s just easier to say we have lost one of the good guys — a special man with a guitar and an amp.
A flood of tributes to Ware on social media
As the news of Terry’s passing spread on social media, tributes arrived from all reaches.
Fellow Norman music legend Mike Hosty posted about teaching guitar lessons at the same studio as his friend, revealing how Terry would keep a three-ring binder with details of all his students — an example of his attention to detail and interest in the kids who wanted to be musicians.
“In his book he says that he is pretty lucky. We are all the lucky ones to have had him,” Hosty wrote.
Michigan folk singer Chris Buhalis had visited Terry four weeks ago — before this year’s Woody Guthrie Folk Festival where the two had performed together many times — to check on his ailing friend of 30 years.
“We had ice cream and talked like old times. When I was getting ready to leave, Buff said, ‘Want to play a song?’ We played a couple. (…) He was the best of us,” Buhalis wrote.
Musician Michael Bendure’s bands — The Whisky Gingers and Heartbreak Rodeo — made albums produced by Terry. He said Terry made musical arrangements and offered ideas they hadn’t considered. Through his network of musician friends, Terry also brought in other instrumentalists to make their recordings better.
“Although he was clearly the best musician in the room or on the stage, he always made you feel like you were doing him the favor or giving him the opportunity by asking him to play with you. He was a master collaborator, and he loved inviting others to take part in his musical projects,” Bendure wrote on Facebook.
Many Oklahomans became acquainted with Terry as the house band leader and guitarist who accompanied most of the performers at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah.
“Without Buffalo there would be no Woodyfest. Those are not just words of hyperbole for this time of heartbreak, they are a statement of fact,” festival organizers posted in a statement this week.
Terry Ware’s love of creating music
In his book Man With Guitar and Amp, Terry Ware wrote about his love for creating music.
“I can honestly say that when a piece of music comes together, it is as gratifying as anything is for me. Going through the process of writing and recording something that started as a little lick, chord progression, or melody idea and having that turn into completed composition and recording is something you can’t put a price on,” he said.
Ware’s 70th birthday, celebrated in 2020 — a week before COVID-19 shut the world down — quickly became evidence of his place in Oklahoma’s musical world.
More than 250 fans showed up for his birthday jam at a downtown Norman event location. It was a “Who’s Who” of Oklahoma (and beyond) singers and songwriters, such as The Red Dirt Rangers, Mary Reynolds, Louise Goldberg, Lacy Saunders, Monica Taylor, Travis Fite, Jared Deck, Joe Baxter and Felix “Flea” Linden. Nancy Apple came from Memphis. Dave Gant from Nashville. Many others made the trek.
The show culminated in a mass jam of more than 30 guitar players banging out the Link Wray instrumental track Rumble. Wray was one of Terry’s guitar heroes and Rumble his favorite song.
“Seeing the audience reaction when we hit the opening chords was great. There were wide-eyes and mouths agape in astonishment of the air-moving volume washing over them,” Terry would later write in his autobiography.
In the months of the COVID-19 lockdown that followed, Terry went to work writing lyrics and music in his home studio fashioned from his enclosed single car garage and decorated in Rat Fink cartoon memorabilia. He dubbed the creative space the “Buffarama.”
“It’s my happy place as they say, and there’s nothing that I enjoy more than being alone in Buffarama composing and recording,” he wrote.
In that space Terry wrote instrumental guitar songs, musical stories, rock and roll, and surf music. One friend told him that between his Rat Fink obsession and his authorship of surf music, he was “just an Okie trapped in a California body.”
Many songs were written in collaboration with Terry’s close friend, singer-songwriter Gregg Standridge, who also played in The Shambles. Their work culminated in an album, Everybody’s Got One.
“He mentored so many of us. He taught us what true musical professionalism looked like — not through lectures, but through the way he played, treated people and carried himself,” Standridge said of Ware. “We lost a magnificent human being. But on the other side, it just welcomed one of the finest musicians this planet has ever known.”
Of course for hundreds (or more) singers, songwriters and guitar players with whom Ware has performed as a sideman, mentor or band leader, the enormity of his passing is beyond measure in words. Maybe it will take lyrics and music to do that.
“Terry’s legacy will be carried on in many of our hearts and actions as we are inspired to be kind, to do what we love, to love music, and to uplift the next generation,” said Danielle Tipton, a Norman musician and friend of Ware’s.
His life story in autobiography
For Terry, it was all about music. Writing it. Performing it. And that led to a story-filled life.
Many of those stories recorded by Ware in a journal are recounted in detail in his book. Stories like Terry and The Cowboy Twinkies band leader Ray Wylie Hubbard playing Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother with Willie Nelson at Harrah’s casino in Lake Tahoe in 1978.
Terry’s parents were in the audience, having stopped there on their way to visit relatives in Oregon. For the last number, Nelson invited John Denver, who was also appearing at the casino, to come on stage and join in the finale Will the Circle Be Unbroken. As the curtain dropped, Nelson lit up a joint and handed it to Terry, who took a hit and handed it to Denver.
Later, he found his parents at their table and told them, “You’ll never guess what I just did.”
Some of his stories are like scenes from the Blues Brothers movie. When Terry was in a band performing at a club in Nacogdoches, Texas, a beer-throwing melee broke out in the audience. Terry and the band kept playing, as mugs and pitchers were being thrown about until the chaos spilled onto the stage and he and bandmates grabbed mic stands to defend themselves. Soon, police arrived and hauled off the audience in hand cuffs, leaving behind an empty club strewn with beer, blood, broken glass and hair.
Not long after that, their drummer was doused with beer when a fight broke out at a bar in Golden, New Mexico, while the band was playing. A patron blamed it on Terry’s guitar riffs delivered during a Jimi Hendrix song that she said were “too heavy, man.”
“We got the van loaded and hit the road, not bothering to even try to get paid. There was no way we were going to attempt wading through the pandemonium that was still unfolding,” Terry wrote.
His touring life took him from small to big. From near to far. From the Scipio Supper Club in Garnett, Kansas, to the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles for the Grammys. Long nights in a minivan on lonesome highways. Some trashy small town motels. Some stays in Malibu mansions overlooking the Pacific. Appearance on BBC television in the UK. Performance on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion.
All along the way he encountered Okie-connected people in the music business — tour managers, guitar pickers, singer-songwriters.
Terry concluded his active touring life in 2016 as the lead guitarist for John Fullbright’s band, highlighted by an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in 2014. He told how that appearance on the Ed Sullivan stage marked a full-circle moment, since his childhood inspiration for music involved watching the television broadcast of The Beatles playing on the same stage in 1964.
The Fullbright-Ware team had formed in a show at the Blue Door when Greg Johnson asked Terry to accompany Fullbright on stage. Terry said they immediately found “that musician ESP between us that can’t be taught or rehearsed.” It began a seven-year connection that became as familial as it was professional. Sometimes fans at the merch table would ask him if he was Fullbright’s dad. Terry played on From the Ground Up, Fullbright’s Grammy-nominated album.
Norman’s homage to ‘Buff’
Last summer Terry was diagnosed with lung cancer. Close friends respected his wishes not to publicize it, but word soon spread.
Coincidentally, The Depot art gallery in Norman was showcasing the work of Terry’s long-time friend and visual artist Steve Crossett, who had created all of Ware’s album covers, many of which were in the show. (Crossett had been the drummer in one of Terry’s bands while studying at OU in the 1970s.)
Terry had been scheduled to perform as part of 2nd Friday Art Walk opening of the exhibit, but he had begun chemotherapy and was unable to play.
Jackson, The Depot’s executive director, came up with the idea of paying tribute to Terry with an outdoor concert at the gallery. She got Terry and his wife Jeannie’s blessing and scrambled to make it happen.
“We were mindful that this show we were putting together to celebrate Terry might be a last hurrah. But, we didn’t want that to be the case,” Jackson said. “Within 24 hours I was talking to John Fullbright and the Red Dirt Rangers, Kyle Reid, the Shambles and Peggy Johnson. Everybody wanted to show up. There wasn’t a human that didn’t immediately, without question say, ‘Yes.’ Nobody mentioned money. Nobody mentioned anything. Everybody came.”
Norman closed off the downtown street outside the train station. A stage was set up, and with little notice, several hundred people arrived to hear the impromptu concert put on by Terry’s friends, a show they called “Buffapalooza.” It was live streamed so that Terry could watch it from his home.
“We didn’t talk about him being sick. We just had the musicians who were inspired by him play their music,” Jackson said. “There’s not a human I know in most genres of music around that isn’t so sad right now. He just had his fingers in and his touch and imprint on so many people and so many projects. I know he spent a lot of years traveling, but in the last decade and a half just being here mostly in Norman with us. He was in everything. Woodyfest, (Norman Music Festival), Summer Breeze and the Blue Door. Playing all the time.”
Ware’s iconic role in the Oklahoma music scene
In early July, I texted Terry’s boyhood friend and fellow musician T.Z. Wright after seeing Terry’s name on this year’s Woody Guthrie Folk Festival line up. Until he became ill, Terry had led the WoodyFest house band since 2003, and he had performed at the festival since it began in 1998. I was skeptical he would make the trip to Okemah. When I had last seen Terry in June, he did not look well.
T.Z. had just returned from Terry’s house. He said Terry had decided not to attend WoodyFest. The summer heat would be rough on him, and he didn’t want to put anyone out in case he had a medical complication.
And then Wright texted this: “I had a good jam session with him this afternoon. Knowing how rough he felt, I was amazed at his playing!”
I remembered how amazed I was when I first saw Ware picking his guitar (with his bottle of Topo Chico an arm’s length away) in a jam session with Wright and Standridge at the Midway Deli in Norman almost a decade before. The trio at the Midway became a monthly staple for me.
Terry led each song swap session, introducing the featured guest — oftentimes singer/songwriter friends he had played with over the years, such as RT Valine, Peggy Johnson or Susan Herndon. Because of him, I learned much about music and became acquainted with many creative souls.
Starting with a pre-show meal and visit with Terry and his wife, Jeannie, and friends, the 90 minutes of song swapping became a cathartic antidote to the day-to-day stresses of life. Hearing Terry play was relaxing. It made us feel good about people.
A large print of my photograph of Terry made at one of those sessions hanged on my living room wall for the last several years. It now hangs at the Midway Deli in the room where musicians play.
Every show ended with him leading the group and the audience in a sing along to the Lead Belly tune, Relax your mind.
“Relax your mind, relax your mind
Oh, make you feel so fine sometime.
Sometime, you got to relax your mind.”
If Terry left a message for us, it was that.
Watch the Ware the Buffalo Roams documentary
