Jerl Welch and his twin brother, Berl, are devoted to Charlie McCoy.   That’s how Jerl first heard of SPAH (Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica); he was in the Charlie McCoy Fan Club and Charlie is a big supporter of SPAH.
 
To find out more about SPAH, in 1991 Jerl Welch packed his bags and headed to Detroit to see what a harmonica convention was all about.  That year the organization hosted an international competition with Howard Levy as one of the judges (Howard also gave seminars that year), and Jerl was blown away. He had never seen so many harmonica players under one roof.  All sharing What they knew, holding workshops, giving performances, jamming with each other in the halls of the hotel, laughing, talking.  Jerl came back to Texas a changed person, and Texas was soon to change as well.

Back in Dallas, Jerl could never get the convention off of his mind and started thinking about starting a club.  He put an add in the newspaper that simply said, "Harmonica player - are one, know one - call 214-327-5008".  Around 20 folks responded, and he wrote down their names and  numbers to start a database.  Next, Jerl then went to music stores to gather names from other musicians and kept coming up the same ones: Tom Ellis and Paul Harrington.

Tom, Paul, and Jerl eventually met at a local restaurant and after much talk, the first Texas harp club was conceived.  They decided to call it HOOT, for Harmonica Organization Of Texas.  Tom Ellis found a meeting place and made some press announcements, and Paul made contact with other musicians.

Finally the date was set, and the first HOOT meeting was held at the Rum Boogie Café in Dallas Texas, on January 25th, 1994.   Around twenty five folks showed up.  Among those (that are still members today) were Al Scifres, Frank and John Halovanic, Don Sanders, Steve Pippins, Hash Brown, Hank Black, and Ron Hampton.  By our third meeting we had grown to 60 members and had honorary members Sam Myers and Gary Primich on board.

In St. Louis at SPAH in 1996, Jerl Welch met Lonnie Boulware from Amarillo, Texas and these two Texans had a lot in common.  They both loved the harp. Whenever Lonnie was in Dallas he’d come to a HOOT meeting.  By 1997 the Amarillo chapter was born and by January 2001 they had over 70 members.

Tom Stevens from the Austin area followed next.  Tom came to our of our Dallas meetings in August of 2000, and as of April 2001 has a booming new club in the Austin area with over 30 members and growing.

Gary Johnson found out about us from our web-site and we talked for awhile about starting a club  in Houston .He went right  to work and November 15, 2001 the Houston Hoot Chapter was off and running. Houston is such a large area, we expect this chapter to be the largest in no time.

We look forward to other Texas HOOT clubs starting, and anyone that’s interested can call Jerl Welch for more information. 

We are an established club , going on our 7^th year with a membership of 200+. We have a very strong Diatonic enrollment as well as the Chromatic players. There are the basic beginners as well as the working professionals.

We open the meeting with a short business mtg. , then go into open mic period . This is for the ones who want to get up in front of the group and perform. They either play solo or by track or with the help of our staff guitar players. Next we go into our technical session where we teach about some area of the harmonica, theory, tuning repair, positions, whatever, we try to cover what is needed. After that we go into an open social Jam and close the meeting.

If this something you might be interested in, drop in for a visit, and I bet you will be hooked.

Keep on Harping