San Antonio This Saturday/A Tribute to the Royal Jesters

Let the Music Speak is taking me to San Antonio this Saturday from 10:00 until 5:00 for the SA Record Convention at the Schertz Civic Center. So, it’s time for another tribute to key figures in San Antonio’s music history, the Royal Jesters, who along with Ruben Ramos and Sunny and the Sunliners effectively created Chicano r&b in the late Fifties and Sixties. A little tangent: I was introduced to the Jesters’ music because of lunch: at Gillette Junior High in Kingsville you could choose to eat in the cafeteria, but if you wanted something else you could walk across the street to Ruben’s Dairy Grill, an appealing burger place that consisted of an enclosed kitchen surrounded by a covered concrete slab with tables. Besides burgers Ruben’s offered a very loud jukebox, which kept the slab shaking most of the time during the lunch hour. The music menu consisted of mostly recent hits, but almost every day I would hear two songs that I hadn’t experienced before: James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please” and “Wisdom of a Fool” by the Royal Jesters. Both songs were first recorded in 1956, but while Brown’s record was the original, “Wisdom of a Fool” was written for doo wop stars the Five Keys and became one of their Fifties hits. (If you’re keeping score, the song was later covered by artists including Ronnie Carroll, Bobby Vee, and B.J. Thomas.) The great Royal Jesters version was actually a recent release when I first heard it, one of a series of regional successes by a band that formed after meeting at Lanier High School on the West Side. There were changes in the lineup over the years, but the core was Henry Hernandez, Mike Pedraza, Oscar Lawson, and Louis Escalante.  (Pictured are Louis, Oscar, and Henry.) Part of the reason that they developed a distinctive vocal sound had to do with their local popularity right out of school: they loved rhythm and blues, but they regularly played everything from nightclub shows to church events and mariachi parties, so they learned (and synthesized) everything. From the start they regularly sang in English and Spanish, but, like Ruben Ramos and Sunny Ozuna, they shifted primarily to Spanish during the surge of Tejano music in the Seventies.