The Billy Spears Band
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Billy
Spears died Saturday, July 6, 2013, surrounded by his loving
family.
Rest in peace, Billy, but make
heaven dance.
Bob Case died December 26, 2024, of
pancreatic cancer. Rest in peace, Bob.
Jimmy Ray Law died May 22, 2025, of liver cancer. Go
in peace, Jim.
Billy was inducted into the Kansas Music Hall of Fame
on March 7, 2009, at Liberty Hall in Lawrence.
All the people you see in this picture played in that
ceremony.
Carol Spears was inducted into the
Kansas Music Hall of Fame in 2024.
*** Billy's 81st
Birthday Party ***
.A Billy Spears Band promotional 8x10 from 1975,
taken in Denver or Boulder,
after Michael Roark was replaced by Bud
Pettit after a serious bus accident.
Steve Dahl, who had booked the Penetrations, was with Stone
County, our booking agency, at the time.
From left: Bob Case, Billy Spears, Bud Pettit, Andy
Curry, Jimmy Ray Law.
Carol Spears is seated on my bass.
The
Billy Spears Band was a high-energy dance band led
by, of course, Billy Spears.
We played bluegrass, both pure and adulterated;
Western swing;
straight country;
hippie country;
and, a little bit of blues and rock and roll.
In the years from 1975 to 1978, we traveled from the State
of Washington to the State of Kentucky, from Texas to
Michigan.
In
the beginning.
Billy Spears, through 1974.
Billy Spears, a member of a musical family from
Hartshorne, Oklahoma, was taught to fiddle, in the bluesy
style native to Oklahoma and Texas,
by his Uncle
Earl Spears.
In addition to being a mighty
fiddler, Billy sang and played a Fender electric mandolin ("Mandocaster"),
in
a jazzy style.
The use of electric mandolin
was popularized by Tiny
Moore as a member of the Bob Wills and His Texas
Playboys.
It is pretty natural for a
fiddler to play mandolin as well, as the tuning is the same
for both instruments.
Billy began playing
professionally in the early 1950s.
He met his
future and only wife, Doris, at a gig in Western Canada.
They settled
in Lawrence, Kansas and raised four daughters: Carol,
Lawna, Sally, and Lisa.
Billy's
day job was Food-Service Supervisor at the Kansas University
Student Union, but he played in local bands throughout the
1960s,
notably the Kaw
Valley Stump Jumpers and Country Strings and Brass.
In the early 1970s, Billy
formed the Billy Spears Band. In addition to Billy, some of the people
who were in the band during those years were:
- Mike Roark, drums - he'd grown up in
Lawrence, playing in rock bands in high school
- Vaclav "Bill" Berosini, bass - from a
famous circus family, the "Flying Berosinis"
- Janet Jameson, vocals and second fiddle -
from the KC area, formerly of Cole Tuckey, with
a rock
background
- Bob
Case, pedal steel guitar, banjo, and
electric guitar - a Stanford graduate
- Gordon Cleveland, acoustic guitar and
vocals - an aficionado of early "roots" country
music
- Carol Spears, Billy's oldest daughter
- Pat Cleveland, vocals - Gordon's wife
- Jim
Stringer - lead guitar
It was a very
eclectic bunch, both personally and musically. I
never got to hear this band in person before they eventually
broke up in 1974.
Click here
to listen to some recordings by this band and read more
information.
On January 6, 1975, his daughter
Sally, pictured here, was murdered by her boyfriend.
Perhaps
feeling that life was short and that a person must pursue his
passion,
Billy quit his job with the KU
Student Union and decided to put everything into his music
career.
The band reforms.
Through
1974 and into the beginning of 1975 I was working at the
Village Inn Pancake House on Iowa Street in Lawrence.
Management
sent me to the home office in Fort Collins to learn how to
be a Village Inn kitchen manager.
While I was there I
got down to Denver to see Bobby "Blue" Bland one evening,
and Fats Domino another.
But I digress.
Bob Case and Mike Roark,
from the earlier Spears Band, were playing for Dwane
Richardson (the Richmen Express),
and they called me to
join them as bassist and second vocalist.
I remember playing quite a bit at the Golden Horseshoe in
Topeka.
The Horseshoe had "exotic dancers" in one room and live
music in another. The pay was poor, but it was good
practice.
I guess I proved my worth, as Bob and Mike asked me to
join the next incarnation of the Spears band with them, and
I said yes.
The band was Billy, Bob,
Mike, myself, a singer/guitar player named Jimmy Ray Law,
and some of the time, Carol Spears, singing and playing second
fiddle.
In these
earliest days, we practiced in a house where Bob and Dwight
lived, south of Lawrence in the Wakarusa valley.
Here's a picture of an early band practice in
that house:
From
left: Mike Roark, Andy Curry, Billy Spears, Jim Ray Law,
and Bob Case.
The guy in the foreground, under the cymbal, is Ned Nelson, Mike's
housemate. The dog is Rush, the Spearses' runt boxer.
The other person involved in the
band - and he was just as important as any of the
rest of us, if not more so - was Dwight Haldeman,
the band's manager. Dwight kept us as
organized as possible, ran sound and lights, talked
to agents and club owners, took care of the
equipment, wrote the checks... you get the
idea. We would never have gotten off the
ground without Dwight.
The picture of
Dwight in the tux was taken at his wedding in Summer
2006! He looks a lot more respectable now (he
became a financial advisor for Edward Jones)
than he did at the
Oklahoma border in 1977. But then, so do I.
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Copyright
2006, 2013 by Andy Curry
