Artists: Biography Los Lonely Boys  

Los Lonely Boys are the three Garza brothers: Henry on guitar, Jojo on bass and Ringo on drums. This trio of brothers, aged 21-25, from a tiny town in West Texas, has been making music together since they were small children. They write, sing and

play music drawn from diverse sources -- Tex-Mex, country, blues and rock pioneers like Ritchie Valens, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and such pop music giants as The Beatles.

Though Henry, the oldest of the brothers, has been hailed as the inheritor of the great Texas guitar tradition epitomized by Freddie King, Johnny Winter and the Vaughan Brothers, he is also a well-known young player in the burgeoning Latino, rock-guitar style pioneered by Carlos Santana.

"Our dad had five brothers and a sister, and they had a great conjunto band in the '70s and '80s," Henry says. "They did a mixture of stuff that nobody was playing back then, a mixture of conjunto with country music and Spanglish. They were really popular in South and West Texas. ... They basically just fell apart after the tragedy of one of the brothers dying, the drummer."

Henry's middle brother Joey, aka Jojo, also began playing guitar before switching to piano and then, finally, bass. The family band became complete when younger brother Ringo picked up the drums. After the breakup of their father's band, the boys began backing him at his solo shows. The band played their first show with their father while still pre-teens. The music they made with their father was a mixture of classic rock 'n' roll, country and Tex-Mex. Recognizing that his sons possessed prodigious talent, Garza relocated the group to Nashville. Although Los Lonely Boys flew under the radar of the record industry along Music Row, their time in Music City did benefit the three brothers greatly.

"We were in Nashville back and forth through the 1990s," Henry explains. "When we first went to Nashville, we were still playing with my dad, but we started growing as individuals and writing for ourselves, and I guess we just kind of outgrew him in a sense. We needed to get away from dad, not in a bad way, but we started working on our own, and all of a sudden we were playing our first gig in Atlanta, without him. Things weren't going so well in Nashville, so we came back to Texas and started doing our thing here."

Solidified as a trio, the band developed a reputation as one of the most exciting live acts on the extremely competitive Texas and Southeast circuit, but the years of studying the classics allowed Los Lonely Boys to develop their superior vocal and songwriting skills as well. Willie Nelson, who has called Los Lonely Boys his favorite band, invited them to record at his own Pedernales studio and to perform at Farm Aid. They released their self-titled debut album in 2003.