Terry "Buffalo" Ware obit

Longtime Oklahoma guitarist Terry "Buffalo" Ware dies at 76

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Terry “Buffalo” Ware, a longtime Oklahoma guitarist known for his work with Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmy LaFave and John Fullbright, died Wednesday after a battle with lung cancer, according to several friends. He was 76.

Born in Shattuck in 1950, Ware was raised in the Northwest Oklahoma towns of Gage and Woodward. His “lightning bolt moment” that led to him learning how to play the guitar came from watching The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, a performance he called “earthshaking.”

In high school, his rock and roll band The Debtors (later called The Debtor Group) played teen sock hops, school dances and VFW halls across Western Oklahoma and parts of Texas and Kansas. Ware later played bars and clubs around Norman and Oklahoma City with the band Sailor, while attending the University of Oklahoma in the early 1970s.

After graduation in 1972, he moved to Red River, New Mexico, where he met Soper, Oklahoma native Ray Wylie Hubbard. Along with fellow Okies Dennis Meehan (aka Clovis Roblaine) and Jim Herbst, they formed Ray Wylie Hubbard & The Cowboy Twinkies. That band released a self-titled record on Reprise Records in 1975 and toured throughout the 1970s, including an opening stint for Willie Nelson at The Troubadour in Los Angeles.

“The very first time I heard Terry ‘Buffalo’ Ware play, it occurred to me that Prometheus had actually swiped tone from the gods and given Terry the lowdown, greasy, sacred secret of getting a tone that would make demons drool and shiver and cause teenage angels to wanna smoke cigarettes and do the hully-gully,” Hubbard told Vintage Guitar magazine in 2023. “He’s also got taste, groove and grit.”

Ware returned home to Oklahoma after The Cowboy Twinkies disbanded. In the early 1980s, he formed Norman rock band The Sensational Shoes, which would play Oklahoma City venues like VZDs, Panama Reds and Cafe Paseo.

He went back on the road with Hubbard in 1986, touring the U.S. and Europe for the next decade or so. Ware played on several of Hubbard’s albums throughout the 1990s, and later toured with Jimmy LaFave and Kevin Welch.

Ware released roughly a dozen solo recordings throughout the 2000s. Despite often recording and performing with Americana and folk artists, his solo work leaned more toward surf rock, owing to an early love of Duane Eddy and The Ventures.

He spent the last quarter century of his life as a skilled and versatile freelance guitarist for the likes of the Red Dirt Rangers, Joel Rafael and Susan Herndon, among others. For nearly two decades, Ware was the house bandleader for the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah.

Ware played electric guitar on John Fullbright’s debut studio album, From the Ground Up, which was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Americana Album in 2013. That led to Ware joining Fullbright onstage at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards as well as a performance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” in 2014. The latter was a full-circle moment for Ware, as the show was staged at the same Ed Sullivan Theater where The Beatles inspired him 50 years earlier.

Ware’s musical legacy is captured in the 2024 short documentary Ware the Buffalo Roams and in his autobiography, Man with Guitar and Amp: A Sideman's Memoir, which was released earlier this summer.