Harry DePonta “Ponty” Bone was a musician, bandleader, and singer/songwriter known as an authentic Texas accordion King. He is a master of the accordion and has gained an international reputation. Writers worldwide have paid homage to Ponty as one of the real innovators of his chosen instrument. While attending Texas Tech, he fell in with the local musical community due to a chance introduction to then teenager Jimmie Dale Gilmore. In the early 1970s, Ponty started playing with Lubbock’s country music patriarch and visionary Tommy Hancock and his Roadside Playboys at the legendary Cotton Club and with Hancock’s Supernatural Family Band. In 1976, he joined Joe Ely’s band and spent seven years playing, touring, and recording five albums. He has also shared the stage and studio with such varied musicians as The Clash, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Gary P. Nunn, to name a few. In 1982, Ponty formed his band, The Squeezetones. The band toured the US, Canada, Europe, and Mexico over the next two decades and released three albums to critical praise; Easy as Pie, My, My, Look at This, Dig Us on the Road Somewhere. In 2001, Ponty Bone and The Squeezetones released Fantasize, which the Austin American-Statesman picked as one of the top albums 2001. Ponty passed on July 13, 2018, at the age of 78.
Ponty Bone was inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame in 2016.