The Hiltons buy an ornament everywhere they go. It is a family tradition: one per vacation, one per occasion. Maryanne Hilton wanted the one from Gruene Hall.
Her mother set a condition.
"I asked my Mom if I could get an ornament," Maryanne said, "but she said I couldn't get one until I sang there."
Gruene Hall, in New Braunfels, calls itself the oldest continually operating dance hall in Texas. It was not an obvious promise to keep. Then, last summer, the family flew down for the day, which is a thing this family can do: her father is a pilot, and they keep their own plane.
Driving would have taken about four hours, the family says. Flying took about one.
A band called The Red Iron Push was playing. She talked to them on their break, they asked what songs she knew, and the lead singer asked whether she wanted to sing one on that stage.
She said, "Oh yeah, I would."
She sang "Watermelon Moonshine." Afterward she went to the gift shop and bought the ornament.
The stranger who walked up afterward
The song led somewhere else, too. A woman came over to talk to her family after the set. It was the mother of Lucas Rehl, a drummer from Prosper, and both families lived in North Texas.
Dinner followed, then a search for a bass player. When nobody turned up, Maryanne thought of Jaxton Weatherly of Frisco, whom she had met years earlier in a singing program. He was a drummer, but his father played bass. He learned.
They started playing together early this year. On Sept. 13, the three of them, now 13, 13 and 14, won the youth division of North Texas Got Talent, the competition run by North Texas Performing Arts. Gregory McKnight, the organization's studios managing director, confirmed the results by email: first place out of 10 youth finalists, chosen from 48 youth auditions and 72 auditions overall. Alexia Orta was second in the division and Reagan Hammond third.
They played "Sweet Child O' Mine" at the finals, at The Winston School in Dallas.
"Erupting joy and an answered prayer," Maryanne said of the moment their name was read. "There is so much talent in North Texas. We sing with a lot of the kids that we competed with, so we know how good they are. And we performed the song better than we ever had."
McKnight, for his part, said the band "had a strong stage presence and seemed to have a great support system behind them."
The name is a map of the band
Airbourne Tex takes its name from the airstrip and the cockpit. Lucas is working toward a pilot's license, Maryanne grew up flying with her family, and the band wanted to be called Airborne Tex, spelled the usual way. That name was taken, so the band became Airbourne Tex.
Her family reads the three syllables as a roster: AIR for Lucas, BOURNE for Jaxton, TEX for Maryanne, who was born in Texas and raised in the air.
