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"western swing" Definitions
  1. swing music played typically on country-music instruments (such as guitar, fiddle, or steel guitar)
"western swing" Synonyms
country music country country and western country-and-western country-western music C & W hillbilly music old-time country rock

551 Sentences With "western swing"

How to use western swing in a sentence? Find typical usage patterns (collocations)/phrases/context for "western swing" and check conjugation/comparative form for "western swing". Mastering all the usages of "western swing" from sentence examples published by news publications.

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Lightning : Start a three-game western swing Wednesday night at San Jose.
Lightning: Start a three-game western swing Wednesday night at San Jose.
The Pacers earned their third victory in four games on a western swing.
The Bulls, who lost their second straight, were opening a three-game Western swing.
He'll hold a rally in Phoenix, the first in a three-state western swing.
They're now 1-503 on a five-game Western swing that continues Wednesday at Phoenix.
Trump begins his western swing this week in New Mexico, a state that underscores his challenge.
Pittsburgh completed a 1-2 Western swing, having already lost at Anaheim and won at Los Angeles.
OLD WESTBURY "Picnic Pops Concert: A Kornucopia," traditional New Orleans jazz, western swing, and American roots music.
The Rays finished a six-game western swing to Seattle and San Diego with a 5-23 record.
The Raptors, who won all four games on a Western swing, opened sluggishly on their return home Saturday.
Their tweaks to the blues ultimately gave rise to bluegrass and western swing, which became country-and-western.
Wills was a fiddler, and in the nineteen-thirties and forties his group pioneered a style known as Western swing.
His Western swing begins with a pair of events with progressive favorite David Garcia, who is challenging Arizona Republican Gov.
Backup Jerian Grant had a team-high 222 points for the Bulls, who went winless on a four-game Western swing.
Drawing from a fine recent album, "Arclight," the group nodded to Western swing and Gypsy jazz without yielding to musty evocation.
After Tuesday's 110-94 loss to the similarly moribund Nuggets, Carmelo Anthony was asked about Jackson's presence on this western swing.
But its beat and its sensibility were just as deeply rooted in the predominantly white traditions of country blues and western swing.
Kevin Love had a game-high 31 points and 18 rebounds for the Cavaliers, who were opening a three-game Western swing.
The back-to-back homers were the fifth of the season for the Royals and second of their five-game Western swing.
The Brewers landed in San Francisco on Sunday night having won two of three in Colorado to open a nine-game Western swing.
"I'm working for you now -- I'm not working for Trump," he told supporters at a rally in this key Western swing state Monday.
And when the N.H.R.A. season has a western swing later this summer, he plans to spend time in California, cheering his wife on.
Hernandez collected three hits, while Scott Kingery and J.T, Realmuto had two apiece for the Phillies, who completed a 2-5 Western swing.
But Mormons are considerably more conflicted about his mad-as-hell message — and their ambivalence could cost the candidate in Western swing states.
Mike Moustakas doubled for the Royals, who lost their fifth straight, including four in a row to start a seven-game Western swing.
Legions of country, Western swing, and blues players had been searching for a dirtier sound, a sound that reflected the grittiness of their music.
Tatum finished with a game-high 2128 points, Brown 763 and Walker 276 for the Celtics, who were opening a five-game Western swing.
Tatum finished with a game-high 24 points, Brown 22 and Walker 20 for the Celtics, who were opening a five-game Western swing.
Jaylen Brown added 23 points, Al Horford 14 and Jayson Tatum 12 for Boston, which improved to 2-0 on its four-game Western swing.
Aside from a 3-0 win at Los Angeles to start their Western swing, their play has been haphazard and lacking urgency in recent weeks.
The Bakersfield sound clung tenaciously to country's most twangy, sinewy elements — bluegrass, Western swing, honky-tonk, rockabilly — to accompany lean, down-to-earth, working-class storytelling.
The defeat was the eighth in a row (0-7-28) for the Red Wings, who fell to 255-213-211 on their five-game Western swing.
Bannon is on a western swing this week that ends at the California GOP convention in Anaheim where he will have ample time to meet with potential candidates.
Beal shot 10 for 24 from the field and 7 for 9 on 3-pointers for the Wizards, who are 1-1 on a four-game Western swing.
He was a wildly versatile singer, songwriter and performer, with an affinity for a variety of styles — outlaw country, ballads, the Bakersfield sound, Western swing, jazz and more.
Warren finished with a team-high 113 points as the Pacers overcame a slow start to win for the third time in four games on a western swing.
McLaughlin complemented Wiggins with 19 points off the bench for the Timberwolves, who fell to 0-3 on a four-game Western swing that ends Thursday at Sacramento.
Beal shot 10 for 133 from the field and 7 for 9 on 3-pointers for the Wizards, who are 210-260 on a four-game Western swing.
White and Jake Marisnick had two hits apiece for the Astros, who won for the sixth time in their last seven games while completing a 6-2 Western swing.
I appreciated Sanneh's exploration of the roots of Strait's style of country music, such as the influence of Bob Wills, who was known as the king of Western swing.
Wall had eight assists to complement his team-high 26 points for the Wizards, who lost for the second time in three games on their five-game Western swing.
Trump's western swing began at a San Francisco lunch expected to net $3 million for Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee for the Republican National Committee and his campaign.
Trump, who is on a Western swing for his re-election campaign, told reporters on Tuesday that he had his suspicions as to who "Anonymous" is, but would not elaborate.
Both are from Texas, and both began their careers as keepers of old-school flames: The Dixie Chicks are bluegrass-fluent, and Ms. Musgraves performed Western swing music as a teenager.
His open-door vision of country, which embraces jazzy harmonies; western swing; gospel piano; pop songs; outlaw irreverence; rock drive; and a kindly, avuncular wisdom, is the city's presiding musical spirit.
Ray Benson: The co-founder of the Grammy-winning western swing band Asleep at the Wheel announced on his Facebook page on March 31 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
He'd planned to travel to Fort Worth, Texas, next month to perform with Lonnie Spiker at the Academy of Western Artists Awards, where the pair are nominated for best western swing album.
Morant hit 8 of 14 field-goal attempts and 3 of 5 3-point attempts for Memphis, which had opened a three-game Western swing with a loss at Utah on Saturday.
Bradley Beal had 17 points to lead Washington, which was playing for the second time on a five-game Western swing and lost for just the third time in its past nine games.
With arrangements by Matt Rollings, who produced "Summertime" with Buddy Cannon, the style is upmarket western swing, featuring smooth work by aces like David Piltch on upright bass and Paul Franklin on pedal steel.
Bradley Beal had 246 points to lead the Wizards, who were playing for the second time on a five-game Western swing and lost for just the third time in their past nine games.
Dexter Fowler added a single, a triple and a home run for the Cardinals, who have won three in a row after opening a nine-game Western swing with three losses in four games.
Like all such compositions, it's the bastard child of country and R&B, this one with a melody adapted from "Ida Red," a 1938 Western swing song from Bob Will and His Texas Playboys.
Part of the Trump campaign's strategy is to dispatch the president to second-tier states that could reasonably be within his reach come November, hence his whirlwind western swing through Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.
G Joe Young recorded his third straight double-figure scoring night with 16 as Indiana lost for the second time in three outings on its four-game Western swing that ends Saturday night in Sacramento.
About two years earlier, Western swing lord Junior Barnard designed a rudimentary humbucker pickup for his guitar, combining two pickups to buck the unpleasant hum of a lone single-coil and produce a fuller tone.
Towns played much of that game in foul trouble, and the Timberwolves were at a huge scheduling disadvantage, making the final stop on an eight-day, four-game Western swing in which they never won.
Kent Bazemore (18 points), Alex Len (14), DeAndre' Bembry (13 points), Vince Carter (11) and Jeremy Lin (10) also scored in double figures for Atlanta, which fell to 0-2 on a four-game Western swing.
Song after song took the audience on a grand tour around country's mammoth tent of trends, eras and subgenres, through cowboy music, western swing, bluegrass, honkytonk, the Nashville Sound, the Bakersfield Sound, Outlaw country and beyond.
Marten Linssen and Jaylen Sims had 12 points apiece to pace North Carolina-Wilmington (23-5), which completed a winless two-game Western swing that began with an 80-59 loss at Boise State on Friday.
Wednesday night's campaign event kicked off a three-day, three-rally Western swing for Trump that starts in Arizona, a critical swing state Trump won four years ago that Democrats hope to win back in November.
Reserves Justin Holiday (15) and Ron Baker (career-high 13) were the leading scorers for the Knicks (14-12), who fell to 2-33 on a five-game Western swing that began with a pair of wins.
Reserves Justin Holiday (15) and Ron Baker (career-high 13) were the leading scorers for the Knicks (343-12), who fell to 2-2 on a five-game Western swing that began with a pair of wins.
Governing and campaigning Trump is expected to use Las Vegas -- where he owns a hotel -- as a base for his western swing, meaning the large presidential footprint will loom over the city as Democrats press for votes.
Cash's band was itself something of an anomaly in the country scene, playing a rockabilly-influenced variation on country music that wasn't quite the popular Western swing of the 1940s or the honky-tonk of the early '50s.
He drew from the American folk tradition but also from the Gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt, the Western swing of Bob Wills, the harmony vocals of the Andrews Sisters, the raucous humor of Fats Waller and numerous other sources.
Cedi Osman (15 points), Larry Nance Jr. (13), David Nwaba (13), Tristan Thompson (12), Ante Zizic (12) and Jordan Clarkson (10) also scored in double figures for the Cavaliers, who were completing an eight-day, five-game Western swing.
Based on "Ida Red," a 1938 Western Swing hit for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the new title and beefed-up rhythm section were the ideas of producer and co-owner of the Chess Records label, Leonard Chess.
Kinsler, who recorded his 20th multiple-hit game of the season, also stole two bases for Detroit, which lost for just the third time in 12 games while falling to 1-1 at the start of a six-game Western swing.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - President Donald Trump began a four-day Western swing on Tuesday with a fundraiser in Los Angeles, the first stop on a trip aimed at making himself a distraction as Democratic presidential candidates focus on the Nevada caucuses.
Right-handers Tyler Duffey, Matt Belisle and Brandon Kintzler protected a one-run lead with 3 2/3 innings of hitless relief as the American League Central-leading Twins improved to 13-3 on their 10-game Western swing that ends Sunday.
Aside from the attention-grabbing spectacle of long lines, ample media coverage and cars festooned with Trump-Pence signs driving by candidates' events, Mr. Trump's travels through four states on his Western swing have created a logistical nightmare for some Democratic candidates.
Charlotte's Dwayne Bacon and Golden State's Eric Paschall shared game-high scoring honors with 229 points as the Hornets capped a 244.2-242.4 Western swing by taking advantage of a Warriors team missing injured stars Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, D'Angelo Russell and Draymond Green.
Ms. Shepard, who grew up on the country blues of Jimmie Rodgers and the western swing of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, brought a freewheeling, cheeky style to the eternal themes of heartache, cheating and marital discord, planting the flag for independent women.
Always a careful student, Mr. Haggard took an opportunity to pay tribute to one of country music's foundational figures, Bob Wills, who was the titan of Western swing, the roadhouse country-jazz of the 1930s and '40s that was a forefather of country music.
Duvall, Jose Peraza, Scooter Gennett and Alex Blandino had two hits apiece as the Reds, who began a seven-game Western swing with a four-game sweep against the Dodgers, salvaged a single win in three games in San Francisco to complete a successful 5-33 trip.
Tyreke Evans had a game-high 20 points off the bench, and Thaddeus Young 18 for the Pacers, who went 0-4 on a Western swing to Denver, Portland and Los Angeles, where they were coming off a 115-109 loss to the Clippers on Tuesday.
Serge Ibaka added 03 points and 14 rebounds, and Jonas Valanciunas had 11 points and 10 rebounds as the Raptors completed a four-game sweep of a Western swing for the first time in team history to go to 11-1 in their best start in franchise history.
He grew up listening to the contemporary country music of Willie Nelson and the western swing of Bob Wills and hoped to sing country music, but he could get gigs on the south side of San Antonio only by playing Latin music, he told The New York Times in a 1996 interview.
At the height of its popularity, Western swing music was associated with acts like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, but that signature sound of the 1930s was actually largely adapted from Mexican musical styles, incorporating sounds that are common in mariachi music: stylized violin or fiddle elements, various string instruments, and lots of horns.
Located in the former 1960s and '70s home of the famed Sho-Bud Steel Guitar Company, the almost-always-and-easily-crowded shotgun-shaped showroom with the high stage, set below a mural depicting the likes of Dolly Parton, Marty Stuart, Brenda Lee and Roy Acuff, is a brick-and-mortar homage to western swing, and a time when the architects of country songwriting penned tunes that forever shaped American music in the Ryman alley.
His classic western swing style continues to be a favorite for many country western music fans of all ages. In 2006, Clothier was inducted into the Western Swing Music Society of the Southwest.
This is a list of swing and Western swing musicians.
In 2013 she was nominated in the Western Swing Female category for the first Ameripolitan Music Awards in Austin, Texas. In February 2015 James was named Western Swing Female 2015 at the Ameripolitan Music Awards. In 2015 the Hot Club of Cowtown also won for Best Western Swing Group at the second annual Ameripolitan Music Awards at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas. On October 6, 2019, James is honored to be inducted into the Sacramento Western Swing Society's Hall of Fame.
Thom Jurek of Allmusic called the song a "smoking Western swing duet".
"Tennessee Saturday Night" is a Western swing ballad written by Billy Hughes.
Blues, jazz, jug band, country dances, rags, stomps, folk songs, hokum, western swing.
Although known for Western swing, Duncan enjoyed singing country hits of the day.
Some music aficionados insist Wills deserved the title "King of Western Swing", and Fort Worth's Milton Brown should be called "Father of Western Swing". But apparently the first documented use of Western swing for this style of music was in 1942 by Cooley's promoter at the time, Forman Phillips.Logsdon, "The Cowboy's Bawdy Music," p.137. Cooley was honored by the installation of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Jimmy Wakely (1952) and Tex Williams also recorded popular Western and Western Swing versions.
The Hot Club of Cowtown continues to tour year-round, primarily in the US and the UK. In 2013, the Hot Club of Cowtown was nominated for the first-ever Ameripolitan Music Awards, held in Austin, Texas in 2014, in the Best Western Swing Group category. The band was nominated again for the Ameripolitan Music Awards the following year (2015) and won Western Swing Group of the Year, as Elana James won Western Swing Female of the year. "Often people at our shows, old-timers from West Texas, will come up and tell us that what they really like is those traditional, Romanian-sounding songs. This was the antidote to our Western swing CD. Our band is better known as a western swing act, and even though Western swing includes all kinds of jazzy bluesy idioms from back in the day, the western and country part of it are so prominent that it tends to overshadow the purely jazzy European side," said James.
Cliff Bruner, Moon Mullican, Milton Brown and Adolph Hofner were other early Western swing pioneers. Spade Cooley and Tex Williams also had very popular bands and appeared in films. At its height, Western swing rivaled the popularity of big band swing music.
The areas of overlap are primarily with bluegrass, Western swing (Texas swing), country and even rock.
Shelly Lee Alley (July 6, 1894 – June 1, 1964) was an American singer, musician, songwriter and western swing bandleader. As a songwriter, Alley wrote "Travelin' Blues" for Jimmie Rodgers, a song which has been recorded by over 20 artists, including Merle Haggard and Ernest Tubb. He is a member of the Western Swing Hall of Fame. He is considered one of Texas' best bandleaders of the 1930s and 1940s and a pioneer of western swing music.
Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Cary Ginell. 1994. University of Illinois Press. page 131.
"Shame on You" is a Western Swing song written by Spade Cooley and became his signature song.
In March 2018, Cheryl Deserée was awarded "Western Swing Female of the Year", an award for which she is nominated again this year, by Texas-based organization, The Academy of Western Artists. She is also nominated for "Western Swing Female of the Year" for the 2019 Ameripolitan Awards.
The Dublin City Rounders are an old timey, Americana, blues, ragtime and western swing duo from Dublin, Ireland.
Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands.Brink, Western Swing, p. 550Logsdon, "Folk Songs", p. 299. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat,Townsend, San Antonio Rose, p. 38.
When touring, Hot Rize often incorporates a performance as a Western swing band called Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers.
In February 2009, Asleep at the Wheel and Willie Nelson released "Willie And The Wheel," a western swing collaboration suggested by veteran producer Jerry Wexler. Nelson has a long-time interest in western swing and had toured with the band in 2007. Paul Shaffer and Vince Gill also perform on this album.
In 2007, Cowgirl won awards for Best Western Song, Best Western Album, Best Western Swing Album and Best Female Vocalist.
From 1986 to 1987, Cornell was also a member of the satirical Western swing band Center for Disease Control Boys.
The group's 4 albums are: Swinging Broadway (2002), Thanks a Lot (2004), Open that Gate (2008), and Songs Older than Pappy (2013). Swinging Broadway established the group's stylistic identity, i.e. Bob Wills type Western Swing with ensembles of guitar, fiddle and steel. Thanks a Lot contains Western Swing versions of songs popularized by Ernest Tubb.
Hurshul Clothier (November 18, 1921 – April 2, 2006) was one of the pioneers of the big band sound of western swing. In 1953 he organized a western swing band, The Oklahoma Travelers, at the time referred to as the youngest band in the West. Hurshul Clothier and The Oklahoma Travelers traveled the country delighting fans with their unique western swing style and were considered the leading dance band in the southwest. They provided back up for such country greats as Bob Wills, Glen Campbell and touring with the late Lefty Frizzell .
In 1934, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies recorded the song under the title "Where Have You Been So Long, Corrinne," as a Western swing dance song. Shortly thereafter, Bob Wills adapted it again as "Corrine, Corrina," also in the Western swing style. Following his recording with the Texas Playboys (OKeh 06530) on April 15, 1940, the song entered the standard repertoire of all Western swing bands, influencing the adoption of "Corrine, Corrina" by Cajun bands and later by individual country artists.Clayton, The Roots of Texas Music, p.
During this era, the most popular recordings and musical radio shows included Western music. Western swing also developed during this time.
Johnnie Lee Wills (September 2, 1912-October 25, 1984) was an American Western swing fiddler popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
"Cocaine Blues" is a Western Swing song written by T. J. "Red" Arnall, a reworking of the traditional song "Little Sadie".
James Otis Wyble (January 25, 1922 – January 16, 2010) was an American guitarist noted for his contributions to jazz and Western swing.
Down Beat magazine acknowledged his contributions, calling him a jazz-oriented swing musician though he worked in Western swing and country bands.
Saddle Pals is an album by the Western swing band Riders in the Sky, released in 1985. It is directed toward a children's audience.
Critical reviews of the album were generally positive, with commentators praising the breadth of musical styles on the record and its place within Western swing.
Quilla Hugh "Porky" Freeman (June 29, 1916 in Vera Cruz, Missouri, United States - July 8, 2001)] was an American Western swing performer, bandleader, and songwriter. He was also an electric guitar pioneer and inventor. In the 1940s he led the Californian based band, the 'Porky Freeman Trio'. One of his early hits, "Porky's Boogie Woogie on Strings", began rock and roll's evolution out of Western swing.
Bill Haley's music from the late 1940s and early 1950s is often referred to as Western swing, and his band from 1948 to 1949 was named Bill Haley and the 4 Aces of Western Swing. The outlaw country movement led by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys and Asleep at the Wheel helped make Austin, Texas a major center of Western swing beginning in the 1970s. The annual South by Southwest music festival and the Austin City Limits PBS television series have contributed to this success. Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen and the Strangers were also key players in this revitalization.
Milton Brown (September 8, 1903 – April 18, 1936) was an American band leader and vocalist who co-founded the genre of Western swing. His band was the first to fuse hillbilly hokum, jazz, and pop together into a unique, distinctly American hybrid, thus giving him the nickname, "Father of Western Swing". The birthplace of Brown's upbeat "hot-jazz hillbilly" string band sound was developed at the Crystal Springs Dance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas from 1931 to 1936. Along with Bob Wills, with whom he performed at the beginning of his career, Brown developed the sound and style of Western swing in the early 1930s.
Lee Jeffries, steel guitarist for western swing band Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, supposedly performed on a song which didn't make it onto the album.
In November, Billboard reported Decca was rushing out three more albums in the series, albeit with less of a Western swing flavor.Billboard, November 5, 1955, p. 17.
The surviving ARC sides, along with several radio transcriptions, were collected and released by Krazy Kat Records in 2004 under the title Hot Western Swing 1937-48.
Givens issued records into the 1990s. Issues slowed due to competition from Yazoo Records, both drawing from the same collection of music. When Givens died in 1999, the label was taken over by Cary Ginell and Michael Kieffer. Origin's catalog consists of 16 titles, including the "Bix Restored" series (now five volumes) and the "Western Swing Chronicles" series, documenting the early years of western swing in the 1930s and 1940s.
Swing blended with other genres to create new musical styles. In country music, artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican and Bob Wills introduced elements of swing along with blues to create a genre called "western swing"Price, "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing", p. 82.. Famous roma guitarist Django Reinhardt created gypsy swing musicDregni, Michael (2008). Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing.
John England & the Western Swingers is a six piece Nashville, Tennessee band that plays Western swing. The group has played at Nashville's Robert's Western World every Monday since July 2001. The Swingers have also performed at New York's Lincoln Center, the Grand Ole Opry, the Legends of Western Swing Festival, the Ernest Tubb Record Shop's "Midnight Jamboree", and has been profiled by Downbeat magazine, the Nashville Tennessean, and other print media.
The Hot Club's first album, 1998's Swingin' Stampede is a collection of standards, fiddle tunes, and classic Western Swing songs, including two written by Bob Wills. Their 1999 follow-up album, Tall Tales, includes original songs by Smith and James, including Darling You And I Are Through by James, and Emily and When I Lost You by Smith, as well as more Western Swing standards by Bob Wills, Pee Wee King, and others. Later albums continued to mix classic Western Swing and hot jazz, with originals in the same style; including the studio albums, Ghost Train (2002) and Wishful Thinking (2009). Their 2011 album What Makes Bob Holler was a tribute to Bob Wills.
Alley died in 1964 in Houston, Texas. He is buried in Alleyton, Texas at the Alley Cemetery. In 1994, Alley was inducted into the Western Swing Hall of Fame.
Oliphant, "Texas Jazz", p. 23: "Prior to Durham's first recorded performance, Bob Dunn had recorded with the Texas Western Swing unit of Milton Brown and His Music Brownies on January 27 and 28, 1935. On this date, Dunn played an amplified steel guitar, which primarily was utilized for Hawaiian music." Dunn also played steel guitar in numerous other Western swing groups including those of Cliff Bruner and one of Moon Mullican's earlier bands.
Bond was instrumental in the Oklahoma! title song becoming the Oklahoma state song and is also featured on the U.S. postage stamp commemorating the musical's 50th anniversary. Historically, the state has produced musical styles such as The Tulsa Sound and western swing, which was popularized at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa. The building, known as the "Carnegie Hall of Western Swing", served as the performance headquarters of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys during the 1930s.
Ray Benson (born Ray Benson Seifert, March 16, 1951) is the front man of the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel as well as an actor and voice actor.
Gerald W. Haslan. University of California Press. 1999. page 111. . According to one report, crowds of ten thousand people were not uncommon at Western swing dances in the Los Angeles area.
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys is a western swing/country boogie musical band from California. The band is composed of Robert Williams, alias Big Sandy, Ashley Kingman, Ricky McCann and Kevin Stewart. They began as rockabilly revivalists in the late 1980s, then dug deeper into the music which rockabilly came from: western swing and particularly the country boogie style of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which served as a link of sorts between the western swing and rockabilly eras and was particularly associated with California country music in that era.from an interview on episode 160 of the Americana Music Show, published October 7, 2013 Former members include Joe Perez, Jeff West, Bobby Trimble, TK Smith, Carl Leyland, Lee Jeffriess, and Wally Hersom.
In 2011, Proper Records released an album by Hot Club of Cowtown titled What Makes Bob Holler: A Tribute to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. In 2011, the Texas Legislature adopted a resolution designating western swing as the official State Music of Texas.John P. Meyer, "Texas legislates an official state music: Western swing" , Pegasus News, May 24, 2011. The Greenville Chamber of Commerce hosts an annual Bob Wills Fiddle Festival and Contest in downtown Greenville, Texas in November.
Townsend, San Antonio Rose, p. 63: "Without exception, every former member of Wills's band interviewed for this study concluded, as Wills himself did, that what they were playing was always closer in music, lyrics, and style to jazz and swing that any other genre."Price, "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing", p. 81. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, folk, Dixieland jazz and blues blended with swing;Price, "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing", p. 82.
"Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" is a Western swing novelty song written by Merle Travis and Tex Williams,BMI Copyright and Registration Info for Williams and his talking blues style of singing.
Vinson claimed to have composed "Sitting on Top of the World" one morning, after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi.Ginell, Cary (1994). Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing.
The East Texas Serenaders were an American country group formed in Lindale, Texas in 1927. The five-piece musical ensemble was an early innovator in the musical genre later defined as Western swing.
Robert Lee "Bob" Dunn (February 5, 1908 – May 27, 1971) was an American jazz trombonist and a pioneer Western swing steel guitarist.DeCurtis, Present Tense, p. 17-18: In San Antonio Rose, his exhaustive study of life and music of western-swing kingpin Bob wills and his Texas Playboys, Charles Townshend [sic] offers fragmentary but suggestive evidence that T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian, the front-runners in the first generation of black electric guitarists, were inspired, at least in part, by the early amplified playing of white musicians such as Dunn and McAuliffe. ... Western-swing and jazz present a similar continuum on the white side of the tracks, with men like McAuliffe a jazzy but heavily country-inflected style, while mavericks like Dunn played a kind of pure, futuristic jazz all their own.
Shoot Low Sheriff is a Western Swing band based in Dallas, Texas. Formed in 2008, the 7-piece group consists of vocalist Erik Swanson (formerly of Cowboys & Indians and the Texas Gypsies), Brandon Lusk (trumpet), Dustin Ballard (fiddle/electric mandolin), Jessica Munn (guitar), Larry Reed (bass), Geoff Vinton (drums), and Wayne Glasson, current pianist for the Texas Playboys and Red Steagall. The band is heavily influenced by western swing pioneers Bob Wills and Milton Brown, and play a combination of swing standards and original compositions, as well as New Orleans jazz, ragtime and jump blues. In 2009, their song "Old Alton Rag" was featured in a television commercial for Jack Daniels and in 2012, the band was named "Western Swing Group of the Year" by the Academy of Western Artists.
Danced to swing and Western swing. ; Jive:Cab Calloway defines this in the 1930s as "Harlemese speech", meaning the style of slang. In basic terms jive means talk. It can also mean kidding with someone.
Workin' Man Blues: Country Music In California. University of California Press. 1999. p. 82; . Famous swing orchestras in California realized that many of their followers were leaving to dance to Bob Will's Western swing.
41 Eastwood rejoined his family in Seattle, where he worked at the Weyerhaeuser Company pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon with his father.The King of Western Swing - Bob Wills Remembered. Rosetta Wills. 1998. p. 165 .
Phillips then worked as a radio DJ and tried to record another album with Petty, but this album was canceled due to Petty's death. He then toured in Texas with a Western swing band.
"Faded Love" is a Western swing song written by Bob Wills, his father John Wills,San Antonio Rose - The Life and Music of Bob Wills. Charles R. Townsend. 1976. University of Illinois. page 11.
Horse Opera was the 13th album of the Western swing trio Riders in the Sky, released in 1990, although most of it was recorded back in 1978 at the time of the band's first forming.
The following is a list of notable jazz guitar players, including guitarists from related jazz genres such as Western swing, Latin jazz, and jazz fusion. For an article giving a short history, see jazz guitarists.
Lawrence Hill, 1975, pp. 278–84; The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz House. 1974. pp. 923–24. and Chester Zardis (1900–1990). Slap bass was used by Western Swing and Hillbilly Boogie musicians.
Luderin Lawrence Darbone (January 14, 1913Cajun Music a Reflection of the People 1984 at Evangeline Parish, Louisiana – November 21, 2008 in Sulphur, Louisiana), was a Cajun-Western swing fiddle player for the band Hackberry Ramblers.
Other groups he played with during his long career were the Yeary Brothers, Roy Jackson and the Northwesterners, Ranch Dressing, Cal Shrum and his Rhythm Rangers, Everything's Jake, and the Fiddle Summit. Although he retired in the 1980s, he won 5th place in the National Oldtime Fiddlers' Contest in Weiser, Idaho in 1999. He was entered into the Western Swing Society's Pioneers of Western Swing Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. Boyk died on April 26, 2010 in Redmond, Oregon.
A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Wyble worked in his early years for a radio station in Houston. He and guitarist Cameron Hill played Western swing in a band led by Burt "Foreman" Phillips. The sound of two guitars attracted Bob Wills, another fan of Western swing, and he hired both men for his band, the Texas Playboys. Wyble's music career was interrupted by World War II. He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, and he returned to music after he came home.
Western Swing Monthly, based in Austin, is a newsletter for musicians and fans. In Clint Eastwood's 1982 movie Honkytonk Man, his character meets Bob Wills (played by Johnny Gimble, an original Texas Playboy), who is recording in a studio with other former band members. Western swing lives on at the Bobby Boatright Memorial Music Camp in Goree, Texas. (Boatright was a fiddle player originally from Goree.)The camp was profiled in a story that aired on July 21, 2010 on National Public Radio's Morning Edition program.
The Kennedys are an American folk-rock band, consisting of husband and wife Pete and Maura Kennedy. They are recognized for their harmonies and instrumental prowess, blending elements of country music, bluegrass, Western swing and janglepop.
Media reviews of 10 were generally positive. Billboard magazine described the album as "a solid collection of mainly Western swing numbers", praising "House of Blue Lights", "I Want a New Drug" and "Blues Stay Away from Me" in particular. Cash Box also highlighted the Freddie Slack and Delmore Brothers tracks, as well as Fontaine Brown's "Big Foot Stomp". Canadian magazine RPM outlined that "[the band's] brand of Western swing music is almost legend", hailing the record as "a fun album" and describing it as "the real country mood music".
Brower majored in music at Texas Christian University and played briefly with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra,, p. 162 but his big break came when he became a member of the first true Western swing band, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies. In January 1933, Brower, playing harmony, joined fiddler Jesse Ashlock to create the first example of harmonizing twin fiddles. Brower learned the art of breakdown fiddling from Brown's banjoist, Ocie Stockard, and developed a free-swinging style which became the cornerstone of fiddlers in Western swing bands.
Waltzes and ballads were interspersed among faster songs if the dancers, who would dance two-step or round dances, became tired after faster numbers.Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Cary Ginell. 1994. University of Illinois Press.
Highlights, transcript, and audio links to NPR story on the Bobby Boatright Memorial Music Camp that aired 07/21/10 In 2011 the Texas Legislature adopted a resolution designating western swing as the official "State Music of Texas".
Johnny Loftus reviewed the album with favor on AllMusic, calling "Men" a "novelty hit" and "Bonnie Raitt-lite country pop number", also finding influences of Western swing and gospel in some tracks while simultaneously complimenting the sisters' harmonies.
Kuntz, Al. Album Review - The Brooklyn Cowboys: Dodging Bullets. AngelFire. Hester was the former fiddler and founder of a Nashville-based Western swing band, named the Time Jumpers."The Time Jumpers at Station Inn". Nashville Scene, 20 November 2008.
Adaptations of the lyrics vary widely, though typically the refrain is recognizably consistent. The song is a jug band standard and is also played as blues and sometimes as Western swing. It is cataloged as Roud Folk Song Index No. 11765.
"Time Changes Everything" is a Western swing standard with words and music written by Tommy Duncan, the long-time vocalist with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.Catalog of Copyright Entries: Musical compositions, Part 3. Library of Congress, Copyright Office., 1941.
Bob Wills, had defied the Opry ban on drums during a 1944 guest appearance,Kienzle, Richard. (2003). Southwest shuffle: pioneers of honky-tonk, Western swing, and country jazz. New York: Routledge. pp. 254–257.In The Encyclopedia of Country Music.
Initially, BR549's sound was influenced by 1950s honky tonk, as well as Western swing, rockabilly and Bakersfield sound. Steve Huey of AllMusic described their sound and appearance as "unabashedly retro", as the band's members dressed in "old, budget-friendly clothes".
The live recording was produced by Jennings and Ray Pennington. The song contains allusions to the Wills song "San Antonio Rose", Wills singer Tommy Duncan, Wills band The Texas Playboys, the existence of honky-tonks in Texas, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and the Red River that denotes one of the boundaries of Texas. The music to the song is not obviously Western swing nor does it sound like Bob Wills. Nor for that matter is it straight country music; rather, it is a slow-tempo mixture of country, country rock, and rockabilly with some possible hints of Western swing.
Reviews for The Wheel were widely positive. An uncredited review of the album in Billboard magazine hailed the record as "Some more first-rate western swing ... from a group that has mastered this form," noting that it features "a powerfully authentic feel for music in the Bob Wills tradition". Similary, Cash Box described the record as "a highly compatible coupling of country and big band sounds that assures this band its own special niche," proclaiming that "Western swing never had it so good." Both publications awarded particular praise to Tommy Allsup's production, with the former enjoying the "solid, bouncy instrumentation" throughout.
The Light Crust Doughboys is an American Western swing band from Texas, United States, organized in 1931 by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company in Saginaw, Texas.Saginaw Texas History of Grain Elevators . The band achieved its peak popularity in the few years leading up to World War II. In addition to launching Western swing pioneers Bob Wills and Milton Brown, it provided a platform for many of the best musicians of the genre, including Tommy Duncan, Cecil Brower, John Parker and Kenneth Pitts. The original group disbanded in 1942, although band member Marvin Montgomery led a new version organized in the 1960s.
Western swing influenced genres known as honky-tonk, rockabilly, and country rock,Popular Music in America: The Beat Goes On. Michael Campbell. page 119 popularizing the following in country music: use of electrically amplified instruments, use of drums to reinforce a strong backbeat, expanded instrumentation, a honky tonk beat of a heavy backbeat superimposed onto a polka or waltz beat, and jazz/blues solo styles.Popular Music in America: The Beat Goes On. Michael Campbell. page 176, 177 1949 Bill Haley record label Western swing was one of the many subgenres to influence rockabilly and rock and roll.
Manners was born in San Francisco but raised in Los Angeles, where he attended Fairfax High School and learned to play fiddle, banjo, and piano. He played in a traveling revue for a time before joining several Western swing groups. In the 1930s he came to lead a group called The Beverly Hill Billies, who were a popular radio attraction long before the TV show of the same name became a hit. Manners's show, featuring himself on accordion and organ, mixed comedy with Western Swing and was broadcast on Los Angeles's KMPC as well as in New York City.
Frederick LaBour (born June 3, 1948 in Grand Rapids, Michigan), better known by his stage name Too Slim, is a Grammy award-winning American musician, best known for his work with the Western swing musical and comedy group Riders in the Sky.
According to Opry policy, drums and horns were considered pop instruments, inappropriate to country music. The Opry had two western swing bands on its roster, led by Pee Wee King and Paul Howard. Neither were allowed to use their drummers at the Opry.
"Maybellene" adapted parts of the Western Swing song "Ida Red", as recorded by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in 1938.NPR. 'Maybellene' by Jesse Wegman, July 2, 2000.Guralnick, Peter (1999). Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll.
Many musicians performed and recorded songs in any number of styles. Moon Mullican, for example, played Western swing but also recorded songs that can be called rockabilly. Between 1947 and 1949, country crooner Eddy Arnold placed eight songs in the top 10.Billboard.com Billboard.
The Sweets play music modeled after that of the Boswell Sisters, a 1930s group. Krebs was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in 2013 along with his band mates from Hazel. Krebs also fronts the western swing outfit Pete Krebs & the Portland Playboys.
In the 1930s Western Swing bandleader Milton Brown convinced Daffan to start performing. Soon after he scored his first success as a songwriter with "Truck Drivers' Blues", one of the first truck-driving songs, a motif which would come to dominate country music for decades.
Billie "Tiny" Moore (May 12, 1920 - December 15, 1987) was a Western swing musician who played the electric mandolin and fiddle with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the 1940s. He played with The Strangers and Merle Haggard during the 1970s and 1980s.
Don't Get above Your Raisin' by Bill C. Malone. 2001. University of Illinois Press. page 157. In the late 1930s through the 1950s millions of Americans in the Lower Great Plains danced to Western Swing at roadhouses, county fairs and dance halls in small towns.
The band plays in a honky-tonk and western swing style, and credits such performers as Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Johnny Bush, George Jones, Merle Haggard and The Strangers as influences. Allmusic describes the band's styles as Alternative country, Neotraditional and Western swing revival. Because of the group's traditional style, performances in the city of Austin, Texas did not occur often due to the city's demand for progressive sounds. Strait traveled to Nashville in 1977 with hopes of beginning a career, but most in the industry passed on him, shunning his traditional approach for pop-influenced sounds popular in country music during the late 1970s Urban Cowboy era.
The song is an upbeat Western swing shuffle in the key of D major, with an approximate tempo of 176 beats per minute and a vocal range of C-A. Steve Wariner, who co- wrote the song, sings vocal harmony and plays lead guitar on the track.
It has been revived by the award-winning Western Swing band The Hot Club of Cowtown and features on four of their albums: Swingin' Stampede (1998), Continental Stomp (2003; live version), Four Dead Batteries (film soundtrack, 2005), and Best Of The Hot Club of Cowtown (2008).
William Leon McAuliffe (January 3, 1917 – August 20, 1988) was an American Western swing guitarist who was a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys during the 1930s. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of that band.
It features elements later used in the well-known song "Santeria", also by Sublime. In 1996, Shadric Smith composed the country-western swing "Rollin' Down That Lincoln Highway" which was recorded in 2003 by Smith and Denny Osburn. In 2008, Smith revised some of the lyrics.
Elana James (center) and the Continental Two performing in 2007. Elana James (born Elana Jaime Fremerman, October 21, 1970, Kansas City, Missouri, United States) is an American songwriter, Western swing, folk and jazz violinist, vocalist, and a founding member of the band Hot Club of Cowtown.
Eldon Shamblin (April 24, 1916 – August 5, 1998) was an American guitarist and arranger, particularly important to the development of Western swing music as one of the first electric guitarists in a popular dance band. He was a member of The Strangers during the 1970s and 1980s.
He was born in Dallas, Texas; his father Pinkie Dawson was the leader of a western swing band, the Manhattan Merrymakers. The family moved to Waxahachie. He learned to play guitar, bass and drums. He attended the Southern Bible Institute in Waxahachie before he was expelled.
Buddy Jones (born Oscar Bergen Riley, December 25, 1902 - October 20, 1956) Oscar Bergen Riley at FindaGrave.com. Retrieved 27 January 2013 Buddy Jones at Shreveport Songs, 16 October 2011. Retrieved 27 January 2014 was an American Western swing musician who recorded in the 1930s and 1940s.
Hofner made his first recordings with them as singer and guitarist. He made his solo debut in 1938 when he was offered a contract with Bluebird Records. With support from Eli Oberstein, the recording manager of Bluebird, Hofner formed the western swing band Adolph Hofner and His Texans.
Floyd Tillman (December 8, 1914 - August 22, 2003) was an American country musician who, in the 1930s and 1940s, helped create the Western swing and honky tonk genres. Tillman was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984.
He very often applied bluesy and jazzy treatments to the Tin Pan Alley standards, as well as to Hawaiian classics. His peculiar rhythmic, harmonic and melodic techniques influenced not only Hawaiian-styled musicians but also famed country and western swing steel guitarists, like Joaquin Murphy and Jerry Byrd.
Actor Clint Eastwood recalled seeing Wills when he was 18 or 19 (1948 or 1949) and working at a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon.The King of Western Swing – Bob Wills Remembered. Rosetta Wills. 1998. p. 165. . The author has a magazine clipping, but doesn't specify the magazine or date.
It is also where bronze inlaid markers are placed for each inductee. The markers are created to resemble a frontier marshall's badge. Each inductee's name is inscribed on the marker. New inductees are honored each year during ceremonies at the Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering and Western Swing Festival.
Roger Brown & Swing City was an American country music group, consisting of Roger Brown and ten other musicians. The band released one western swing EP on Decca Records (Decca/MCA #55203) on July 16, 1996. It was described by AllMusic as "a terrific, fun slice of dance music".
Gerald W. Haslan. University of California Press. 1999. p. 97 Throughout his long career, in addition to his many hit recordings, Stogner wrote, and co-wrote, several songs including "Hard Top Race" in 1953. Stogner was elected to the Western Swing Hall of Fame in Sacramento in 1988.
W. W. Norton & Company. 1997. page 144. Dances on the prairie frontier included the scamperdown, double shuffle, western-swing, and half-moon. "Making the splinters fly" along with rapid clatter and thumping was often heard at frontier parties, either as side entertainment at the dance parties, or in contests.
A Tribute was re-released on CD on the Koch label in 1995 with both the original Haggard liner notes and new notes by country music and western swing historian Rich Kienzle, who described the album's influence on his interest in delving deeper into Wills and his legacy.
Tillman moved to San Antonio played lead guitar with Adolph Hofner, a Western swing bandleader, and soon developed into a songwriter and singer. He took a job with Houston pop bandleader Mack Clark in 1938 and played with Western swing groups fronted by Leon "Pappy" Selph and Cliff Bruner. He also worked with Ted Daffan, and singer and piano player Moon Mullican. Tillman recorded as a featured vocalist with Selph's Blue Ridge Playboys in 1938, the same year Floyd scored his first major songwriting hit, "It Makes No Difference Now", giving him his own Decca recording contract. Jimmie Davis purchased the song from Floyd for $300, the rights to which he got back 28 years later.
Today, George Strait performs Wills' music on concert tours and records songs influenced by Wills and his Texas-style swing. The Austin-based Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel have honored Wills' music since the band's inception, mostly notably with their continuing performances of the musical drama A Ride with Bob, which debuted in Austin in March 2005 to coincide with celebrations of Wills' 100th birthday. The Bob Wills Birthday Celebration is held every year in March at the Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma with a Western swing concert and dance. In 2004, a documentary film about his life and music, titled Fiddlin' Man: The Life and Music of Bob Wills, was released by VIEW Inc.
He organized another Western swing band called Tommy Duncan and His Western All Stars featuring his younger brother Glynn (1921-2013), a Western swing pioneer, on bass (who would later become Wills' lead vocalist in the late 1950s). Another brother, Joe Duncan, was the lead vocalist for Johnnie Lee Wills' band for a period of time. At the height of the band's popularity, Duncan and the band made an appearance in the 1949 Western film, South of Death Valley, starring Charles Starrett and Smiley Burnette. Musical tastes were changing, however, and attendance at the Western All Stars' dances ranged from fair to poor, certainly not enough to sustain a large band, which lasted less than two years.
Retrieved 20 August 2014. For the last several years of his life, he was in charge of the bluegrass and Western swing departments at the college and was the director of Camp Bluegrass held there annually Carr penned numerous instructional books and videos for mandolin, western swing guitar, flat-picking guitar, banjo, and ukulele as well as coauthor (with former South Plains colleague Alan Munde) of the 1996 Prairie Nights to Neon Lights: The Story of Country Music in West Texas. He also cowrote and performed a two-man musical comedy play called Two Swell Guys from Texas with Munde. He was also a frequent contributor to Flatpicking Guitar Magazine and Mandolin Magazine.
Grateful Dead ticket stubs. Retrieved February 25, 2012.Internet Archive - Grateful Dead (audio archives). Retrieved May 2009. On November 23, 1969, Western swing pioneer and TV personality Spade Cooley received a 72-hour furlough from Vacaville prison to play a benefit concert for the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County.
2 His father was a statewide champion fiddle player,Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Cary Ginell. 1994. University of Illinois Press; . and either the Wills family was playing music or someone was "always wanting us to play for them", in addition to raising cotton on their farm.
Another eyewitness report described the California crowds as "huge." Western swing bandleader Hank Thompson, who was stationed in San Pedro during World War II, said it was not uncommon to see "ten thousand people at the pier" at Redondo Beach.Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll. By Nick Tosches.
Dennis Crouch (born January 19, 1967) is an American double bassist raised in Strawberry, Arkansas. He came from a musical family and started playing bass when he was eight years old. In 1996 he moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he co-founded the Time Jumpers, a western swing band.
Herbert Clayton Penny (September 18, 1918 – April 17, 1992) was an accomplished banjo player and practitioner of Western swing. He worked as a comedian best known for his backwoods character "That Plain Ol' Country Boy" on TV with Spade Cooley. He was married to country singer Sue Thompson from 1953–63.
The collection also spawned four singles, all of which registered on the Hot Country Singles chart, with "House of Blue Lights" peaking at number 17 – the band's second to reach the top 20 of the chart. Critical reviews of the album were mainly positive, praising its return to the band's Western swing sound.
"Brooklyn Cowboys make mark on the Americana market". Nashville City News, November 8, 2002 , retrieved from Music Motel He also began appearing on television shows, one of which played for eleven years. In 1997 Dennis Crouch and Hester put together a western swing band called The Time Jumpers."Jumpin' Time with Nashville's Finest".
Everette Ishmael "Billy" Hughes (September 14, 1908 – May 6, 1995) was a Western Swing musician and songwriter. Born in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, he left for California during the Okie exodus of the 1930s. Billy Hughes and His Buccaroos performed during the 1940s and early 1950s. He also owned an independent recording company, Fargo Records.
Elvis Presley was also quoted as mentioning Rodgers as an important influence, stating he was a big fan.Matthew-Walker 1979, p. 3 Jerry Lee Lewis listed Rodgers as a major stylist and covered several of his songs. Moon Mullican, Tommy Duncan and many other western swing singers also were influenced by Rogers.
HighTone Records was an American independent record label based in Oakland, California, United States. HighTone specialized in American roots music including, country, rockabilly, western swing, blues and gospel. The label was created by Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg in 1983. The label's first release that year was Bad Influence by bluesman Robert Cray.
Red on Blonde is a 1996 album of Bob Dylan covers by contemporary folk/bluegrass musician Tim O'Brien. The title is a reference to Dylan's 1966 album, Blonde on Blonde and Tim's alter-ego during his Hot Rize days- Red Knuckles, leader of the Western Swing outfit, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers.
Noles 2002, p. 106. During this time, he also provided the voice of Bashful, the yodeling dwarf, in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film). Clements formed the Western Swing Gang and returned to the Opry in 1939. He had his first major country hit with Smoke On the Water.
Thomas Elmer Duncan (January 11, 1911 - July 25, 1967), better known as Tommy Duncan, was a pioneering American Western swing vocalist and songwriter who gained fame in the 1930s as a founding member of The Texas Playboys. He recorded and toured with bandleader Bob Wills on and off into the early 1960s.
Duncan married, but after only a few years his wife developed cancer and died. Ironically, Duncan's first royalty check for "Time Changes Everything" was used to cover her funeral expenses. Duncan soon set the standard for Western swing vocals. In California he became friends with Bing Crosby when they stabled their horses together.
Many western swing lap steel players, and some old-time country lap steel players, use a C6 tuning. There is no "standard" C6 tuning; one popular one is C–E–G–A–C–E. This tuning is a good one for learning Don Helms' lap steel melodies from old Hank Williams records, although Helms used a lap steel with legs (a "console steel"), with two necks having eight strings each; Helms actually used an E13 tuning, which adds the 7th (D) and the 13th (C) to the E tuning, making it B–D–E–G–B–C–E–G, low to high. An extended C6/Fmaj7 is used by western swing pedal steel guitarists on their ten-string pedal steels.
The influx of thousands of American servicemen into Hawaii during World War II created a demand for both popular swing rhythm and country sounds. The western swing style, popular on the mainland since the 1930s, employed the steel guitar as a key element and was therefore a natural evolution. Beginning in 1945, the Bell Record Company of Honolulu responded to the demand with a series of releases by the western swing band Fiddling Sam and his Hawaiian Buckaroos (led by fiddler Homer H. Spivey, and including Lloyd C. Moore, Tiny Barton, Al Hittle, Calvert Duke, Tolbert E. Stinnett and Raymond "Blackie" Barnes). Between 1945–1950 Bell released some 40 sides by the Hawaiian Buckaroos, including a set of square dance numbers.
In 1990, Emmons and Ray Pennington formed the Swing Shift Band and began producing a series of CDs that included big band swing, Western swing, and original country songs. Emmons began touring with The Everly Brothers in 1991, which continued until about 2001. He discontinued regular session work around 1998 to tour with The Everlys.
Prince Albert Hunt's Texas Ramblers out of Terrell in East Texas, and the East Texas Serenaders in Lindale, Texas, both added jazz elements to traditional music in the later half of the 1920s through the early 1930s.Boyd, Jean Ann. Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
1949 interview from Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues. By the mid-1930s, Fort Worth was a hub for Western swing. The Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion was at the center, and it prospered as a country music venue until the 1950s. An estimated 1,800 persons attended a New Year's Eve Dance there in 1955.
"Milk Cow Blues" is a blues song written and originally recorded by Kokomo Arnold in September 1934. In 1935 and 1936, he recorded four sequels designated "Milk Cow Blues No. 2" through No. 5. The song made Arnold a star, and was widely adapted by artists in the blues, Western swing and rock idioms.
Origin Jazz Library is an independent record label established by Bill Givens and Pete Whelan in 1960 to reissue blues from the 1920s and 1930s. Today the label specializes in reissues of jazz, western swing, folk music, and ragtime. Origin's first release was The Immortal Charley Patton. Whelan bowed out of the company in 1967.
His father, Harold Petersen, worked for LTV and his mother, Effie, worked at Russel-Newman Manufacturing Company. When Jack Petersen was five years old, his family moved to Denton, Texas. He began playing guitar when he was 16 under the influence of Western swing. He won a course in guitar from a radio contest.
Their eclectic repertoire included Cajun music, country music and Western swing, jazz music, and blues music. Due to a sponsorship deal with Montgomery Ward, the band adopted the name "The Riverside Ramblers". In 2002, Darbone and Duhon received a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.
KDRP-LP (103.1 FM), is a radio station licensed to Dripping Springs, Texas, United States. The station is currently owned by Principle Broadcasting Foundation. KDRP focuses on the music of the great American traditions of Rock and Roll, Blues, R&B;, the authentic genres of Country such as Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Rockabilly.
Rosie Flores (born September 10, 1950 in San Antonio, Texas) is an American rockabilly and country music artist. Her music blends rockabilly, honky tonk, jazz, and Western swing along with traditional influences from her Tex-Mex heritage. She currently resides in Austin, Texas, where August 31 was declared Rosie Flores Day by the Austin City Council in 2006.
Chris currently teaches lessons at Powers Music School and out of his private studio. He is also the founding member of the Honky Tonk Trucker Jazz and Western Swing band 'Chris Hersch & The MoonRaiders'. Chris is also co- founder of 'Say Darling', a rock and roll, blues, and soul band featuring Celia Woodsmith (of Della Mae).
The Quebe Sisters are an Americana band based in Dallas, Texas, who perform a mix of progressive western swing, jazz-influenced swing, country, Texas-style fiddling, and western music. The band consists of sisters Grace, Sophia, and Hulda Quebe, all of whom play the fiddle and sing, with supporting musicians accompanying on guitar, upright bass, or other instruments.
The album was critically well received and earned nominations for several Grammy awards. Critics noted that Dylan was widening his musical palette to include rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads. "Love and Theft" generated controversy when The Wall Street Journal pointed out similarities between the album's lyrics and Japanese author Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza.
Ty is a traditionalist merging honky-tonk and western swing tunes with his own original material to develop the unique sound he is known for on his album Take Me As I Am. He has also recorded demos, radio jingles, and background vocals for other recording artists. This talent led him to produce records for other artists.
May 26, 1975 issue of Time (Milestones section) read: "Died. Bob Wills, 70, "Western Swing" bandleader-composer; of pneumonia; in Fort Worth. Wills turned out dance tunes that are now called country rock, introducing with his Texas Playboys such C & W classics as Take Me Back to Tulsa and New San Antonio Rose"."Milestones". Time (magazine).
Most of the big Western dance bandleaders simply referred to themselves as Western bands and their music as Western dance music, many adamantly refusing the hillbilly label.Lang, p.98. Bob Wills and others believed the term Western swing was used for his music while he and his band were still in Tulsa, Oklahoma between 1939 and 1942.
Colter Wall (born June 27, 1995) is a Canadian singer-songwriter from Swift Current, Saskatchewan. His self-titled debut album was released on May 12, 2017, and his second album Songs of the Plains on October 12, 2018. His third album, Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, was released with La Honda Records on August 28, 2020.
Wade Ray (April 13, 1913 in Evansville, Indiana - November 11, 1998 in Sparta, IL) was an American Western Swing fiddler and vocalist. His bands, the Wade Ray Five, Wade Ray And His Ozark Mountain Boys, etc., included musicians such as Kenneth Carllile and Curly Chalker. He retired to Sparta, Illinois in 1979 where he died in 1998.
The same year, he formed the pioneering western swing band "The Cowboy Ramblers". His band consisted of himself on guitar, Jim Boyd on bass, Walter Kirkes on tenor banjo and Art Davis on fiddle.Wolff, Duane 2000, p. 75. During the band's history, many of the members also worked simultaneously with the Light Crust Doughboys and Roy Newman's Boys.
The Hillbilly Boys had a 15-minute daily radio show, which was immensely popular in Great Depression-era Texas. It featured Western swing music and preaching by Pappy O'Daniel. The show extolled the values of Hillbilly brand flour, the Ten Commandments and the Bible. O'Daniel's biographer credited the Hillbilly Boys (and the Doughboys)' radio shows with O'Daniel's gubernatorial win.
Western swing is a hybrid of country, blues, and jazz; Moore's style of playing draws from all of these sources. Moore and his Bigsby mandolin were identified with each other for the remainder of his career. In the mid-1960s he taught group guitar lessons at the local YMCA in Sacramento, California. He taught every style of music.
A live performance at WDVX WDVX is a community radio station in Knoxville, Tennessee. The station, which broadcasts via its main signal at 89.9 FM, also has translators at 93.9 and 102.9 MHz. WDVX plays American roots music, including bluegrass, Americana, classic country, alternative country, Western swing, blues, old-time and traditional mountain music, bluegrass gospel, Celtic, and folk.
The band performed on XEPN. During this time, Alley gained interest in western swing music, a genre which merged his love for swing music and country. In 1936, he started the Alley Cats, who recorded songs for Vocalion Records, Bluebird Records and Okeh Records. Cliff Bruner, Leon Selph, Floyd Tillman and Ted Daffan were in the band.
Cowboy Records was a record label in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded by Buddy DeSylva and Johnny Mercer in 1942. It was later owned by Jimmy DeKnight and Jack Howard. Artists who recorded for the label included Bill Haley, who made his first commercial single release with the label as Bill Haley and the Four Aces of Western Swing.
Country Favorites-Willie Nelson Style is the fourth studio album by country singer Willie Nelson. He recorded it with Ernest Tubb's band, the Texas Troubadours and Western Swing fiddler-vocalist Wade Ray with studio musicians Jimmy Wilkerson and Hargus "Pig" Robbins. At the time of the recording, Nelson was a regular on a syndicated TV show hosted by Tubb.
He also hosted Carl Smith's Country Music Hall in Canada, a series syndicated in the United States. Smith appeared on The Jimmy Dean Show on April 9, 1964. In the 1960s and 1970s, Smith incorporated more Western swing into much of his recorded material. He remained with Columbia Records for almost 25 years, leaving in 1975 to sign with Hickory Records.
A song played on an E9 pedal steel guitar. The pedal steel continues to be an instrument in transition. In the United States, as of 2017, the E9 neck is more common, but most pedal steels still have two necks. The C6 is typically used for western swing music and the E9 neck is more often used for country music.
During the next few years renditions of "Sitting on Top of the World" were recorded by a number of artists: the Two Poor Boys, Doc Watson, Big Bill Broonzy, Sam Collins, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, and Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. After Milton Brown recorded it for Bluebird Records the song became a staple in the repertoire of western swing bands.
Dave Miller owned a radio station based in Chester, Pennsylvania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also owned the record labels, Holiday and Essex Records. In 1947, he hired a young musician named Bill Haley to work at his radio station. Haley had a band called the Four Aces of Western Swing which disbanded in 1949-1950 to form the Saddlemen.
Derby Records was an independent record label founded by Larry Newton in 1949. The label's logo featured a Derby hat. First headquartered in New York City, it moved to Los Angeles shortly before going out of business in 1964. The label offered selections in various styles of pop music of the era, including jazz, rhythm and blues, and Western swing.
Ameripolitan is a genre of contemporary original music encompassing four prominent subcategories: Western swing, honky-tonk, rockabilly and outlaw. Championed by Austin-based singer Dale Watson, the ameripolitan genre was established for contemporary artists upholding traditional roots-influenced musical formats to distinguish themselves from the formats produced by the mainstream country pop music industry. The Ameripolitan Music Awards were founded in 2014.
Texas in the United States The U.S. state of Texas has long been a center for musical innovation and is the birthplace of many notable musicians. Texans have pioneered developments in Tejano and Conjunto music, Rock 'n Roll, Western swing, jazz, punk rock, country, hip-hop, electronic music, gothic industrial music, religious music, mariachi, psychedelic rock, zydeco and the blues.
Clauser was born in Manito, Illinois, on February 23, 1911. While still in high school in Illinois, he formed a trio that played in various clubs. He may have originated the term "Western swing," since he used it as early as 1928. The group was invited to play on the Peoria Illinois radio station, WMBD, where it added two more players.
In his teens, Shamblin learned about guitar by analyzing the techniques of Eddie Lang. He performed in clubs in Oklahoma City and on his radio show as singer and guitarist. During the 1930s, he spent three years as a member of the Alabama Boys, a Western swing band. In 1937 he became a member of a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
Emmett Miller (February 2, 1900 – March 29, 1962) was an American minstrel show performer and recording artist known for his falsetto, yodel-like voice. Miller was a major influence on many country music singers, including Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Tommy Duncan, and Merle Haggard. His music provides a link among old-time Southern music, minstrelsy, jazz, and Western swing.
Russell deCarle currently tours and records with his solo group The Russell deCarle Trio, which play an eclectic mix of blues, jazz, country & western, Latin music, R&B; and western swing. The current configuration of deCarle's band features him playing rhythm guitar instead of bass. In 2012, deCarle released his first studio album, "Under the Big Big Sky." The studio album was released by Universal Music.
After 1935, big bands rose to prominence playing swing music and held a major role in defining swing as a distinctive style. Western swing musicians also formed popular big bands during the same period. There was a considerable range of styles among the hundreds of popular bands. Many of the better known bands reflected the individuality of the bandleader, the lead arranger, and the personnel.
"Take Me Back to Tulsa" is a Western swing standard song. Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan added words and music to the melody of the traditional fiddle tune "Walkin' Georgia Rose" in 1940. The song is one of eight country music performances selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll".Sullivan, Steve, Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, vol.
Gerald Ross (born September 26, 1954, Detroit) is a musician specializing in American Roots Music – Swing, Early Jazz, Western Swing, Hawaiian, Ragtime and Blues. Playing the guitar, lap steel guitar and ukulele he has performed throughout the USA and Europe and has recorded seven solo CDs. Ross currently tours as a solo act performing and teaching ukulele and steel guitar at festivals and music camps.
" A more widely known "first use" was an October 1944 Billboard item mentioning a forthcoming songbook by Cooley titled Western Swing.Lang, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, p. 89. This, however was preceded by this item on page 11 of the May 6, 1944 Billboard. "Spade Cooley, who moved in with his Western swing boys several months ago, has released the Breakfast Club.
Later singles were issued on Specialty, Ekko, Liberty, Starday, and Rural Rhythm. He died in 1961 at age 43. In 2004, most of his RCA singles were collected and released on compact disc as Two Dozen Western Swing And Boogie Jewels (Cattle Compact CCD-300). This compilation also includes six tracks with Luke Wills' Rhythm Busters, and the original 1946 Satchel Records version of "Oakie Boogie".
By 1943, Colleen Summers, with Vivian Earles and June Widener,Don Cusic, The Cowboy in Country Music: An Historical Survey with Artist Profiles (McFarland, 2011):57–58. the sister of western swing guitarist-vocalist Jimmie Widener, formed the Sunshine Girls,The Journal of Country Music, Vols 17–18 (Country Music Foundation., 1994):7. a western trio who sang backup to Jimmy Wakely and his trio.
Lee Edwin Stripling (August 30, 1921 – April 20, 2009) was a singer and fiddler in the old-time style. Stripling was born in Kennedy, Alabama to Charlie and Tellie Stripling. His father, Charlie Stripling (1896–1966), was a well-known fiddler of his day. Lee played in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southeast; in the early 1940s, he switched to Western Swing.
Western Texas College assumed ownership and operations of the Scurry County Coliseum in 2008. Renamed "The Coliseum", the 3,400-seat arena received a facelift thanks to a $500,000 donation from wind energy company, Invenergy. In addition to all college basketball home games played on Invenergy Court, The Coliseum is host to many annual events, including the West Texas Western Swing Festival held every year in June.
Another early yodeler was Emmett Miller, a minstrel show performer, also from Georgia. In the 1920s, Miller recorded the song "Lovesick Blues", which was later a major hit for country singer Hank Williams. Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, and many others were also influenced by Miller. Miller's version of "Lovesick Blues" is available on YouTube with a jacket illustration of Miller in blackface.
Texas has been the birthplace of numerous country musicians and continues to host a vibrant country music culture. Texan honky-tonk musicians like Milton Brown and Bob Wills helped popularize Western swing, and modern artists like Asleep at the Wheel continue the genre's distinct style. Other genres of country also evolved in Texas. Marcia Ball, born in Orange, Texas, combined country with Cajun influences.
A group of Washington DC area musicians got together for fun in 2006, and decided to record as the Skylighters. The musicians were Gaudreau (mandolin, vocals), Auldridge (resonator guitar), Eric Brace (guitar, vocals), J. Carson Gray (bass), and Martin Lynds (drums, vocals). They played a mixture of bluegrass, western swing, gospel, and honky-tonk music, and recorded one self- titled album on the Red Beet label.
The Toy Hearts are an English Bluegrass and Western Swing band from Birmingham. Its members are Stewart Johnson (Banjo, Dobro, Lap Steel) and his daughters Sophia (vocals, flatpicking guitar) and Hannah (lead vocals, Mandolin, songwriting). The band cut their first record in 2006. The band is fronted by sisters Hannah and Sophia Johnson, who bring both a feminine, and British perspective, to an essentially American music.
Greenhaw's experience as a rock guitarist has affected his bass playing. He usually plays with a pick, a feature more common to rock bassists than to jazz, country or western swing players. Greenhaw brings great variety to the Doughboys' bass position. His approach changed the bass sound of the Doughboys' rhythm section; the bass, before always supportive, now is more melodic and noticeable, as in rock music.
Gimble's fiddling style, while uniquely his own, came to be known as the "Texas fiddling style" that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century among fiddlers such as Cliff Bruner, Louis Tierney, and Jesse Ashlock. Gimble learned from them, and further developed while playing with Wills, who epitomized and promoted a new sound known as Western swing. Western swing rose to national prominence in the 1940s, combining the old-time, Southern-derived Anglo string band tradition, with its breakdowns, schottisches, waltzes, and reels, with the big band jazz and pop music of the day. After Gimble married Barbara Kemp of Gatesville, Texas in 1949, he settled in Dallas, where, in the early 1950s, he began doing radio and television shows with Bill and Jim Boyd (of the Lone Star Cowboys) and performed on The Big D Jamboree, a weekly variety show broadcast live from the Dallas Sportatorium.
In 1997, he relocated to California, where he joined Big Sandy & His Flyrite Boys, a rockabilly and western swing group, touring with them for three years. Since then his repertoire has included ragtime and early jazz. He formed the Carl Sonny Leyland Trio in 2003 with Hal Smith on drums (later replaced by Jeff Hamilton) and Marty Eggers on bass. The trio plays primarily boogie woogie and traditional jazz.
In 1925, inspired by Dalhart, he began recording hillbilly songs. His 1930 version of "Hesitation Blues", recorded with the Goofus Five, is considered to predict the western swing style, with an intriguing combination of country and western and Chicago blues feels.Biography by Eugene Chadbourne at Allmusic. Retrieved 6 February 2013 Bernard continued to record into the 1940s He died on March 6, 1949 in Manhattan, New York City.
Williams started out in the early 1940s as vocalist for the band of Western Swing king Spade Cooley, based in Venice, California. Williams' backing band The Western Caravan numbered about a dozen members. They originally played polkas for Capitol Records, and later saw success with "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke" written in large part by Merle Travis. In April 1956 Williams appeared on the Chrysler-sponsored CBS TV broadcast Shower of Stars.
Through the West the same steps could be traced under the names of [the] Collegiate, Balboa, and Dime Jig."Marsh, Agnes L. Textbook of Social Dancing. New York: Fischer, 1935. preface pg VI. And a New York writer sent to Oklahoma in late 1940 noted an "...Oklahoma version of shag done to the western swing music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys at the Cain's Dancing Academy in Tulsa.
By 1949, "Guitar Boogie" reached number eight during a stay of seven weeks on the Hot Country Songs chart and number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making it "the first guitar instrumental to climb the Country charts [then] crossover, and climb the Pop Charts". As an early popular example of hillbilly boogie, it is a link between 1940s Western swing and honky-tonk and 1950s rockabilly.
Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop. Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands, even fully orchestrated bands, vocals, and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead. Additionally, although popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively.
In the late 1920s, O'Daniel assumed responsibility for the Burrus company's radio advertising. To that end, he wrote songs, sang, and hired a group of musicians to form an old timey band to back his vocals. Originally called the Light Crust Doughboys, notable musicians such as Bob Wills got their start with O'Daniel. After the Doughboys split up, O'Daniel formed the Western swing band, Pat O'Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys.
Townsend, Charles R. San Antonio Rose - The Life and Music of Bob Wills (University of Illinois, 1976), p. 203. The Los Angeles-area Wilmington Press carried ads for an unidentified "Western Swing Orchestra" at a local nightspot in April 1942. That winter, influential LA- area jazz and swing disc jockey Al Jarvis held a radio contest for top popular band leaders. The winner would be named "the King of Swing".
Western swing began in the dance halls of small towns throughout the lower Great Plains in the late 1920s and early 1930s,Kienzle, Southwest Shuffle, Preface, pp. vii-xi.Carney, "Country Music", p. 535 growing from house parties and ranch dances where fiddlers and guitarists played for dancers. During its early development, scores of groups from San Antonio to Shreveport to Oklahoma City played different songs with the same basic sound.
When Bob Wills played the Los Angeles Country Barn Dance at the Venice Pier for three nights shortly before he broke up his band to join the U.S. Army during World War II, the attendance was above 15,000. Fearing the dance floor would collapse, police stopped ticket sales at 11 p.m. The line outside at that time was ten deep and stretched into Venice.The King of Western Swing - Bob Wills Remembered.
Pat O'Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys was a Texan Western swing band with its own radio program during the mid-1930s. Pat O'Daniel, the son of "Pappy" O'Daniel, was the band's leader. The Hillbilly Boys, associated with Pappy O'Daniel's flour company which produced Hillbilly Flour, helped catapult Pappy O'Daniel to the governorship of Texas (although this is often credited to Pappy O'Daniel's earlier band, the Light Crust Doughboys).
In 1971, the song was a Top 40 regional hit in Detroit when it was recorded by the band 'Lucifer' for Invictus Records. A lifelong fan of jazz, Penny recorded an instrumental "Hillbilly Be-Bop" (King 795, 1949). It was one of the first western swing numbers to incorporate the new sounds in jazz...bebop. His bands included jazz sidemen such as guitarists Jimmy Wyble, and Benny Garcia.
On this album, Bill Kirchen treads where country music finds its origins in blues and bluegrass, and in the Western Swing of Texas and California honky tonks. He is joined by Nick Lowe, Austin de Lone and The Impossible Birds (Geraint Watkins, Robert Trehern), and their influence is very much in evidence. The title track is a loving tribute to the Fender Telecaster guitar, Kirchen's guitar of choice.
With Milton Brown as his idol and inspiration, Stogner moved to central California, where he formed a popular western swing band in Fresno." Although famous for his long-time big band, The Western Rhythmaires, his first band was called The Arkansawyers.Haslam, Workin' Man Blues, p. 90: "Elwin Cross and the Arizona Ramblers was an important band in part because Cross hired to future stalwarts, Bill Wood and Dave Stogner.
Rutt, p. 26 The duo did play the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and Hollywood's famed Cocoanut Grove, and made a single TV appearance as a team, on the local L.A. program The Spade Cooley Show, starring American Western swing musician and big band leader Donnell Clyde "Spade" Cooley. In 1953, Petrillo, solo, guest-starred in a TV pilot, Wings for Hire, starring Lawrence Tierney and filmed in Florida.Rutt, p.
Price, Jazz Guitar and Western Swing, p. 81: "Eldon Shamblin was a session player for CBS and a regular in standard jazz and swing bands before he joined Bob Wills." As the band's arranger and its first electric guitarist, Shamblin moved it closer to jazz. During World War II, he served in the military for four years, then returned to Wills and remained with the band until the middle 1950s.
By age 10 she was making $3 a night, generous pay during the Great Depression. When Starr's father changed jobs, the family moved to Memphis, where she continued performing on the radio. She sang Western swing music, still mostly a mix of country and pop. While working for Memphis radio station WMPS, misspellings in her fan mail inspired her and her parents to change her name to "Kay Starr".
Miller's influence on early country music is most apparent in Hank Williams's cover of the 1922 Friend–Mills song "Lovesick Blues" and Bob Wills's recording of "I Ain't Got Nobody", both of which closely resemble Miller's versions, and George Strait's Western Swing cover of "Right or Wrong". Merle Haggard, Van Dyke Parks, Ry Cooder, Leon Redbone, Louis Prima, Van Halen and their frontman David Lee Roth have recorded Miller's songs.
John Paul Gimble (May 30, 1926 – May 9, 2015) was an American country musician associated with Western swing. Gimble was considered one of the most important fiddlers in the genre. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 in the early influences category as a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Gimble was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
Based on San Antonio's Riverwalk, the new Aztec Theatre re-opened in August 2009 as a concert venue. San Antonio Rose Live was a two-hour live show featuring traditional country, western swing, and gospel music. Featuring the San Antonio Rose Live Band composed of 9 world-class musicians from Nashville, Branson, Austin and San Antonio. This show closed in February 2012 due to "the current and future economic circumstances".
It does however include a false ending followed by an instrumental outro of the fiddle theme from the Bob Wills classic hit "Faded Love". This outro had not been present in the recorded live version, thus making it hard to hear echoes of Western swing in that arrangement. The album Waylon Live, released in December 1976, was recorded at the same performances that produced "Bob Wills Is Still the King," and included that version again.
Ged plays guitar, resonator and mandolin in The Righteous Prannies. Aust Champ & multi Golden Guitar Winner fiddle player and flatpicker Mike Kerin [Flying Emus, Slim Dusty, Anne Kirkpatrick] leads the group, bass player and producer Michael Vidale who is also a multi Golden Guitar winner [Flying Emus, Jimmy and The Boys, Don Walker, The Bushwackers]. Tinker Duffy (accordion) and Luke Robinson (percussion). They play Celtic, Appalachian, old time, bluegrass, Americana and Western swing.
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were the leading proponents of Western Swing, which combined country singing and steel guitar with big band jazz influences and horn sections; Wills's music found massive popularity. Recordings of Wills's from the mid 1940s to the early 1950s include "two beat jazz" rhythms, "jazz choruses", and guitar work that preceded early rockabilly recordings.San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills. Charles R. Townsend. 1976.
She became a regular singer at the Hotel Café, emerging as a pillar of a vibrant grass- roots scene of young singer/songwriters. Baylin has since moved to Nashville, Tennessee to live with her husband.LAist interview with Jessie Baylin Baylin's album, You was an amalgam of pop, jazz, blues, Western swing, and other rootsy styles. The album was produced by Jesse Harris with Norah Jones, who co-wrote most of the songs.
In 1951, his song "Let's Live a Little" was a big hit, reaching number two on the Billboard country chart. During 1951, he had three other hits, including "If the Teardrops Were Pennies" and his first number-one hit, "Let Old Mother Nature Have Her Way". The songs made Smith a well-known name in country music. His band, the Tunesmiths, featured steel guitarist Johnny Silbert, who added an element of Western swing.
Crumbley made a lifetime out of music mainly in the traditional swing tradition, as with the Cab Calloway and Earl Hines bands of the 1960s and '70s. He joined the Dandie Dixie Minstrels in 1926 with bandleader Lloyd Hunter. He played with the George E. Lee Band, western swing pioneer Tommy Douglas, and Bill Owens. But he continued to work with Hunter as well as players such as Jabbo Smith and Erskine Tate.
He performed on several shows on radio station KMOX in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as the CBS Saturday morning show "Barnyard Frolics." then organized and led a Pennsylvania-based western swing band called the Down Homers, recording for Vogue Records. Rock and roll pioneer Bill Haley joined the band in 1946 as a guitarist and yodeler replacing Roberts who had joined the Navy. Before departing, Roberts taught Haley some of his yodels.
David and Howard Bellamy were inspired by many musical sources from an early age. Their father played country music around the house, and was also a member of a local Western swing band; in addition, they were inspired by the rock and roll music their sister played. Despite having never had formal music training, both brothers learned how to play guitar, mandolin, and banjo. In addition, David learned accordion, fiddle, organ, and piano.
"Sitting on Top of the World" (also "Sittin' on Top of the World") is a country blues song written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon. They were core members of the Mississippi Sheiks, who first recorded it in 1930. Vinson claimed to have composed the song one morning after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi.Cary Ginell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.
R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders are an American retro string band playing songs from, and in the style of, the 1920s: old-time music, ragtime, "evergreen" jazz standards, western swing, country blues, Hawaiian, hokum, vaudeville and medicine show tunes. Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb was the band's frontman and album cover artist. Other members of the band include fellow cartoonist Robert Armstrong and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff (who directed the 1995 documentary Crumb).
Omar Kent Dykes grew up in McComb, Mississippi, began playing the guitar at age 12 and started his first band at 13. In his 20s, he gathered a group of musicians who started calling themselves 'the Howlers'. They specialized in frat parties and were a party band, playing music that included both "R&B;, R&R; and even the occasional polka and western swing tune". Dykes has said he remembers these days fondly.
"Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals" is a song released by Hank Williams under the pseudonym Luke the Drifter. The song dates back to at least 1926 when it was recorded by a number of artists including the Bar Harbor Society Orchestra. It had also previously been recorded and released in 1948 by Bill Haley as Bill Haley and the 4 Aces of Western Swing; it was Haley's first professionally released single.
Reeves was raised in Shamrock, Texas; while in high school he formed his first band which played Western swing music. He studied briefly at the University of Houston before serving in the Korean War. After returning from the military, he received a position as a radio deejay on KCTX (AM) Radio in Childress. In 1955, Reeves recorded his debut single "I'm Johnny on the Spot" for record producer Bob Tanner's TNT Records.
Their repertoire overlaps 1930s swing, including French popular music, gypsy songs, and compositions by Reinhardt, but gypsy swing bands are formulated differently. There is no brass or percussion; guitars and bass form the backbone, with violin, accordion, clarinet or guitar taking the lead. Gypsy swing groups generally have no more than five players. Although they originated in different continents, similarities have often been noted between gypsy swing and Western swing]l, leading to various fusions.
Lee Roy PettitAdam Komorowski, Swinging Hollywood Hillbilly Cowboys (Properbox 85, 2004) booklet, p. 20; California Death Records Index give his father's name as "PETTIT"; Social Security Death Index list his name as "LEE ROY M PETTIT", last residence as "Calimesa, Riverside, CA". (October 29, 1916 – July 31, 1994), known professionally as Ramblin' Jimmie Dolan, was a Western swing musician born in Gardena, California.Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits.
Accessed March 16, 2019. In 1934, Clauser and the Oklahoma Outlaws moved to Des Moines, Iowa, which had a popular radio show on station WHO, where they were regulars until 1937. The band specialized in Western swing, playing the popular songs of the day, with Clauser's original songs added in. Al Clauser & His Oklahoma Outlaws appeared in an early Gene Autry film, Rootin' Tootin' Rhythm, and recorded a dozen tracks for ARC.
Baker, who played western swing, had little interest in bluegrass music until he heard "Wheel Hoss" and "Roanoke". During a package show with Don Gibson, Baker met Monroe and was offered a job. He cut his first recordings with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys on December 15, 1957. Kenny Baker served more years in Monroe's band than any other musician and was selected by Monroe to record the fiddle tunes passed down from Uncle Pen Vandiver.
Joining the Ecco-Fonics in 1998, Deke toured, signed to HighTone Records and released three albums for the label. His style incorporates country, alternative country, rockabilly, hillbilly, blues, western swing and rock 'n' roll. Dickerson writes a regular column in Guitar Player magazine and feature articles in Vintage Guitar magazine and The Fretboard Journal. He also organizes an annual "Guitar Geek Festival" held in Anaheim, California, every January, during the NAMM Show.
Gradually, the Cajun accordion emerged to share the limelight. In the early 1930s, the accordion was pushed into the background by the popular string sounds of the time. Piano and other string instruments joined fiddle to create a jazzy swing beat strongly influenced by Western Swing of neighboring Texas. The Cajun fiddle was a well established instrument which had been somewhat eclipsed by the German accordion fad, which had similar effect in French Canada.
Too Cold at Home was met with generally positive critical and commercial reception. Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly praised Chesnutt's singing voice and honky-tonk style, but felt that the album had too many cover songs. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic compared the album's sound to Western swing and George Jones. In 1994, Too Cold at Home earned a platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for U.S. shipments of one million copies.
Elvis Presley was a prominent player of rockabilly and was known early in his career as the "Hillbilly Cat". When the Country Music Association was founded in 1958, the term hillbilly music gradually fell out of use. The music industry merged hillbilly music, Western swing, and Cowboy music, to form the current category C&W;, Country and Western. Some artists (notably Hank Williams) and fans were offended by the "hillbilly music" label.
Newer traditions have grown out of old time fiddle music but it retains a separate and distinct identity from those styles. These include bluegrass and Western swing and to some degree country rock. However, the positive statement of what, exactly, constitutes the true and authentic delineation of old time fiddle music is not necessarily unambiguous. Different sources draw a sharper distinction than others, and there is a good deal of overlap which purists will acknowledge to a varying degree.
Kaminski sings, plays piano, and accordion in polka bands.Joann Vitelli, Matthew Kaminski is the music of the Atlanta Braves Atlanta Business Chronicle June 7, 2019.Matthew Kaminski is a member of the Latin Salsa orchestra Orquesta MaCuba, the Western swing band Back in the Saddle, and leads the Georgia Polka Band.Matthew Kaminski Matthew Kaminski is a Hammond Organ/Leslie Speaker Artist and is highlighted at the instrument maker's website as representing a passion for playing the organ.
Jack Guthrie, Woody's cousin, changed the lyrics and music slightly and in 1945 recorded a Western swing version, which reached No. 1 on the Juke Box Folk Records charts. It remains the best-known version of "Oklahoma Hills", and was the biggest hit of Jack Guthrie's fairly short life. Though Woody originated the song, the official Woody Guthrie website credits both him and Jack as its writers, perhaps because Jack's changes have become so well known.
Stay All Night was recorded in 2003Ibiblio; The Public's Library and Digital Archive Bluegrass Discography; Stay All Night across two cities. The eight Bluegrass music tracks were recorded at Allan Eaton Studios in St Kilda, Victoria. The studio was familiar to the boys as they had previously played on The Man from Snowy River: Arena Spectacular soundtrack at this studio. Five Country music and Western swing tracks were recorded at Swinging Doors Studios in Kareela, New South Wales.
"Sunday Night", by F.W. Root, 1878, provided some of the lyrics for the Bob Wills version of "Ida Red". In the 1930s Bob Wills took the old tune and set it to a 2/4 dance beat to be played by his Western swing dance band, the Texas Playboys. His 1938 recording (Vocalion 05079) became a hit. The song, as originally recorded by Wills, borrowed lyrics from an 1878 popular song written by Frederick W. Root ("Sunday Night").
Johnson was well known for a playing style described as "dum chuck" combining elements of American Western swing and jazz with traditional Shetland fiddling music. He was associated with the stylistically opposite fiddle player Dr Tom Anderson, and was an influence on Aly Bain (fiddle) and Martin Taylor (guitar). Johnson's childhood was plagued by ill health which interrupted his schooling; he left school without qualifications. However, he took up music after seeing a photograph of a ukulele-playing cowboy.
Jann Browne (born March 14, 1954 in Anderson, Indiana) is an American country singer. She moved to Southern California in 1978 where she performed in a number of Orange County country bars.The Encyclopedia of country music - Oxford University Press 1998 From 1981 through 1983, before her solo career, she was a vocalist with the Western swing group Asleep at the Wheel. She has recorded four studio albums, and has charted three singles on the Hot Country Songs charts.
"Bubbles in My Beer" is a Western swing song that was originally recorded by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in 1947. It later became a standard that has been performed by many country music artists. One critic of drinking songs ranks it number 20, calls it "the ultimate self-pity song," and credits it with "setting the tone for a whole genre of songs about drowning sorrows in the barroom."Rich Stewart, "Rhythm and Booze," Modern Drunkard Magazine .
In a retrospective review of the album for website AllMusic, James Chrispell awarded the album three and a half out of five stars and stated: "Combining old-fashioned swing, western swing, country ballads, Cajun and good ol' rock & roll, Asleep at the Wheel turns a wonderful performance on Wheelin' and Dealin'." Robert Christgau awarded the album a B rating, slightly lower than its predecessor Texas Gold, noting that "this LP singles out no really striking nonoriginals".
At the age of three, Musselwhite moved to Memphis, Tennessee. When he was a teenager, Memphis experienced the period when rockabilly, western swing, and electric blues were combining to give birth to rock and roll. That period featured Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and lesser-known musicians such as Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Johnny Burnette. Musselwhite supported himself by digging ditches, laying concrete and running moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln automobile.
At the age of 18 he organized his own band (the Renegade Band later renamed the Richard Lynch Band) and has been successfully recording and touring ever since. Lynch refers to his music as "pure country, showcasing elements of western swing, honky tonk and outlaw country". His style is influenced by classic American country artists like Keith Whitley, Conway Twitty and George Strait. In January 2017 Lynch collaborated with Ronnie McDowell on a military tribute duet "Love Tattoo".
In 2004 she was inducted, with her Hot Club bandmates, into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame. James has recorded with a wide array of folk, country, and Americana artists including Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Slaid Cleaves, Denny Freeman, Dave Stuckey, Eliza Gilkyson, Heybale, Tom Russell, The Hoyle Brothers, Kerry Polk, Beatroot, Bruce Anfinson, and many others. She and Hot Club Of Cowtown appeared on "Larry's Country Diner" on RFD-TV in July 2019.
"Maybellene" is a rock and roll song. It was written and recorded in 1955 by Chuck Berry, adapted in part from the Western swing fiddle tune "Ida Red". Berry's song told the story of a hot rod race and a broken romance, the lyrics describing a man driving a V8 Ford and chasing his unfaithful girlfriend in her Cadillac Coupe DeVille. It was released in July 1955 as a single by Chess Records, of Chicago, Illinois.
On the double bass, the technique was developed in Western swing bands in the 1920s, and spread to other genres, including jazz, rockabilly, and other offshoots of those styles. On the bass guitar, the technique is widely credited to Larry Graham, an electric bassist playing with Sly and the Family Stone in the late 1960s. The technique quickly spread to the funk and disco genres. Slapping is a technique also adopted by acoustic and electric fingerstyle guitarists.
His recordings of 1956-57 are a mix of Western swing, rock and roll, and straight country music. He played regularly in Mobile, Alabama and toured the South sporadically. He recorded with Dollie Records at the end of the 1950s, his last major contract; he continued performing locally for some time after that. He ran a dance club in Georgia in the 1970s, and returned to rockabilly performing in the 1980s as the Europeans revived it.
Hart was born in Oakland, California, and spent some time in Carroll County, Mississippi, in his youth, where he was influenced by the Mississippi country blues performed by his relatives. Hart is known as one of the world's foremost practitioners of country blues. He is also known as a faithful torchbearer for 1960s and 1970s guitar rock, as well as western swing and traditional country. His style has been compared to Lead Belly and Spade Cooley.
In 2008, The Hot Club of Cowtown, with James, guitarist Whit Smith and bassist Jake Erwin re-formed, and continued touring and recording. In 2008, the band released The Best of the Hot Club of Cowtown, followed by Wishful Thinking in 2009, and in 2011, a collection of Western swing songs made popular by legendary Texas bandleader Bob Wills, What Makes Bob Holler. The Hot Club of Cowtown's most recent albums include Rendezvous in Rhythm, (Gold Strike Records, 2013), a collection of hot jazz standards and traditional Romanian-style instrumentals performed acoustically, in the style of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli; Midnight on the Trail, a compilation of early Western swing and cowboy songs; "Crossing the Great Divide," a 7-track EP of songs written by The Band on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the release of Music from Big Pink and The Band; and Wild Kingdom, an album of original material released on September 27, 2019. James has worked in the Bob Marshall and Lee Metcalf Wilderness of Montana as a wrangler, packer, cook, and guide.
In 2013, Bonebrake joined the World Takes, helmed by Stephen Maglio. The band released an album, Love Songs for eX's, and toured with the Meat Puppets. Although most of his work has been within the punk genre, Bonebrake heads two jazz ensembles: the Bonebrake Syncopators, who play early jazz standards in a swing and western swing style; and Orchestra Superstring who play Afro-Cuban jazz and Latin jazz. In both jazz groups, Bonebrake plays vibraphone or marimba rather than a drum kit.
He and his younger brother Emil and Simon Garcia formed the Hawaiian Serenaders and performed locally.Carlin 2003, p. 185. Influenced by Milton Brown and Bob Wills, Hofner became a singer in a band that played what was later called Western swing, a combination of country music and jazz. He kept his day job as a mechanic while performing at night in clubs in San Antonio. In the 1930s, Hofner, Emil, and fiddler Jimmie Revard started the band the Oklahoma Playboys.
He was born James George Tomkins, in Hillingdon Hospital, Middlesex, England, and went to Woodfield Secondary School in Cranford, Middlesex. At the age of 14, he began learning the guitar, and within two years had turned professional. When he was young he played with Sid Gilbert and the Clay County Boys, a Western swing group, Johnny Duncan's Blue Grass Boys, Vince Taylor & the Playboys, Janice Peters & the Playboys, and the Vince Eager Band. Sullivan gave guitar lessons to near-neighbour Ritchie Blackmore.
Outlaw was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota as Sam Morgan. At the age of 10, his family moved to southern California. He grew up in a conservative Christian home and was limited by his parents as to what kind of music he could listen to. He did however, note the influence of Western Swing band Asleep at the Wheel and how their all-star tribute albums to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys acted as "country music in a bottle" for him.
Collision Course is the sixth album by American country band Asleep at the Wheel. Produced by Joel Dorn at Regent Sound Studios in New York City, it was released in June 1978 as the group's fourth and final studio album on Capitol Nashville. After 1977's The Wheel featured all original material, Collision Course features only two tracks written by members of the band. The remaining recordings are covers of compositions originally by popular Western swing, Cajun and jazz artists.
12 but Phillips asked him to perform some of the many other songs he knew. After running through a few songs, Presley expressed an interest in finding a band to play with, and Phillips invited local Western swing musicians Winfield "Scotty" Moore (electric guitar) and Bill Black (slap bass) to audition Presley. They did so on Sunday, July 4, 1954, at Moore's house. Neither musician was overly impressed, but they agreed a studio session would be useful to explore his potential.
Angelo Dos Santos (born September 8, 1940) is a Brazilian musician. At the age of 11, Dos Santos, while under his uncle's custody, Julio Dos Santos, moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When he was a teenager, Rio de Janeiro experienced the period when Bossa Nova, western swing, and some forms of American Big Band music were combining to give birth to classical orchestral harmonica music. The period featured bands such as Borrah Minnevitch and his Harmonica Rascals, and The Harmonicats.
Corresponding tunings for a six string lap steel guitar are the E6 tuning E-G#-B-C#-E-G#, or E7 tuning B-D-E-G#-B-E. A popular E9 tuning for eight string table steel guitar is the western swing tuning E-G#-B-D-F#-G#-B-E, low to high and near to far. The standard Nashville E9 tuning for ten string pedal steel guitar is B-D-E-F#-G#-B-E-G#-D#-F#.
In 2000, the Institute offered its first Visiting Research Fellowship which brought scholars to campus for two weeks each year to study materials in Baylor's oral history collection. From 2000 through 2011, the fellowship contributed to the scholarship of eleven outstanding historians. Ph.D. candidates and seasoned scholars alike have benefited from researching the diverse topics in the collection, including interviews on rural life, southern culture and religion, Western swing music, economics and politics, Baptist fundamentalism, the civil rights movement, and public education.
Rickenbacker lap steel guitar, Electro B6, with Beauchamp horseshoe pickup, late 1930s The first lap steels had a smaller body, but still retained a guitar-like shape. Instrument makers rapidly began making them into a rectangular block of wood with an electric pickup, the precursor of the pedal steel. According to music writer Michael Ross, the first electrified stringed instrument on a commercial recording was a western swing tune by Bob Dunn in 1935. He recorded with Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies.
"Right or Wrong" was recorded by many early jazz and swing orchestras, including Mike Markel and His Orchestra (OKeh 4478, 1921), Original Dixie Jazz Band (Oriole 445, 1925), Peggy English (Brunswick 3949, 1928), Tampa Red (Bluebird 6832, 1936). The recording with the longest lasting influence was performed by the black-faced Emmett Miller and the Georgia Crackers (OKeh 41280, 1929). Miller's version was picked up by an early Bob Wills and became a standard Western swing dance tune.Stambler, Country Music, p.
Burchard and Scott officially formed Moonlight Social on January 14, 2011. The duo reportedly chose the name "Moonlight Social" as a metaphor for their honest, conversational songwriting style. Burchard recorded, produced, and mixed the band's debut, self-titled Moonlight Social EP on a budget of $150. Before the EP came out, Ray Benson of western swing band Asleep At The Wheel selected Moonlight Social to play a spotlight stage at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport as part of the South by Southwest Festival.
Ralph Joseph Reynolds was born in Denver, Colorado, and was raised in the small town of Shady Grove, Oklahoma. Inspired by Western Swing and artists such as Bob Wills, Hank Thompson, and Eddy Arnold, who he heard on the radio, Reynolds took up guitar at age 14. He began playing rockabilly in Texas in the mid-1950s after hearing performers such as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison. While performing in San Diego, California, Reynolds met music publisher Herb Montel.
The Time Jumpers performing at the Station Inn in 2011The Time Jumpers is the name of a Grammy-winning Western swing band formed in 1998 by a group of Nashville studio musicians who enjoyed jamming together. Country star Vince Gill was a member of the group between 2010 and 2020. The 11–member group started playing occasional local gigs until they agreed to take a regular slot playing at the Station Inn, a venerable Nashville bluegrass venue."The Time Jumpers at Station Inn".
Johnny Loftus reviewed the album with favor on AllMusic, calling "Men" a "Bonnie Raitt-lite country pop number", and finding influences of Western swing and gospel in some tracks while simultaneously complimenting the sisters' harmonies. The sisters' final chart entries came in 1992 from the album I Got a Date. Both "What'll You Do About Me" (later a top-20 hit in 1995 for Doug SupernawWhitburn, p. 353) and the title track fell short of the country music top 40.
The historical development of particular swing dance styles was often in response to trends in popular music. For example, 1920s and solo Charleston was – and is – usually danced to ragtime music or traditional jazz, Lindy Hop was danced to swing music (a kind of swinging jazz), and Lindy Charleston to either traditional or swing jazz. West Coast Swing is usually danced to Pop, R&B;, Blues, or Funk. Western Swing and Push/Whip are usually danced to country and western or Blues music.
313 Trying to repeat his success, Shibley recorded at least four follow-up songs. Ramblin' Jimmie Dolan, Tiny Hill, and Red Foley, all released versions in 1951; Hill's version reached number seven on the Country charts and number 29 on the pop charts. Shibley's record may have climbed higher and outpaced any of the others, but his second verse opened up with: Eastern radio stations, never a fan of Western swing anyway, refused to play it.Grushkin, Rockin' Down the Highway, p.
He formed a new Western swing band of his own at age 21 and began touring the Southeast United States. Gordon served in the Army briefly during the Korean War; while there he met Roger Miller, whom he later helped get signed. In June 1952, an employee of RCA Victor heard Gordon playing in a contest in Atlanta and told executive Steve Sholes about him. Gordon signed with RCA soon after and began recording for the label in the fall.
The Two Man Gentlemen Band are a modern musical duo consisting of Andy Bean (lead vocals, tenor guitar, banjo) and Fuller Condon (upright bass, backing vocals). Their musical style is drawn from the tradition of Slim & Slam, and incorporates a contemporary mix of early jazz, western swing, and vaudeville with humorous lyrics. The Two Man Gentlemen Band have released eight studio albums. Their most recent album, Enthusiastic Attempts at Hot Jazz & Swing Band Favorites, was released by Bean-Tone Records in 2014.
Doc Watson performing in 1994 In 1953, Watson joined the Johnson City, Tennessee-based Jack Williams' country and western swing band on electric guitar. The band seldom had a fiddle player, but was often asked to play at square dances. Following the example of country guitarists Grady Martin and Hank Garland, Watson taught himself to play fiddle tunes on his Gibson Les Paul electric guitar. He later transferred the technique to acoustic guitar, and playing fiddle tunes became part of his signature sound.
Merle's band, The Strangers, were also present during the recording, but Wills suffered a massive stroke after the first day of recording. Merle arrived on the second day, devastated that he would not get to record with him, but the album helped return Wills to public consciousness, and set off a Western swing revival. Haggard did other tribute albums to Bob Wills over the next 40 years. In 1973 he appeared on For the Last Time: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
Ingle and his Natural Seven also performed with Grand Ole Opry performers such as Minnie Pearl and other Opry notables. He joined Jo Stafford on her 1949 tour of the Midwest. Despite the comedy emphasis, the quality of the musicianship was often outstanding, including in some cases Les Paul or Western Swing performers Tex Williams and steel guitarist Noel Boggs. The band also recorded short films of their numbers, before disbanding in 1952; by 1956, Ingle had formed the band once again.
A version with an English language lyric was recorded in February 1940 by Adolph Hofner and his Texans, one of the great Western Swing bands, in Dallas. Lawrence Welk brought the song wide attention in the United States on his radio program, then in 1941 on the Okeh Records label. The song was a hit for the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra with Bob Eberly doing the vocals. The recording was made on March 19, 1941 by Decca Records as catalog number 3698.
Edwin Duhon (11 June 1910 in Broussard, Louisiana - 26 February 2006 in Westlake, Louisiana) was an American musician and co-founder of the Hackberry Ramblers, a band playing a combination of Cajun music, Western swing, and country music. Duhon formed the Hackberry Ramblers along with fiddler Luderin Darbone in 1933. He first played acoustic guitar and went on to play electric guitar, piano, double bass, harmonica, and accordion at various times. He focused solely on the accordion from the mid-1990s.
Soon after this he decided, as all successful people must decide at some time or another, to be his own boss again – and he has been that ever since.' These notes fail to account for his early band, known as the Four Aces of Western Swing. During the 1940s Haley was considered one of the top cowboy yodelers in America as "Silver Yodeling Bill Haley". One source states that Hayley started his career as "The Rambling Yodeler" in a country band, The Saddlemen.
Eddie Jackson (1926 - January 14, 2002) was an American country and rockabilly musician. Jackson was born in Cookeville, Tennessee, and moved as a youngster with his family to Detroit, Michigan. He began playing country and Western swing in local bars as a teenager, and served in the Navy during World War II. He fronted a band called The Cowboy Swingsters, then simply The Swingsters for nearly 50 years, playing rhythm guitar and singing. Other musicians in his bands, such as Jimmy Franklin during the 1950s, sometimes sang.
On 1 January she was awarded a Centenary Medal by Prime Minister, John Howard. In 2001, she met Glen Hannah who became her boyfriend. Urquhart performed with western swing group Feral Swing Katz at the Gympie National Country Music Muster in August – the performance was broadcast a year later on Live on Stage by ABC Radio National with Vince Jones presenting. In 2002, she travelled to Nashville to record tracks for a future album with Hannah providing acoustic guitar, harmony vocals and song writing.
Some purists were appalled at the prospect; traditionally a string bass provided the rhythm component in country music, and percussion instruments were seldom used. Electric amplification, new in the beginning days of the Opry, was regarded as the province of popular music and jazz in the 1940s. Although the Opry allowed electric guitars and steel guitars by World War II, the restrictions against drums and horns continued, causing a conflict when Bob WillsKienzle, Richard. (2003). Southwest shuffle: pioneers of honky-tonk, Western swing, and country jazz.
Dean and Mark Mathis, real-life brothers, in their childhood were taught the guitar by their mother, and they soon mastered other musical instruments — piano, bass guitar, and drums. They both played in a band at Bremen High School, Georgia, and decided on a career in the music industry upon leaving education. Dean joined Paul Howard's Western swing band in 1956 as pianist, then joined Dale Hawkins' band, where his brother soon joined as a bass player. They stayed with the band for two years.
Chicago-Style Stepping, affectionately known as steppin, like most social dances, evolved from the "Bop" in the 1970s. In 1973 Sam Chatman was the first to coin the term "Chicago Step", and has been widely credited with marking steppin's evolutionary transition from Bop. The swing dance known as Steppin' is a part of the Western Swing family. The parent dance "Chicago Bop" may have been more Eastern Swing, but Steppin' has characteristics more similar to Western, especially its usage of a lane or slot.
Primarily made up of original material, it features three cover versions including a recording of Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally", which was released as a single in January 1996. Guest performers on the album include steel guitarist Lloyd Maines, bassist Dave Pomeroy and drummer Chad Cromwell. The Wheel Keeps on Rollin' received positive reviews from the majority of critics, many of whom praised its mix of "classic" Western swing and more radio-friendly country music. Some commentators, however, criticised's Benson vocal performances on the record.
Initially, LeJeune found the going tough because at the time the accordion and Cajun music had become unpopular, as it was being replaced by the fiddle and Western Swing music. In postwar Louisiana, many felt Acadiana should assimilate with the rest of America and eliminate the French language, culture and music. Luckily, in 1948 LeJeune met fiddler Floyd LeBlanc. Together they traveled to Houston, Texas where they recorded "Love Bridge Waltz" and "Evangeline Special" on Leblanc's "Opera" label with Virgil Bozeman's Oklahoma Tornadoes supporting.
Patsy Montana opened the door for female artists with her history-making song "I Want To Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart". This would begin a movement toward opportunities for women to have successful solo careers. Bob Wills was another country musician from the Lower Great Plains who had become very popular as the leader of a "hot string band," and who also appeared in Hollywood westerns. His mix of country and jazz, which started out as dance hall music, would become known as Western swing.
In the postwar period, KGO produced many live music programs, including that of Western Swing bandleader Bob Wills, whose music was a staple of the time. KGO was instrumental in bringing the first exercise show to broadcasting, hosted by Jack LaLanne, a fitness instructor and gym operator in nearby Oakland. LaLanne conducted his radio fitness show for many years on KGO, moving in the late 1950s to KGO-TV and a successful TV syndication career. By the late 1950s, KGO had suffered poor ratings.
The group recorded and performed with David Byrne, Seu Jorge, Bebel Gilberto and Steve Earle. In 2005, Hormel formed Smokey's Secret Family, which plays Brazilian-, Caribbean-, and African-styled surf music; and Smokey's Round-up, a western swing band. In the early 2000s, Smokey was a primary player on Johnny Cash's final album, American Recordings, which included the Grammy Award-winning cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt". From 2004 to 2010, Hormel was a composer and guitarist for the Nickelodeon TV cartoon series The Backyardigans.
Kesler was born in Abbeville, Mississippi. He learned to play mandolin and guitar as a child, and steel guitar during his time in the U.S. Marines. After his discharge, he formed a band with his brothers, before joining Al Rodgers in his band, performing in and around Amarillo, Texas. After two years with Rodgers, Kesler moved around 1950 to Memphis, where he played in various country and Western swing bands, including the Snearly Ranch Boys led by Clyde Leoppard, who also included Quinton Claunch.
Sir Douglas Quintet were an American rock band that experimented with Latin folk elements during the 1960s. Rock and roll music of the 1950s originated from a variety of sources including rhythm and blues, blues, gospel, country and western, bluegrass, western swing, and Tin Pan Alley pop music. Also, there was some influence of the traditional Latin music on it. Caribbean rhythms like calypso were used in surf music; and there were some rock and roll songs based on cha-cha-chá or mambo.
Biography by Jason Ankeny at AllmusicAutobiography at Julian Aberbach website By this time he had developed an interest in country music, which he saw as a potentially profitable component of American popular music.Biography After leaving the Army he set up a publishing business, Hill and Range, in Los Angeles with business partners Milton Blink and Gerald King.John Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 1, p.586 There, he heard the Western swing bandleader Spade Cooley who was performing at the Venice Pier.
He played football and was in the school band playing clarinet. He served in the 112th Cavalry Regiment of the Texas National Guard where he gained riding experience His first band was called The Rhythm Aces and they worked with many Western Swing bands such as Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, the Light Crust Doughboys, and Bill Boyd's Cowboy Ramblers. In 1934, Davis was recording with the Cowboy Ramblers for Bluebird Records. He added the mandolin to his repertoire of instruments that he played.
In January 1935, Brown's band signed with Decca records and recorded 36 songs for the label with Brown singing lead vocals on most all of the tracks. Released as singles over the course of 1935, the songs helped establish the band as the most popular Western swing band in the entire southwest United States. In March 1936, Brown and his Musical Brownies travelled to New Orleans to record their second set of sessions for Decca. By this time, fiddler Brower had been replaced by Cliff Bruner.
Restless is the fifth studio album by Shelby Lynne, released on July 18, 1995 on Magnatone Records, and later re-released on Curb Records. Lynne co-wrote six of the songs on the album. The album is considered the last in a series of efforts for Lynne to attract mainstream country music audiences, this time incorporating elements of western swing. Lynne did not record another album with a Nashville-based record label until more than a decade later, when she signed with Lost Highway Records.
The Longhorn Ballroom sign as of January 8, 2017. The Longhorn Ballroom is a music venue and country western dance hall in Dallas, Texas (USA). It was known in the early 1950s as Bob Wills' Ranch House when the large ballroom was built and operated by O.L. Nelms, an eccentric Dallas millionaire, for his close friend, western swing bandleader Bob Wills. When Wills left, O.L. Nelms leased the sprawling dance club to Jack Ruby who later killed Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy's accused assassin.
By the early part of the 1960s, however, the Nashville sound had become perceived as too watered-down by many more traditionalist performers and fans, resulting in a number of local scenes like the Bakersfield sound. A few performers retained popularity, however, such as the long-standing cultural icon Johnny Cash.Garofalo, p. 140. The Bakersfield sound began in the mid to late 1950s when performers like Wynn Stewart and Buck Owens began using elements of Western swing and rock, such as the breakbeat, in their music.Collins.
Cole started as a musician, playing the accordion as a young teenager with three other kids in a western swing band. The band played in amateur contests and small clubs, and even managed to get a one-time gig on Ray Bolger's mid-1950s television show Where's Raymond? Besides playing the accordion, he was also the band's singer. When the ensemble auditioned together at the Disney Studio for The Mickey Mouse Club in spring 1955, he was the only one selected to join the cast of Mouseketeers.
Knocky Parker (August 8, 1918, Palmer, Texas – September 3, 1986, Los Angeles, California), born John William Parker, II, was an American jazz pianist. He played primarily ragtime and Dixieland jazz. A native of Texas, Parker played in the Western swing bands The Wanderers (1935) and the Light Crust Doughboys (1937–39) before serving in the military during World War II. After the war he worked with Zutty Singleton and Albert Nicholas. He became an English professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College and the University of South Florida.
An uncredited review in Time called it "a classic hard- times complaint about the rent, the banker at the door, and a roof that is crumbling". The Orlando Sentinel called it "a humorous workingman's lament about such everyday woes as high rent and car trouble. The arrangement is high-siprited Texas swing, but the song has a dark undertone with double-edged lines such as 'Well, I haven't bought the farm yet, but I'm not that far behind.'" The song has a western swing accompaniment.
Gosdin's rendition was a number 10 country hit that year. "Spaghetti Western Swing" is a narrative skit featuring Redd Volkaert. The final track is a hidden track called "Kung Pao", another skit featuring Bill Anderson, George Jones and "Little" Jimmy Dickens. "The Cigar Song" is based on an urban legend about a man who purchases expensive cigars and takes out insurance on them, then smokes them and asks for the insurance money after claiming that they were lost in a "series of small fires".
The music was strictly for dancing, and included mostly the simpler one and two step dances with quite a few foxtrots along with both "cowboy" and "Mexican" waltzes. Cain's Dance Academy opened in 1930 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. People danced to "hot hillbilly music" or "hot string-band music". Bob Wills and Texas Play Boys played Western Swing nightly from 1934 until 1943. Crowds at Cain's Ballroom were as large as 6,000 people. Regular shows continued until 1958 with Johnnie Lee Wills as the bandleader.
From the 1970s until May 2002, the station was primarily known for its country music heritage, as well as being nationally famous for Western swing music. KVOO hosted such musicians as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Johnnie Lee Wills and Billy Parker, who has won awards as country music disc jockey of the year. One of the places in Tulsa made famous by KVOO Radio was Cain's Ballroom, located on Main Street. Cain's Ballroom was the performing place for Bob Wills, with live broadcasts on KVOO.
Wald, Gayle, Shout, Sister, Shout!, p. 42 The following year, Western swing musician Buddy Jones recorded "Rockin' Rollin' Mama", which drew on the term's original meaning – "Waves on the ocean, waves in the sea/ But that gal of mine rolls just right for me/ Rockin' rollin' mama, I love the way you rock and roll". In August 1939, Irene Castle devised a new dance called "The Castle Rock and Roll", described as "an easy swing step", which she performed at the Dancing Masters of America convention at the Hotel Astor.
Miller became the founder of Essex Records in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1951. The label had local popular success, being known mostly for its release of the early records by Bill Haley & His Comets. Miller originally changed the name of the group from the "Four Aces of Western Swing" to "Bill Haley and the Saddlemen" then repeated a suggestion that the group change their name to the Comets after Halley's Comet. After Haley and the Comets signed to Decca Records, Haley sued Miller for selling the group's earlier records on his Essex label without paying royalties.
She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Chatsworth, California, the daughter of former Western Swing bandleader and comedian Hank Penny and his wife, Shari. An early acting appearance was on the miniseries The Thorn Birds when she was only 11 years old as young Meggie. She also appeared as Dani in The New Gidget and as a pigeon-obsessed youngster in an episode of the police series T. J. Hooker. At the age of 13, Penny played Megan Wheeler in the Clint Eastwood western Pale Rider, released on June 26, 1985.
Media response to Merry Texas Christmas, Y'all was largely positive. AllMusic's Ross Boissoneau wrote that "Ray Benson and company have outdone themselves, with nods to traditional country ... as well as the band's stock in trade, Western swing. All in all, it's a fun and amusing way to get your fill of the sounds of the season." Similarly, Eric Fidler of The Daily News Journal noted that "The band manages to straddle categories, with a lovely straight-ahead version of "Silent Night" ... a delightfully swinging "Feliz Navidad" ... and novelty tunes such as "Xmas in Jail.
A friend, blues guitarist Sam Mitchell, asked her to deputise for him at Obelisk, a Westbourne Grove pancake house where he played on Monday nights. Dore co-opted Julian Littman and Karl Johnson to help pad out the long sets required and the band grew, eventually including Karl's brother Stuart Johnson on banjo and dobro, and various guests on fiddle, mandolin and guitar. This was the basis of her first band, Hula Valley. The band played a selection of bluegrass, western swing and hillbilly music, as Dore was yet to start her own songwriting.
Johnny Cash Rockabilly was most popular with country fans in the 1950s; one of the first rock and roll superstars was former Western yodeler Bill Haley, who repurposed his Four Aces of Western Swing into a rockabilly band in the early 1950s and renamed it the Comets. Bill Haley & His Comets are credited with two of the first successful rock and roll records, "Crazy Man, Crazy" of 1953 and "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954.Bill Haley's biography at the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
Its culture is a complex blending and separation of the cultures different people originally brought with them to Texas. Its African American community contributed to the blues through various artists, and it is the only place in world where its past musicians such as Adolph Hofner sang Western Swing Style music in Czech and German. It is larger in size than most European nations. Its geography, climate, people, neighboring regions, and size make it far too diverse to be classified in any other way than one truly of its own.
Oklahoma has been the source of several pop music movements that can be traced not only to a specific city but to a specific location within the city. Those music scenes include Western swing (attributed to Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa), and Leon Russell's Tulsa Sound from his Tulsa church-turned-studio called The Church Studio. Like those two, red dirt music grew from a specific place in Stillwater. The place was an old two-story, five-bedroom house called "The Farm", for two decades the center of what evolved into the red dirt scene.
Western swing in its beginnings was just dance music. The term swing, meaning big band dance music, wasn't used until after the 1932 hit "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)".Marble, Freedom On My Mind, p. 57. Recording companies came up with several names before World War II trying to market it—hillbilly, old-time music, novelty hot dance, hot string band, and even Texas swing for music coming out of Texas and Louisiana.Lang, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, p. 89.
A contemporary incarnation beginning in the 1990s (including Montgomery until his death in 2001) bills itself as the longest-running country music band in the world. The Light Crust Doughboys were charter inductees into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1989, and were also inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In December 2005, the Light Crust Doughboys Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Quitman, Texas. The Light Crust Doughboys Museum was later moved in 2015 to the Auvenshine Library at Hill College in Hillsboro, Texas.
In 1946 the top spot was dominated by two songs which each spent 16 weeks at number one and which between them topped the chart from February to September. In the issue of Billboard dated February 2, "Guitar Polka" by Al Dexter reached number one for the first time, albeit jointly with three other songs. After one week out of the top spot it returned to number one, where it spent fifteen consecutive weeks, one of them jointly with "New Spanish Two Step" by Bob Wills, widely known as the "King of Western swing".
According to Jimmy Thomason, "It happened when Dunn was working at Coney Island in New York...he ran into this black guy who was playing a steel guitar with a homemade pickup attached to it...hooked up to this old radio or something and was playing blues licks...and he got this guy to show him how he was doing it. I never knew this black musician's name but both Bob and Avis talked to me about him often."Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Cary Ginell. 1994.
His first one had ten strings and was built for Al Giddings. Bigsby's most famous mandolin, built in 1952, was owned and played by Western swing musician Tiny Moore. This instrument had five single courses rather than the more common four double courses, and was patterned after a similar instrument built by Jim Harvey of La Jolla, California, for a player named Scotty Broyles. Gibson and Rickenbacker introduced solid-body eight-string mandolins in the 1950s,Rickenbacker 5002V58 while Fender followed the single- course idea with its four-string version.
Cecil Lee Brower (November 28, 1914 – November 21, 1965) was a classically trained American jazz violinist who became an architect of Western swing in the 1930s. Perhaps the greatest swing fiddler, he could improvise as well as double shuffle and created his own style which became the benchmark for his contemporaries. Brower played in many Western bands, including his own, and was a renowned Nashville session musician. He performed with some of the biggest names in country music until his death at age 50 while a member of Jimmy Dean's band.
311: "A notebook kept by Bob Wills in 1931, when he was doing a radio program in an early phase of his career in Texas with Herman Arnspringer, listed songs drawn from [Emmett] Miller's repertoire: 'Right or wrong,' 'Big Bad Bill, 'Blues Singer from Alabam,' 'I Ain't got Nobody,' and 'Lovin' Sam'. " Both Wills (Vocalion 03451, 1936) and Milton Brown (Decca 5342, 1936) made early recordings. Western swing versions generally do not include any of the verses, only repetitions of the chorus. The song also appears on Leon Redbone's 1990 album Sugar.
She split from Epic and signed with the smaller Morgan Creek label, debuting with 1993's Temptation, an exercise in Bob Wills-style Western swing and big band jazz. The label folded not long after, and she moved on to Magnatone for 1995's Restless, which marked a return to contemporary-style country. Afterward, Lynne disappeared from recording for several years. One notable project that she assisted on was Vince Gill's 1996 High Lonesome Sound album, where she provided background, harmony vocals on the song "You And You Alone".
Haley's Juke Box: Songs of the Bill Haley Generation (often listed in reference books as Bill Haley's Jukebox), was the eleventh studio album by Bill Haley & His Comets. Released by Warner Bros. Records in the summer of 1960, the album was produced by George Avakian. With this record, Haley attempted to return to his roots as a country music singer, by recording an album of classic country and western songs, one of which, "Candy Kisses", Haley had previously recorded in 1948 for his first single with the Four Aces of Western Swing.
Daffan wrote "Truck Drivers' Blues" after he stopped at a roadside diner and noticed that every time a trucker parked his rig and strolled into the cafe, the first thing he did, even before ordering a cup of coffee, was push a coin in the jukebox. He decided to write a song to capture some of the truck drivers' nickels and make himself rich and famous. Recorded by western swing artist Cliff Bruner (with Moon Mullican on lead vocal) in 1939, the song sold more than 100,000 copies, the best-selling record of that year.
Throughout the 1950s, the most popular kind of country music was the Nashville Sound, which was a slick and pop-oriented style. Many musicians preferred a rougher sound, leading to the development of the Lubbock Sound and Bakersfield Sound. The Bakersfield Sound was innovated in Bakersfield, California in the mid to late 1950s, by performers like Wynn Stewart, who used elements of Western swing and rock, such as the breakbeat, along with a honky tonk vocal style. He was followed by a wave of performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who popularized the style.
Abby DeWald in 2007 Amanda Barrett in 2007 The Ditty Bops were an American band from Los Angeles, California that began with Warner Brothers, and later self-produced recordings. Noted for their tight vocal harmonies by Abby DeWald and Amanda Barrett. They incorporated a variety of musical styles such as folk, bluegrass, blues, western swing, ragtime and musical theater with guitar, ukulele, mandolin and dulcimer. Their live shows were often very interactive, and had different themes and theatrical elements complete with props, costumes, skits, and amusing slide shows.
In 1935, the Cowboy Ramblers had a huge hit with their recording of "Under the Double Eagle" which later became a western swing standard and remained in print for twenty five years. Other classics of the 1930s include "I've Got Those Oklahoma Blues", "Fan It", "Wah Hoo", "Beaumont Rag" and "New Steel Guitar Rag". The Cowboy Ramblers became major stars on radio and were offered work in Hollywood films and Boyd eventually appeared in six Western films during the 1940s. One of his other hits was "If You'll Come Back", No. 4, Jan. 1941.
He admired Jimmie Rodgers as well, and learned to yodel by listening to his records. He even named his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. Bob Wills, Blue Yodel No. 1 Tommy Duncan, vocalist for "Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys", was a good yodeler. (See the sound file with Duncan singing Rodger's "Blue Yodel No. 1" in 1937) Bob Wills is considered by music authorities to be the co-founder of Western Swing. In 1949 Hank Williams recorded his first hit song "Lovesick Blues", first recorded by Emmett Miller in 1928.
"Stay a Little Longer" is a Western swing dance tune written by Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan. The title comes from a refrain in the chorus: The song consists of a number of unrelated verses, one of which (verse three) comes from an old folk song"Shinbone Alley": Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded it in 1945 and it reached number three in 1946.Whitburn, The Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits, p. 493 Willie Nelson (number 22 in 1973) and Mel Tillis (number 17 in 1982) also charted Top 40 hits.
In country music Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, and Bob Wills combined elements of swing and blues to create a Western swing. Mullican left the Cliff Bruner band to pursue solo career that included many songs that maintained a swing structure. Artists like Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel have continued the swing elements of country music. Asleep at the Wheel has also recorded the Count Basie tunes “One O'Clock Jump”, “Jumpin' at the Woodside”, and “Song of the Wanderer” using a steel guitar as a stand-in for a horn section.
After leaving the Light Crust Doughboys, Brown formed the world's first Western swing band in Fort Worth, Texas, the Musical Brownies. The first incarnation of the Brownies featured Brown, guitarist Derwood Brown, bassist Wanna Coffman, Ocie Stockard on tenor banjo, and fiddle player Jesse Ashlock. Shortly afterward, pianist Fred "Papa" Calhoun and fiddle player Cecil Brower (who replaced Ashlock) joined the group. Like the Light Crust Doughboys, the Musical Brownies played a mixture of country, pop, and jazz, but the Brownies had a harder rhythm & blues dance edge than their predecessors.
Robinson was born in Brenham, Texas, United States. He learned to play guitar at nine years of age, and was supposedly mentored by gospel blues singer-guitarist Blind Willie Johnson in the bottleneck style. Later in his career, he was introduced to the steel guitar by Western swing musician Leon McAuliffe, and became a noted fiddle player, who instructed Sugarcane Harris. L. C. Robinson's brother, harmonica player A. C. Robinson, collaborated with him in Texas in the 1930s, and later the two performed and recorded together in a band in California in the 1940s.
Musgraves has one younger sister, Kelly Christine Sutton (née Musgraves), who is a photographer. Musgraves began songwriting at the age of eight, when she wrote a song called "Notice Me" for her elementary school graduation. She first learned to play music on the mandolin, then at age 12 started taking guitar lessons from a local musician named John DeFoore, which she later described as "one of the most important things that ever happened to me." Musgraves' mother took her to local music festivals to sing western swing music.
Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette, 2008 The band typically plays traditional Cajun music but draws stylistically from Western swing, rockabilly, and punk rock. They have remained a traditional Cajun band, reviving forgotten classics of the genre, singing almost entirely in Cajun French, and maintaining smooth, moderate tempos suitable for dancing two-steps and waltzes. Their high energy live shows include antics more common to rock or punk bands, such as fiddler Michot climbing atop the upright bass of LaFleur as both musicians continue to play or the sporting of hipster Mohawks and prominent tattoos.
The event features a ranch rodeo, chuckwagon cookoff, children's poetry contest, Western swing dances, cowboy music and poetry, a trappings show, and horsemanship clinics. In 1999, Steagall was inducted into the Texas Trail of Fame. In April 2003, Steagall was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, joining the likes of Will Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Goodnight, and Charlie Russell. In January 2004, he received the Spirit of Texas Award and was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in Fort Worth.
By the 1950s, the anti- Communism scare was in full swing, and some performers with a liberal or socialist bent were blacklisted from the music industry. In the middle of the 1940s, Western swing reached its peak of popularity. It was a mixture of diverse influences, including swing, blues, polka and popular cowboy songs, and included early stars like Bob Wills, who became among the best known musicians of the era. With a honky tonk root, modern country music arose in the 1940s, mixing with R&B; and the blues to form rockabilly.
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen is an American country rock band founded in 1967. The group's founder was George Frayne IV (alias Commander Cody, born July 19, 1944 in Boise, Idaho) on keyboards and vocals. The band's style mixed country, rock and roll, Western swing, rockabilly, and jump blues together on a foundation of boogie-woogie piano. They were among the first country rock bands to take its cues less from folk rock and bluegrass and more from the rowdy barroom country of the Ernest Tubb and Ray Price style.
Gimble and his wife Barbara were divorced twice and remarried twice. They had two daughters and a son, and as of 2015 they had four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Johnny and his son Dick Gimble, a college professor of music, started a fiddle camp and with the help of daughter Cyndy ensured that the western swing style of country music was passed on to the next generation. Gimble's granddaughter, Emily, is a notable vocalist and keyboard player who has performed with Johnny, Asleep at the Wheel, Warren Hood, and Hayes Carll.
Wilson began his career performing with Ivory Lee Semien in the 1950s, recording tracks in 1957 for Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He was described as having "absorbed not only the black Texas blues as sung and played by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson but also the heavily amplified, often wildly distorted, steel guitar sounds of the region's white Western Swing bands." In 1960, Wilson signed with Ivory Records in Houston. Wilson led recording sessions, but despised touring, and only played locally until his death in Houston in 1975.
The album would play a crucial role in the revitalization of Western Swing music and inspire younger musicians like Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Haggard would do more tribute albums to Wills over the next 40 years. In 1973 he appeared on For The Last Time Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys. In 1994 Haggard collaborated with Asleep at the Wheel and many other artists influenced by the music of Bob Wills on an album entitled Tribute To The Music Of Bob Wills And The Texas Playboys.
Because of its size and portability, the fiddle was the core of early Oklahoma Anglo music, but other instruments such as the guitar, mandolin, banjo, and steel guitar were added later. Various Oklahoma music traditions trace their roots to the British Isles, including cowboy ballads, western swing, and contemporary country and western." "Mexican immigrants began to reach Oklahoma in the 1870s, bringing beautiful canciones and corridos love songs, waltzes, and ballads along with them. Like American Indian communities, each rite of passage in Hispanic communities is accompanied by traditional music.
The narrator explains that he had lived most of his life in Texas along the Frio River (Brazos River in Shafer's original recording, Colorado River in his later performances), but that a string of failed relationships with women in that state that ended disastrously (such as going insane, sending the law after him and walking out before the honeymoon) prompted him to flee to Tennessee; he still relives his more pleasant times in Texas by way of Transcendental Meditation each night. The song is known for its Western Swing style rhythm.
Pennington first performed in a western swing band called the Western Rhythm Boys, which performed in Ohio. In 1958, he signed with King Records and released "Three Hearts in a Tangle" under the name Ray Starr. However, Pennington was dissatisfied with the recording, so he asked that it be withdrawn as a single. Pennington then took up record producer and artists and repertoire jobs at the label, including a production credit on Hawkshaw Hawkins' final album, Lonesome 7-7203, one of the first country albums to feature both black and white session musicians.
However, it was not copyrighted until 1932 by Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon and his publishers, Mitchell Parish and J. Mayo Williams. The song is familiar for its opening verse: The Mississippi Sheiks, as the Jackson Blue Boys with Papa Charlie McCoy on vocals, recorded the same song in 1930; this time as "Sweet Alberta" (Columbia 14397-D), substituting the words Sweet Alberta for Corrine, Corrina.Dixon, Blues & Gospel Records, p. 355. "Corrine, Corrina" has been recorded in a number of musical styles, including blues, jazz, rock and roll, Cajun, and Western swing.
23: "For example, 'Corrine, Corrina,' now considered a Cajun standard, probably was originally an African American blues song. In the 1930s, it was adapted to western swing by Bob Wills, and, from there, worked its way into the standard Cajun repertoire, changing slightly with each transformation." "Corrine, Corrina" is also an important song related to Western swing's pioneering use of electrically amplified stringed instruments. It was one of the songs recorded during a session in Dallas on September 28, 1935, by Roy Newman and His Boys (OKeh 03117).
About five years later, The Blasters invited Los Lobos to open for them and also helped get the young men from East L.A. their first record deal. Steve Berlin made a transition to Los Lobos, with The Blasters' blessing. The Blasters toured almost continuously for much of their heyday. The notes for The Blasters Collection observed that in one particular month, they toured with a wide range of acts: the all-girl band The Go-Go's, psychobilly pioneers the Cramps, with western swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel and on a leg of Queen's west coast tour.
While playing in a club in North Carolina, he became a member of the Tennessee Ramblers- based out of North Carolina. The Ramblers appeared regularly on WBT in Charlotte playing their American Country and Western swing music. The band had a recording contract with Bluebird records and appeared in several Hollywood singing cowboy feature films, Ride Ranger, Ride (1936), Yodelin’ Kid from Pine Ridge (1937) and Ridin’ the Cherokee Trail (1941).Marty Roberts and The Tennessee Ramblers on the movie set of Ridin' the Cherokee Trail starring Tex Ritter Roberts' movie career was abruptly interrupted by the onset of WWII.
It is separate and distinct from traditions which it has influenced or which may in part have evolved from it, such as bluegrass, country blues, variants of western swing and country rock. Starting in the 1920 some fiddlers, particularly younger ones like Aurtur Smith, were swept up in the new music, their style and repertoires reflected influences from blues, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley. Anyone who wanted to make a career in music had to keep up with the times. But many, like John Salyer and Hiram Stamper cared little for the new music, and stayed with the old-time tunes.
He was also a strong early influence on western swing players like Cecil Brower. Many of the 1920s OKeh sides continued to sell and remained in print through 1935 when ARC discontinued the OKeh label and reissued selected sides on the 35-cent Vocalion label (the OKeh label was revived by CBS in 1940). After a period of relative obscurity in the 1940s and 1950s, Venuti played violin and other instruments with Jack Statham at the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas. Statham headed several musical groups that played at the Desert Inn from late 1961 until 1965, including a Dixieland combo.
During the seven days of the festival, there are a lot of live concerts and DJ sets with swing, rock and roll, jive, doo-wop, rhythm and blues, hillbilly and western swing. There are dance lessons too. Some of the musicians are Billy Lee Riley (US), Big Jay Mac Neely (US), Sid & Billy King (US), Huelyn Duvall (US), Charlie Gracie (US), Ray Campi (US), Pep Torres (US), Wee Willie Harris (UK), Danny & The Juniors (US), Barrence Whitfield (US), Bill Haley's Original Comets (US), Good Fellas (ITA), Hormonauts (ITA/SCO), Jimmy Cavallo (US) and Stray Cats (USA).
Media response to Keepin' Me Up Nights was generally positive. Billboard wrote that the album featured "a variety of top-notch tunes", praising the band for performing "down-home good country music". Entertainment Weekly writer Alanna Nash stated that "the band ... is still turning out fresh and liquid Texas-style dance-hall fare ... adding just the right amount of boogie-woogie, rock, and Ray Charles-brand R&B;". Similarly, The Pittsburgh Press noted that "this excellent Texas-based band proves it's not only as good as ever at its trademark Western swing, but does equally well in other forms of country music".
Emmons moved to Los Angeles, playing bass in Roger Miller's band and doing studio work on pedal steel. Emmons returned with Peggy to Nashville in 1974, where he quickly resumed studio work with artists such as Mel Tillis, Donna Fargo, Duane Eddy and Charlie Walker. Beginning in 1974, Emmons became a regularly featured performer at the annual International Steel Guitar Convention in St. Louis, and was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1981. In 1976, Emmons recorded a highly regarded tribute to the great Western Swing artist Bob Wills, on which he sang lead vocal and played steel guitar.
"Take me Back to Tulsa" features one of Western Swing's greatest bands in full flight. It originated as a Bob Wills fiddle tune and was so popular at shows that Wills and singer Tommy Duncan added words and recorded it in early 1941. Musically, the song has been described as a "jubilant Western Swing romp", with Wills urging fiddler Louis Tireney to "turn it on boy, turn it on" half way through the song. Wills's organization was based in Tulsa from 1934 to 1942, and the song takes its name from the chorus: "Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry".
Elvis fit right in. He was born and raised in poverty. He was around people that had very little in the way of worldly goods."Elvis Presley Classic Albums DVD Eagle Eye Media EE19007 NTSC Presley made enough of an impression that Phillips deputized guitarist Scotty Moore, who then enlisted bassist Bill Black, both from the Starlight Wranglers, a local western swing band, to work with the green young Elvis.Newsweek August 18, 1997 "Good Rockin' page 55 The trio rehearsed dozens of songs, from traditional country, to "Harbor Lights", a hit for crooner Bing Crosby to gospel.
" Two or three takes later, Phillips had a satisfactory recording, and released "That's All Right", on July 19, 1954, along with an "Elvis Presley Scotty and Bill" version of Bill Monroe's waltz, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a country standard. Presley's Sun recordings feature his vocals and rhythm guitar, Bill Black's percussive slapped bass, and Scotty Moore on an amplified guitar. Slap bass had been a staple of both Western Swing and Hillbilly Boogie since the 1940s. Commenting on his own guitar playing, Scotty Moore said, "All I can tell you is I just stole from every guitar player I heard over the years.
Born in West Monroe, Louisiana, in 1921, as a boy Pierce was infatuated with Gene Autry films and his mother's hillbilly records, particularly those of Jimmie Rodgers and Western swing and Cajun groups. He began to play guitar before he was a teenager and at 15 was given his own weekly 15-minute show, Songs by Webb Pierce, on KMLB-AM in Monroe. He enlisted in the US Army Air Forces, and in 1942 he married Betty Jane Lewis. After he was discharged, the couple moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Pierce worked in the men's department of a Sears Roebuck store.
As a young man Silverman played guitar in a western swing band and developed an interest in jazz music which took him to the Brussels World Fair playing with his college jazz quintet. Upon graduating Silverman became a regular concert guitarist and worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Silverman also played guitar at the Malboro Festival, the Ojai Festival and during this period worked with Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller. As a young guitarist Silverman specialized in new music performing and recording many premieres.
The group's line-up consisted of Daniel Huggins Williams (fiddle), John Munnerlyn (banjo), Cloet Hamman (acoustic guitar), Henry Bogan (cello), and an unidentified second guitarist. Williams, the designated frontman and primary songwriter of the ensemble, was a rare left-handed fiddler who also later tutored other musicians such as Johnny Gimble. Munnerlyn was a part-time musician as he worked United Gas Pipeline Company, while Hamman learned the rudiments of guitar as he was backing up his father, a locally renowned musician in Lindale. Unique to early Western swing ensembles of the era, was the Serenaders' feature of the cello, played by Bogan.
Ira "Iry" LeJeune (October 28, 1928Cajun Music a Reflection of the People – October 8, 1955) was one of the best selling and most popular Cajun musicians in the mid to late 1940s into the early 1950s. His recordings and repertoire remain influential to the present day. He was among a handful of recording artists who returned the accordion to prominence in commercially recorded Cajun music and dance hall performances. The return of the accordion contrasted with the popular Cajun recorded output of the late 1930s and 1940s, a time during which fiddles and Western Swing sounds from Texas were influencing Cajun music.
Drums were scorned by early country musicians as being "too loud" and "not pure", but by 1935 Western swing big band leader Bob Wills had added drums to the Texas Playboys. In the mid-1940s, the Grand Ole Opry did not want the Playboys' drummer to appear on stage. Although drums were commonly used by rockabilly groups by 1955, the less-conservative-than-the- Grand-Ole-Opry Louisiana Hayride kept its infrequently used drummer back stage as late as 1956. By the early 1960s, however, it was rare for a country band not to have a drummer.
As the singing cowboy genre developed it kept its themes of the American west and cowboy life, but moved away from its folk music origins to adapt to popular tastes. Singing cowboys typically recorded with big band arrangements, often in the western swing style popularized by Bob Wills, and were also influenced by the vocal style of crooners such as Bing Crosby. Crosby himself also made a single appearance as a singing cowboy in Rhythm on the Range (1936), including the song "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)" which many other singing cowboys later performed.
In the 1950s, rock and roll versions of "Guitar Boogie", usually titled "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" (but credited to Arthur Smith), were recorded. AllMusic critic Bruce Eder describes these renditions as having "new accents and a beat that took it out of country boogie and Western swing". In 1953, a version by the Super-Sonics was titled "New Guitar Boogie Shuffle"Rainbow R–4097 and another by the Esquire Boys with Danny Cedrone on guitar was titled "Guitar Boogie Shuffle".Nickelodeon 102–A In 1958, a Philadelphia band, Frank Virtue and the Virtues, recorded it as "Guitar Boogie Shuffle".
The earliest documented performance with an electrically amplified guitar was in 1932, by Gage Brewer. The Wichita, Kansas-based musician had an electric Hawaiian A-25 (frypan, lap-steel) and a standard electric Spanish from George Beauchamp of Los Angeles, California. Brewer publicized his new instruments in an article in the Wichita Beacon of October 2, 1932 and through performances that month. The first electric instrument on a commercial recording was made and played in 1935 by Bob Dunn, a musician in Houston, Texas who played in the Western swing band Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies.
She can be seen performing with Brooks' band during the concerts in Dublin at Croke Park and in New York at Central Park. She released an album for Asylum Records in late 1993, under the production of Kyle Lehning. This album produced the single "It's All in the Heart", which spent two weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks (now Hot Country Songs) charts in 1993, peaking at No. 72. Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly gave her album a B- rating, saying that although the album showed jazz and western swing influences, her songs lacked the grit of her compositions for Brooks.
Bush was born John Bush Shinn III in the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood of Houston. He listened to the western swing music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and the honky-tonk sounds of artists such as Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Thompson. His uncle, the host of a local radio program on KTHT, urged Bush and his brother to play on air, giving Bush his first experience of performing in public. Bush subsequently moved to San Antonio in 1952, beginning a solo career in area honky-tonks such as the Texas Star Inn, before switching to drums.
Let the Dance Begin is an album by Jean Stafford, recorded in Nashville, Tennessee. Initially released as a hard copy CD in 2005 (Australia Limited) the album was officially for released world wide in 2017 with two bonus tracks "You Waltzed Right Into My Heart" & “Cowboy Days”, Let The Dance Begin was produced by Jimmy Crawford, an American steel guitar player. The song "Steelin' The 2 Step" written by Stafford, is a western swing song which mentions Bob Wills from Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys. Jean Stafford won an AWA Award (Academy of Western Artists) for "Steelin' The 2 Step" in 2006.
The Red Stick Ramblers were a Cajun Music and Western Swing band formed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1999 while some of the members were attending Louisiana State University. Their name comes from a translation of Baton Rouge, which means "red stick" in French. The most recent line-up consisted of Linzay Young (fiddle, lead vocals), Daniel Coolik (fiddle, mandolin, electric guitar), Chas Justus (guitar, vocals), Eric Frey (Upright Bass, Vocals), Blake Miller (accordion and acoustic guitar) and Glenn Fields (drums). Past members include Josh Caffery, Joel Savoy, Oliver Swain, Kevin Wimmer, Wilson Savoy and Ricky Rees.
His earliest influences were popular blues artists of the day such as Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr, together with country musicians including Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills.Moon Mullican In 1936, he covered Cab Calloway's "Georgia Pine" and also sang his own compositions "Ain't You Kinda Sorry" and "Swing Baby Swing" for Leon Selph's Western swing band, The Blue Ridge Playboys. He played and recorded with Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, the Sunshine Boys, and Jimmie Davis. By the end of the 1930s, he had become a popular vocalist with a warm, deep, vocal delivery.
After a performance at the Spoke, performer Guitar Lynn taught Will the blues scale on guitar and suggested he could use this knowledge to solo with blues bands on nearly any song. As a twelve-year- old, Will soon found himself sitting in at gigs with local players such as Charlie and Will Sexton, Doug Sahm, and Paul Ray of the Cobras. At age thirteen, Will joined the kid band RedHeaded Stepchild along with future Snarky Puppy guitarist Chris McQueen and other classmates. The group played western swing covers, and even wrote some original songs, releasing the album Deep, Wide, & Forever in 1998.
In the 1930s, Penny was the leader of the Radio Cowboys with guitarist Julian Akins, steel guitarist Sammy Forsmark, tenor banjoist Louis Dumont, bassist Carl Stewart, and vocalist, guitarist, and fiddler Sheldon Bennett. At WLW Radio in Cincinnati during World War II, he formed the Plantation Boys, which included fiddler Carl Stewart, guitarist/bassist Louis Innis, fiddler Zed Tennis, and lead guitarist Roy Lanham. Their sound was similar to that of the Radio Cowboys. In 1944 Penny left Cincinnati for Los Angeles where he formed larger Western swing bands that played local clubs and ballrooms such as the Venice Pier in Santa Monica.
Penny was known for his unwillingness to compromise and occasionally combative attitude. He walked out on a 1945 engagement at Venice Pier when dance promoter Bert "Foreman" Phillips insisted Penny direct his musicians to quit playing improvisational jazz solos and stick to melodic instrumental passages in the style of conventional country singers like Ernest Tubb or Roy Acuff. Phillips frequently booked Grand Ole Opry artists at his dancehalls and did not personally care for the jazz elements of western swing. When Phillips demanded Penny fire Wyble, Boggs, and fiddler Harold Hensley for continuing to improvise, Penny just dissolved the band.
In the 1940s she sang with the Sons of the Pioneers; the only "daughter" of the group. In the 1950s when Westerns and Western Swing began to fall out of style, she returned to school and earned a master's degree in education and began a teaching career. Patsy Montana (born Ruby Rose Blevins, 1908 - 1996) was the first female country performer to have a million-selling single with her signature song "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart", recorded in 1935. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
Perhaps yodeler Bill Haley, of Bill Haley and the Comets, has one of the strangest histories of all. Haley zoomed to fame as the "King of Rock and Roll" when his song "Rock Around the Clock" was featured in the popular film Blackboard Jungle in 1955, but it was little known that Haley and his band had been touring for years, performing Western swing music with Haley featured as a yodeler. Haley had been born in 1925, and in 1955, when "Rock Around the Clock" initially charted, he and his band were using the name the Comets.
In mid-2017 Rohan and Al Healy of The Dublin City Rounders began airing a weekly radio show, 'Rhythm & Roots' on Dublin City FM. In September 2018 the show was re-branded, before moving to Near FM in January 2019. The show covers genres including ragtime, country blues, western swing and music hall. The show is filmed and recorded at Beardfire Studio, Dublin, which is owned by the group and their father David Virgin. The studio is also used for recording and production of other artists' work, and is home to the Beardfire Music record label.
More representative examples can be found in some of the songs of Western swing pioneer Bob Wills, and subsequent tradition-minded country artists such as Asleep at the Wheel, Merle Haggard, and George Strait. The popularity of the Carnegie Hall concerts meant work for many of the fellow boogie players and also led to the adaptation of boogie-woogie sounds to many other forms of music. Tommy Dorsey's band had a hit with "T.D.'s Boogie Woogie" as arranged by Sy Oliver and soon there were boogie-woogie songs, recorded and printed, of many different stripes.
One night in a bar visiting with songwriter Cindy Walker, Duncan motioned for her to look at a gentleman sitting just a few tables away who was staring at his glass of beer. Duncan commented to her that he's just "watchin' the bubbles in his beer." Instantly they both realized they had a song idea and "Bubbles in My Beer" became one of the staples of Western swing songs. Aside from "Faded Love", sung by Rusty McDonald, every Texas Playboys record that was a hit featured Duncan on vocals, cementing his status as the finest vocalist Wills had.
Well-received, the album became the #1 Jazz Album for 1956, a position it attained, according to the retrospective book Gibson Electrics, as an "overnight best-seller capturing the essence of the cool jazz era". Critically regarded as one of the defining albums of cool jazz, it is listed in A Concise History of Electric Guitar among those few recordings which "firmly established" the electric guitar's "sound in popular culture, elevating it from the dark dissonance of bebop jazz to the more consonant textures of a rapidly developing style called western swing". Guitar World characterizes it as Smith's "classic album".
Needing two more satisfactory tracks, Elvis returned to the same studio in September where he recorded "Snowbird" and a manic, one-take version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." Nearly every style of country music is represented; bluegrass, honky tonk, Western swing, rockabilly, countrypolitan, and even the then-nascent "outlaw" movement. Snippets of the song "I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago" act as a bridge between each track. After this album, Presley would return to his usual practice of recording a seemingly random batch of songs on each trip to the recording studio, letting his producer assemble them into albums.
The musician Sol Hoʻopiʻi arose during this time, playing both Hawaiian music and jazz, Western swing and country, and developing the pedal steel guitar; his recordings helped establish the Nashville sound of popular country music. Lani McIntire was another musician who infused a Hawaiian guitar sound into mainstream American popular music through his recordings with Jimmie Rodgers and Bing Crosby. A 1916 advertisement for Hawaiian music records from Victor Records. In the 1920s and 30s, Hawaiian music became an integral part of local tourism, with most hotels and attractions incorporating music in one form or another.
John Gilmore has written an in-depth portrait of Cooley's life and death in Shame on You, a segment of Gilmore's non-fiction work, L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times. Cooley is a recurring character in James Ellroy's fiction, including in the story "Whale] Contino's Blues", which appeared in issue No. 46 of Granta magazine (Winter 1994) and was anthologized in Hollywood Nocturnes. Ellroy also features a fictionalized version of Cooley in Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential. Country historian Rich Kienzle, who specializes in the history of West Coast country music and western swing, profiled Cooley in his 2003 book Southwest Shuffle.
In post-war America, folk songs and cowboy songs (also known, in those days, as hillbilly music) were beginning to be more popular with a wider audience. A subculture of rural jazz and blues fans had mixed elements of jazz and blues into traditional cowboy and folk song styles to produce a crossover called western swing. Thanks to the prevalence of radio, this music spread across the United States in the 1940s. Radio was the first almost instantaneous mass media with the power to create large subcultures by spreading the ideas of small subcultures across a wide area.
Although relatively little has been written about Jimmy Walker, he ranks as an important figure in the development of country music. Not only did he record the first version of the country standard "Detour" in 1945, but to date he is the only man who ever replaced Roy Acuff on the Grand Ole Opry. He also recorded numerous other outstanding western swing-honky tonk numbers, appeared as a regular on Midwestern Hayride, WWVA Jamboree and Louisiana Hayride, and appeared in several motion pictures. Born Ernest E. Walker in Mason County, West Virginia on December 18, 1915, "Jimmy" did not opt for a regular musical career until the mid-forties.
Billy Parker (born July 19, 1939 in Okemah, Oklahoma[ Billy Parker Biography]) is an American country music disc jockey and singer. Parker was named Disc Jockey of the Year by the Country Music Association in 1974 and by the Academy of Country Music in 1975, 1977, 1978 and 1984.Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame Inductees He was inducted into the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame in 1992, the Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1993, and received the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters' Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Between 1976 and 1989, Parker charted more than twenty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart.
Buddy Gene Emmons (January 27, 1937 – July 21, 2015) was an American musician who is widely regarded as the world's foremost pedal steel guitarist of his day. He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1981. Affectionately known by the nickname "Big E", Emmons' primary genre was American country music, but he also performed jazz and Western swing. He recorded with Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, The Everly Brothers, The Carpenters, Roger Miller, Ernest Tubb, John Hartford, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ray Price, Judy Collins, George Strait, John Sebastian, and Ray Charles and was a widely sought session musician in Nashville and Los Angeles.
Born in West Palm Beach on December 12, 1943 and raised in Bradenton, Florida, Betts grew up in a musical family listening to traditional bluegrass, country music and Western swing. He started playing ukulele at five and, as his hands got bigger, moved on to mandolin, banjo, and guitar. At sixteen and feeling the need for something "a little faster," he played in a series of rock bands on the Florida circuit, up the East Coast and into the Midwest before forming Second Coming with Berry Oakley in 1967. According to Rick Derringer, the "group called the Jokers" referenced in "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" was one of Betts' early groups.
In the first sound recording (the 1929 recording by Clarence Ashley), Little Sadie may have been a prostitute: I woke next morning 'bout half past nine, The buggies and the hacks all (swarmed?) in line, The gents and the gamblers all standing around, They're gonna take Sadie to the burying ground. The most common version in country and rock is attributed to T. J. 'Red' Arnall's 1947 Western Swing recording with W. A. Nichol's Western Aces. This version was covered by Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Crooked Still, Doc Watson, and George Thorogood, among others. The 1970 Bob Dylan versions are taken from either of Clarence Ashley's recordings.
Although GWTW was produced by Selznick International, it was distributed by Loew's Incorporated as part of a deal with rival studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The parade down Peachtree Street for the movie's premier coincidentally started just outside the Fox because the movie's cast was staying across the street at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. During the 1940s, the Fox acquired strong management and became one of the finest movie theaters in Atlanta. It was also at this time that the Egyptian Ballroom became Atlanta's most popular public dance hall and hosted all the important big bands and country and western swing bands of the era.
Other important influences on rockabilly include western swing, boogie-woogie, jump blues, and electric blues. Defining features of the rockabilly sound included strong rhythms, vocal twangs, and common use of the tape echo; but progressive addition of different instruments and vocal harmonies led to its "dilution". Initially popularized by artists such as Wanda Jackson, Billy Adams, Johnny Cash, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Bob Luman, Eddie Cochran, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the rockabilly style waned in the late 1950s; nonetheless, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, rockabilly enjoyed a revival. An interest in the genre endures even in the 21st century, often within musical subcultures.
Critical reviews of Pasture Prime and Asleep at the Wheel were generally positive. Reviewing the 1998 reissue of the original Pasture Prime album for AllMusic, Anne Wickstrom described it as a collection of "classic Western swing". An uncredited review of the US version on the website claimed that Asleep at the Wheel is "a disc that most fans agree is among [the band's] best", praising the "expert takes" on popular compositions within the genres of country and swing music. Pasture Prime has often been hailed as one of the most important releases by Asleep at the Wheel, and credited for rejuvenating the band's career.
Both albums won her excellent reviews, as well as the International Acoustic Music Awards Grand Prize for the song, "Looking for My Own Lone Ranger". "File under treasure", wrote Charlie Gillett in The Observer 's Music Magazine. In 2008, Dore won Overall Grand Prize as well as Best Folk Award at the 4th Annual International Acoustic Music Awards. The following year saw the release of The Hula Valley Songbook, a collection of American hillbilly, western swing and popular favourites of the 1930s, based around the set list performed by her first band and originally recorded by artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, Al Bowlly and Milton Brown.
The singing group Riders in the Sky recorded a mix of Western and Western Swing and have won Grammy Awards for their work with Disney on Toy Story 2 (1999) and Monsters, Inc. (2001). Western music in video games can be traced back to The Oregon Trail series, early Nintendo title Sheriff/Bandido, and arcade games like Sunset Riders. Fallout: New Vegas relies on a atmospheric Western music style, but it also features old mid-20th century popular Western musicians such as Marty Robbins along with pop music of the day. Furthermore, the Red Dead series of games heavily features Western music, since it takes place in an Old West setting.
Texas developed a distinctive twin-fiddling tradition that was later popularized by Bob Wills as Western swing music. Fiddle music has also been popular since the 19th century in other Western states such as Oklahoma and Colorado. The National Oldtime Fiddlers' Contest has been held each year in Weiser, Idaho since 1953. Oklahoma, with its high concentration of Native American inhabitants, has produced some Native American old-time string bands, most notably Big Chief Henry's Indian String Band (consisting of Henry Hall, fiddle; Clarence Hall, guitar; and Harold Hall, banjo and voice), which was recorded by H. C. Speir for the Victor company in 1929.
Although officially described as a "nostalgia" station, KBRD plays an eclectic mixture of jazz, rock, swing, country, dixieland, ragtime, zydeco, western swing, novelty and other music, much of which can be heard nowhere else in the country. A typical hour broadcast on KBRD might contain music by Artie Shaw, Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party, Bessie Smith, Boots Randolph, Clicquot Club Eskimos, Captain Stubby and the Buccaneers, Bing Crosby, the Harmonicats, Sheb Wooley, Marty Robbins, Jelly Roll Morton, Nat King Cole, the Korn Kobblers, George Formby, Nana Mouskouri, Perry Como, Merle Travis, Louis Armstrong and the ever-popular Hoosier Hot Shots. KBRD broadcasts without commercial interruption.www.kbrdradio.com.
Although he continued to play in Western swing bands, his interest in jazz surfaced on his debut album, The Jimmy Wyble Quintet (1953). Soon after, he worked with Barney Kessel and Benny Goodman, and played with Red Norvo for eight years, including on a tour of Australia accompanying Frank Sinatra. Wyble took a job as a studio musician in Los Angeles during the 1960s, working as a guitarist for movies and television. Wyble played guitar on movie soundtracks, including The Wild Bunch, Ocean's Eleven, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Kings Go Forth, and played on TV shows such as The Flip Wilson Show and Kraft Music Hall.
Thomas Wayne Hancock III (born May 1, 1965 in Dallas, Texas) better known as Wayne "The Train" Hancock, is an American singer-songwriter. Hancock is known as "The King of Juke Joint Swing," because his sound is unique, as he incorporates jazz, big band, western swing, country and rockabilly, styles of music that he began listening to as a kid. His influences include Jimmie Rodgers, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Hank Thompson, Hank Williams and Hank Snow because they were all in his parents' record collection. Throughout his childhood, Hancock moved around seven times because his father was a Design engineer who worked at various engineering firms around the United States.
Originally a "rather tough beer bar," the Palomino, located at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard, was founded by Western swing bandleader Hank Penny and his business partner Amand Gautier, had originally opened the club around 1949-50 as the Palomino. Penny even staged "jazz nights" there where West Coast jazz musicians could come to jam. It was leased in 1952 by Bill and Tom Thomas of Indiana, who later bought the club. The club received a further boost in 1959 when the major country music showcase Riverside Rancho in the Silver Lake neighborhood shut down, leaving the various performers it had hosted available for the Palomino.
It was a major western swing and country standard already in 1939, when it was performed by Moon Mullican. Thelonious Monk's 1947 composition "In Walked Bud" is based on the chord changes to "Blue Skies." The song was featured prominently in the film Star Trek: Nemesis, as sung by Commander Data during the wedding at the start of the film. It is sung again at the very end of the film by his "brother," the android B-4, during the final scene set in the 24th century, a time period not revisited by the Star Trek franchise for another 18 years, until the release of Star Trek: Picard in 2020.
Jason Kardong is a pedal steel player based out of Seattle, Washington and is the Pedal Steel player for Sera Cahoone. Originally from outside of Moscow, Idaho, he grew up directly next door to folk artist Josh Ritter. Shortly after graduating from Washington State University (WSU) with a BS in Agriculture, he relocated to Seattle Washington. His first band after moving to Seattle was the retro western swing six piece band called Six String Eric and his Lazy Ranch Hands who performed along the West Coast opening for such acts as The Lucky Stars, Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, Wanda Jackson and Dave Stuckey.
Contreras is known primarily for playing in the styles of jazz, bluegrass, Western swing and country. Contreras' harmonic approach to the instrument has influenced several contemporary jazz violinists, including Christian Howes, who calls Contreras a "huge influence" who plays the violin "the way a piano player plays the piano." Billy Contreras: Inspired Insights from Country Fiddler Turned Modern Jazz Master, Creative Strings Podcast with Christian Howes, Episode 1, 2014 Contreras enjoys the looseness and fluidity of non-classical genres: “Jazz playing is a lot freer; you don’t have to stick to the song’s melody as much. When you’re doing classical, they want you to do it right by the book.
Throughout his early years, Jack Rhodes formed several hillybilly/western swing groups with his step-brother Leon Payne, The Lone Star Buddies being among the most famous. The group released several singles and were regulars at The Louisiana Hayride, as well as performing throughout East Texas and Louisiana. Rhodes would often record demos at KWKH in Shreveport and other surrounding radio stations, before creating his own studio in Mineola, Tx. He also formed The Jack Rhodes Ramblers, Jack Rhodes and The Trail 80 Boys, and Jack Rhodes and The Trail 80 Roundup. Rhodes founded his own record label, "National Sounds", under his company, All-Roads Music Publishing.
The Ameripolitan Music Awards, spearheaded by internationally acclaimed Texas Troubador, Dale Watson, were established as an annual celebration devoted to acknowledging and honoring the Ameripolitan music genre. Ameripolitan music is defined as original music with prominent roots influence, encompassing four subgenres of music (honky-tonk, western swing, rockabilly, and outlaw) that did not previously fit into any celebrated categories within the mainstream pop country music industry. The awards are funded predominantly by fan supported donations and include 16 different award categories, with special honorary awards also presented. The Vintage Industrial Bar was home to the 2014 Ameripolitan Festival (Europe) on December 13, 2014 in Zagreb, Croatia.
In 1945 he put together his own band, The Showboys, who quickly became one of the most popular outfits in the Texas- Louisiana area with a mix of country music, Western swing, Cajun music, and Mullican's wild piano playing and singing. Although their style was highly eclectic and included country ballads, some of their music clearly foreshadowed what would later be called rock and roll. In September 1946, Mullican cut 16 recordings as band leader, for King Records in Cincinnati. His first release, "The Lonesome Hearted Blues" b/w "It's a Sin to Love You Like I Do" sold quite well, but did not chart.
They survived the 1948 AFM recording ban with steady live work, including a six-week stint with the Louisiana Hayride, and remained with the Opry until 1950, when they returned to Detroit. While still in Nashville, George and Leslie had begun recording a long series of sides for Syd Nathan's Cincinnati-based King label, using top-notch studio musicians such as steel guitarist Jerry Byrd, guitarist Zeb Turner, and bassist Louis Innis. Many of their King efforts showed Western Swing, Latin, and R&B; influences, and were consistently strong sellers. Some originals, such as "Mountain Rosa Lee", later came to be considered classics (in this case, within the bluegrass field).
His 1978 album The Gambler remains one of the most famous country albums ever released, having sold a reported 35 million copies worldwide. Also from the Houston area are Clint Black (grew up in Memorial), Robert Earl Keen (Sharpstown), and Lyle Lovett (grew up near Klein) and more recently George Ducas (grew up in Memorial). Modern musicians like George Strait, from the San Antonio area, continue to carry on the tradition of country music in Texas. Strait "The King of Country" is a singer, actor, and music producer known for his unique style of western swing music, bar-room ballads, honky-tonk style, and traditional country music.
"Rag Mop" was a popular American song of the late 1940s-early 1950s. The song, a 12-bar blues, was written by Tulsa Western Swing bandleader Johnnie Lee Wills and steel guitarist Deacon Anderson and published in 1949. Considered a novelty song, the lyrics consisted mostly of spelling out the title of the song; because of the spelling used in the song, it is sometimes referred to as "Ragg Mopp". While Johnnie Lee Wills and his band recorded it for Bullet Records in 1950, the most popular version of this song was recorded by The Ames Brothers, and released by Coral Records as catalog number 60140.
In the 1930s a vocal group recorded under the name The Four Aces (A Human Orchestra). They vocalized not only the lyrics, but all instrumental parts of their music, recording on the Decca label in the UK. In 1948–49, Bill Haley fronted a group called the Four Aces of Western Swing – often referred to as simply The Four Aces. The style of music this group played was country and western and it was with the group that Haley recorded his first singles for the Cowboy Records label in 1948. The group disbanded in 1949 and Haley went on to form The Saddlemen, which later became Bill Haley & His Comets.
The best-known version was recorded by Roy Acuff And His Smoky Mountain Boys in Hollywood in 1942. Bill Haley and the 4 Aces of Western Swing recorded a cover in 1949 that went unreleased until the 1977 LP Golden Country Origins. Wilma Lee Cooper and her husband Stoney Cooper released a version as the B side of their 1961 single "Night After Night". George Jones and Gene Pitney recorded a version (under the name "George and Gene"), released as a single in 1965, Hank Locklin recorded the song for his 1962 album A Tribute to Roy Acuff, King of Country Music, and the Louvin Brothers also recorded the song.
In 1971, Billy Parker joined KVOO. While at the station, Parker's awards included the Country Music Association Disc Jockey of the Year honor in 1974 and the Academy of Country Music Disc Jockey of the Year awards in 1975, 1977, 1978 and 1984. Parker was inducted into the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame in 1992, the Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1993, and scored the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters' Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. The Interstate Road Show was also hosted on the station by veteran country DJ Larry Scott who is also in the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame.
His second record, "Rockin' Bones", credited to Ronnie Dawson "The Blond Bomber", was released in 1959, and again failed to chart. He performed with the well-established western swing group the Light Crust Doughboys for a time between 1957 and 1960 – releasing one single with the group and harmonica player Delbert McClinton, which was credited to Johnny & the Jills – before signing as a solo singer with Dick Clark's Swan label. Clark attempted to package him as a teen idol and he appeared on American Bandstand shortly before the payola scandal broke. Although his pop singles "Hazel" and "Summer's Comin'" achieved some popularity in Pittsburgh, Dawson later disowned the records.
Micky Braun 2017 The two founding members, Mickey and Gary Braun, are the sons of outlaw country and western swing musician Muzzie Braun of Stanley, Idaho, and the brothers of Cody Braun and Willy Braun of the Texas based roots rock band Reckless Kelly. Both were part of Muzzie Braun & the Little Braun Brothers band, but formed their own band after Cody and Willy left to form Reckless Kelly. The band has its origin in Idaho, other founding members were their childhood friends Travis Hardy on drum and Mark McCoy on bass. They moved to Austin, Texas, where Joseph Deeb on lead guitar joined the band.
"All I wanted to do was go to fiddler's conventions all summer long and play music till the sun came up," says Harris. "So, at that time, I was really opposed to plugging anything in, even people putting pickups on their guitars." His musical style has also been heavily influenced by the early country music of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Doc Watson, and the 1960s and 70s generation of artists like George Jones, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Merle Haggard. Harris describes his music as simply "country," however others have noted influences like western swing, honky-tonk, outlaw country, and the Bakersfield sound.
Bill Cauble of Albany in Shackelford County won the Chuckwagon Award. Cauble has been known for decades for his outdoor cooking and was an organizer in 1991 of the Western Chuck Wagon Association. In 1991, the association honored Frankie McWhorter of Lipscomb with the Western Music Award and the All-Around Cowboy Culture Award. Formerly a member of Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, McWhorter recorded ranch dance music; he was a foreman at the Copper Camp Creek Ranch in Higgins in Lipscomb County and an inductee of the Western Swing Hall of Fame. Actor and rancher Dale Robertson, then living in Yukon, Oklahoma, received the 1999 association award for film and television.
That same year, he joined Paul Howard's Western swing-oriented Arkansas Cotton Pickers as half of Howard's twin guitar ensemble with Robert "Jabbo" Arrington and performed on the Grand Ole Opry. When Howard left, Opry newcomer Little Jimmy Dickens hired several former Cotton Pickers, including Martin, as his original Country Boys road band. He later joined Big Jeff Bess and the Radio Playboys followed by a stint with the Bailes Brothers Band. By 1950, Martin was a part of the rising Nashville recording scene as a studio guitarist and fiddler, and his guitar hooks propelled Red Foley's "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" and "Birmingham Bounce".
In particular, Haley's version used a prominent percussive slapped bass played by Marshall Lytle and electric guitar by Danny Cedrone, with a lick he duplicated two years later on "Rock Around The Clock". This version of "Rock the Joint" sold 75,000 copies. A 2012 article states that "The Comets’ beefed-up arrangement of "Rock This Joint" in 1952 that convinced Haley to move away from his western swing sound towards rock ‘n’ roll". Although Haley's version did not chart when released on Essex Records in 1952, it was enough of a hit in Chicago to win him a short residency in a jazz club there - although this was cut short after many of his black audiences walked out.
As a child, Saucier studied classical violin and performed with the Oak Cliff Symphony Orchestra at the age of 15 where his exceptional talent was the starting point of a great career. His passion for the fiddle and mastery of Western Swing lead to a performance with Hank Thompson and Leon McAuliffe in the 1950s where he was a regular at the Big D Jamboree in Dallas Texas with KRLD. The artists that Saucier worked and or recorded with include Merle Haggard, Ralph Mooney and Roy Nichols. In 1965 he joined the Joanie Waco Show where they played extensively around the country including Las Vegas, Nevada as well as military bases around the country.
He has cited Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins among many major saxophone influences. He recorded on the revived Blue Note label in 1985; the original label provided much of the key music of his formative years, and the eclectic cast on the album Twilight Time reflects the mix of musical styles he encountered in the local club scene of Chattanooga, such as the Blue Room, the AmVets Club and Katie's Four O'Clock Club. Country & western, western swing, and rock & roll all required familiarity with key signatures and repertoire favored by "pickers" (guitarists). Wallace toured and recorded with trombonist Ray Anderson (musician), whose technical skills allowed both musicians to explore a broad repertoire not always associated with jazz music.
Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys is the 12th studio album and first tribute album by American country band Asleep at the Wheel. Recorded at studios in Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee, it was produced by the band's frontman Ray Benson and released on October 25, 1993 by Liberty Records. The collection features recordings of songs made popular by Western swing group Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, a major influence on Asleep at the Wheel. Asleep at the Wheel recorded many Wills songs for its previous studio albums starting with its 1973 debut Comin' Right at Ya, but Tribute... marks the first full album dedicated to his music.
Recording for Pasture Prime took place over the course of three years, beginning with sessions at Nelson's Briarcliff studio in 1981. In 1985, the album received its initial limited release, before Dot Records issued the self-titled version in the United States later in the year. Despite its long and disjointed production, Pasture Prime received largely positive reviews from music critics, who praised its return to the group's classic Western swing style following more experimentation in recent years. It has been highlighted by commentators as one of the band's best releases, while Benson has credited it for "rebounding" Asleep at the Wheel's career after several years of dwindling popularity and financial issues.
The Collection holds the papers of numerous 20th-century writers, including Jim Hightower,Jim Hightower Papers Rick Riordan,Cormac McCarthy Papers. Larry McMurtry,Larry McMurtry Papers Willie Nelson,Willie Nelson Papers Sam Shepard,Sam Shepard Papers Bud Shrake,Bud Shrake Papers, Texas Monthly magazine,Texas Monthly Archives and William D. Wittliff,Bill Wittliff Papers among others. The film holdings contain over 500 film and television screenplays as well as complete production archives for several popular films, including the television miniseries Lonesome Dove.Lonesome Dove Archive The music holdings represent the breadth and scope of popular Texas sounds, and include primary source collections of Progressive country, Tejano music, Texas Blues (including Stevie Ray Vaughan), and Western Swing.
He was both "Male Vocalist of the Year" and "Entertainer of the Year" in 1996. A year later, Hampton's album, Ridin' The Dreamland Range, was honored as the association's Album of the Year. Hampton won "Male Vocalist of the Year" again in 1999, 2002, and 2006. The 2011 winner, honored early in 2012 at the 16th annual awards presentation, include Bruce Pollock (radio disc jockey), Henry Real Bird and Bette Wolf Duncan (poetry books, Horse Tracks and Dakota, respectively), The Nugents (young artists), Syd Masters (male singer), and Mary Kaye (female singer), Jimmy Burson and Joni Harms (Western swing), Stardust Cowboys (Western album "Riding Back to You"), Curtis Potter (Country album, "The Potter's Touch"), and B. K. Nuzum (chuckwagon).
George Strait, one of the best selling musicians of all-time (2014) During the mid-1980s, a group of new artists began to emerge who rejected the more polished country-pop sound that had been prominent on radio and the charts, in favor of more, traditional, "back-to-basics" production. Many of the artists during the latter half of the 1980s drew on traditional honky-tonk, bluegrass, folk and western swing. Artists who typified this sound included Travis Tritt, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Keith Whitley, Alan Jackson, Ricky Skaggs, Patty Loveless, Kathy Mattea, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, and the Judds. Beginning in 1989, a confluence of events brought an unprecedented commercial boom to country music.
In 1981, George Strait had made his musical debut with the album, Strait Country. The album was based on an approach towards traditional country music and its subgenres of honky tonk, Western swing, and the Bakersfield sound. The album was considered an sharp contrast to the then current trends of country music, at the time relying on the Urban Cowboy country-pop scene. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine observed: In the early 1980s, Ricky Skaggs, a picking prodigy who took his inspiration from Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley (Skaggs was a Clinch Mountain Boy as a teen), began making music that he believed brought country back to its roots; Skaggs' style drew heavily on country's bluegrass vein.
By 1934, Fontenot had begun performing with Amédé Ardoin, who wanted him to play on a recording session with him in New York; however, his parents would not allow him to travel. In the late 1930s, he formed a string band with George Lenard and Paul Frank, playing boogie woogie, western swing and jazz as well as traditional tunes, but after a few years Fontenot established a more lasting partnership with accordionist Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin (a cousin of Amédé) from nearby Duralde. In 1948 the pair formed the Duralde Ramblers, who became highly popular in south west Louisiana and made many radio broadcasts through the 1950s, notably on KEUN in Eunice. He also began writing songs.
Bob Wills Western swing was extremely popular throughout the West in the years before World War II and blossomed on the West Coast during the war.title=nfo.net In the 1940s, the Light Crust Doughboys' broadcasts went out over 170 radio stations in the South and Southwest, and were heard by millions of listeners. From 1934 to 1943, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys played nightly at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, reaching crowds as large as 6,000 people. 50,000-watt radio station KVOO broadcast daily programs. Regular shows continued until 1958 with Johnnie Lee Wills as the bandleader. Doyle Brink and his Texas Swingsters out of Waco, Texas, also played on the road for almost 50 years.
One of the first groups to make it big on the West Coast was the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were the first to wear outlandish costumes and make a "show" out of their performances. Artists such as Wynn Stewart used electric instruments and added a backbeat, as well as other stylistic elements borrowed from rock and roll. Important influences were Depression-era country music superstar Jimmie Rodgers, early 1950s honky tonk singer Lefty Frizzell, and 1940s Western swing musician Bob Wills. In 1954, MGM recording artist Bud Hobbs recorded "Louisiana Swing" with Buck Owens on lead guitar, Bill Woods on piano, and the dual fiddles of Oscar Whittington and Jelly Sanders.
In the spring of 1959, Clark appeared regularly on George Hamilton IV's short-lived television series in Washington, D.C. In 1960, Clark went to Las Vegas, where he worked as a guitarist in a band led by former West Coast Western Swing bandleader-comedian Hank Penny. During the very early 1960s, he was also prominent in the backing band for Wanda Jackson--known as the Party Timers--during the latter part of her rockabilly period.Liner notes for the 1961 Wanda Jackson album, There's a Party Goin' On; retrieved October 27, 2012. During Jack Paar's temporary absence from The Tonight Show in early 1960, Jimmy Dean was asked to guest- host the program.
Although his early tutors were among the first to use the thumbpick in guitar playing, freeing the fingers to pick melody, Travis' style, according to Chet Atkins, went on in musical directions "never dreamt about" by his predecessors.Chet Atkins, liner notes to 1996 reissue of the album Walkin' the Strings His trademark mature style incorporated elements from ragtime, blues, boogie, jazz and Western swing, and was marked by rich chord progressions, harmonics, slides and bends, and rapid changes of key. He could shift quickly from finger-picking to flatpicking in the midst of a number by gripping his thumbpick like a flat pick. In his hands, the guitar resembled a full band.
However, the songs never achieved wide recognition, and Strait continued to manage his family cattle ranch during the day to make some extra cash. While he continued to play with his band, without any real connections to the recording industry, Strait became friends with Erv Woolsey, who operated one of the bars in which the Ace in the Hole band played, and who had previously worked for the major label MCA Records. Woolsey convinced some of his Music Row (Nashville) connections to come to Texas and to listen to Strait and his band play. Impressed with the performance, but concerned that they could not market the Western Swing sound that the band featured, they left without a deal.
Texas Swing band Asleep at the Wheel released its version of the song in 2003 on Asleep at the Wheel Remembers The Alamo. Since the early 1970s this group has performed big band Western swing in the style of Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys, and has a devoted following in the US and the UK as well. The song is part of a theme album about the Battle of the Alamo, and includes traditional tunes ("Deguello", "The Yellow Rose of Texas") and more recent whimsical songs ("The Ballad of Davy Crockett", "Don't Go There"). "Remember the Alamo" is sung by longtime frontman Ray Benson, and the band performs the song in the traditional free and flowing Texas Swing style.
" The end result is one of the most satisfying Christmas albums in recent memory." Brian Wahlert of Country Standard Time called the release "a very enjoyable Christmas album" which "promises to add swing to any Christmas party", the Los Angeles Times added that "The standard-bearers of Western swing music certainly know how to make the holiday spirit bright", and Steve Hall of the Indianapolis Star suggested that "this one's a keeper for your holiday music collection". Other publications, including the Albuquerque Journal, the Philadelphia Daily News, The Tennessean, The San Bernardino County Sun and the Wisconsin State Journal, praised Asleep at the Wheel for producing an album including humorous, fun and enjoyable Christmas songs. Some commentators were less positive about Merry Texas Christmas, Y'all.
Framed is the seventh studio album by American country band Asleep at the Wheel. Recorded at several studios in Austin and Dallas, Texas, it was produced solely by the band's frontman Ray Benson and released on August 5, 1980 as the group's only album on MCA Records. Following the departure of the group's primary songwriter LeRoy Preston (and other members) in 1978, the original material on Framed was written primarily by Benson, with Chris O'Connell the only other credited member. Following numerous lineup changes and the band's departure from Capitol Records after five years, Framed marked a stylistic departure for Asleep at the Wheel, who reduced their regular Bob Wills-influenced Western swing output and explored other genres including rock, easy listening and jazz.
As an adolescent in the 1950s, Hendrix became interested in rock and roll artists such as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. In 1968, he told Guitar Player magazine that electric blues artists Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B.B. King inspired him during the beginning of his career; he also cited Eddie Cochran as an early influence. Of Muddy Waters, the first electric guitarist of which Hendrix became aware, he said: "I heard one of his records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death because I heard all of these sounds." In 1970, he told Rolling Stone that he was a fan of western swing artist Bob Wills and while he lived in Nashville, the television show the Grand Ole Opry.
Following in the footsteps of Gene Autry, Lydia Mendoza, Roy Rogers, and Patsy Montana. By the early 1950s, a blend of Western swing, country boogie, and honky tonk was played by most country bands. Western music, influenced by the cowboy ballads, New Mexico, Texas country and Tejano music rhythms of the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, reached its peak in popularity in the late 1950s, most notably with the song "El Paso", first recorded by Marty Robbins in September 1959. Western music's influence would continue to grow within the country music sphere, Western musicians like Michael Martin Murphey, New Mexico music artists Al Hurricane and Antonia Apodaca, Tejano music performer Little Joe, and even folk revivalist John Denver, all first rose to prominence during this time.
Another subgenre of country music grew out of hardcore honky tonk with elements of Western swing and originated north- northwest of Los Angeles in Bakersfield, California, where many "Okies" and other Dust Bowl migrants had settled. Influenced by one-time West Coast residents Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell, by 1966 it was known as the Bakersfield sound. It relied on electric instruments and amplification, in particular the Telecaster electric guitar, more than other subgenres of the country music of the era, and it can be described as having a sharp, hard, driving, no-frills, edgy flavor—hard guitars and honky-tonk harmonies. Leading practitioners of this style were Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Tommy Collins, Gary Allan, and Wynn Stewart, each of whom had his own style.Buckowens.
Critics say that Red Dirt can best be likened to the indie genre of rock 'n' roll as there is no definitive sound that can be attributed to all the bands in the movement. Most Red Dirt artists would be classified by the music industry as Americana, folk, or alt-country, though the range of sounds in the Red Dirt spectrum goes beyond these genres. It has been described as a mix of folk, rock, country, bluegrass, blues, Western swing, and honky tonk, with even a few Mexican influences. Singer-songwriter and former Stillwater resident Jimmy LaFave said, > "It's kind of hard to put into words, but if you ever drive down on the > (Mississippi) Delta, you can almost hear that blues sound," he explains.
Kirchen is reported to be one of the musicians that pioneered the Americana radio format and is a founding father of the "twangcore movement" which includes Dave Alvin, Wilco and Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys. Kirchen's signature sound has been dubbed "dieselbilly" and incorporates elements of country, blues, rockabilly, Western swing and boogie-woogie, laced with themes of American truck driving music. Kirchen's work in the early 1970s with Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen helped set the stage for the singers like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson and other outlaw country bands with his recordings of songs like "Seeds And Stems." Kirchen is said to have "one of the most distinctive, pure-Fender Telecaster tone guitar sounds in modern music".
41 Reeves began to work as a radio announcer and sang live between songs. During the late 1940s, he was contracted with a couple of small Texas-based recording companies, but without success. Influenced by such Western swing-music artists as Jimmie Rodgers and Moon Mullican, as well as popular singers Bing Crosby, Eddy Arnold and Frank Sinatra, it was not long before he was a member of Moon Mullican's band, and made some early Mullican-style recordings like "Each Beat of my Heart" and "My Heart's Like a Welcome Mat" from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. He eventually obtained a job as an announcer for KWKH-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, then the home of the popular radio program Louisiana Hayride.
He took over a band formerly led by ex-Spade Cooley bassist Deuce Spriggens. Penny modeled the Radio Cowboys' repertoire of Western Swing music on Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies. His West Coast bands reflected the influence of both the more sophisticated Spade Cooley band, and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. A number of former Wills sidemen such as Jimmy Wyble, Noel Boggs, and Herb Remington also worked with Penny. The Plantation Boys Penny had three hits on the Billboard Country Singles chart: "Steel Guitar Stomp" (King 528, 1946), an instrumental that featured Noel Boggs and Merle Travis, the slightly risque "Get Yourself A Red Head" (King 540, 1946), and his own composition "Bloodshot Eyes" (King 828, 1950).
On double bass it refers to the technique that is a more vigorous version of pizzicato, where the string is plucked so hard that when released it bounces off the finger board, making a distinctive sound. A percussive sound can also made by smacking the strings with some or all of the fingers on the right hand in between the notes of a bassline, usually in time with the snare drum. The earliest players of this technique in American music include Bill Johnson (1872–1972), Theodore "Steve" Brown (1890–1965), Wellman Braud (1891–1966), Pops Foster (1892–1969),Cary Ginell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p. 252. see also: The Jazz Book.
In April 1934, the band recorded eight songs for Bluebird Records; and then another ten recordings for the label in August. Brown and his talented group of musicians were responsible for numerous innovations, notably in late 1934, the Brownies added the true pioneer of the world's first electrically amplified steel guitar—Bob Dunn. Dunn was a jazz guitarist who first heard electric steel guitar played by a down and out blues performer on the Coney Island Boardwalk—Dunn's innovative steel guitar solo riffs single- handedly created country & western's most recognized solo instrumental sound. His upbeat "Taking Off" instrumental is an excellent example of his inspired solos; a towering inspiration to many Western swing, country and even rock guitarists in the years to follow.
Henry William Thompson (September 3, 1925 - November 6, 2007) was an American country music singer-songwriter and musician whose career spanned seven decades. Thompson's musical style, characterized as honky tonk Western swing, was a mixture of fiddles, electric guitar and steel guitar that featured his distinctive, smooth baritone vocals. His backing band, The Brazos Valley Boys, was voted the top Country Western Band for 14 years in a row by Billboard. The primary difference between his music and that of Bob Wills was that Thompson, who used the swing beat and instrumentation to enhance his vocals, discouraged the intense instrumental soloing from his musicians that Wills encouraged; however, the "Hank Thompson sound" exceeded Bob Wills in Top 40 country hits.
Cindy Cashdollar is an American musician specializing in steel guitar and Dobro. She grew up in Woodstock, New York, where she perfected her skills by playing with bluegrass musician John Herald, blues musician Paul Butterfield, and Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band. After residing in Austin, Texas, for 23 years, she has now returned to her native Woodstock, New York. Cashdollar received five Grammy awards while playing for eight years with Asleep at the Wheel, and has also backed such noted performers as Bob Dylan, Leon Redbone, Redd Volkaert, Carla Olson and Ryan Adams as a member of his band The Cardinals. In 2003, the Academy of Western Artists recognized Cashdollar as Instrumentalist of the Year Award in the Western Swing Music genre.
White Teeth, Black Thoughts is the sixth studio album by American band the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, released on July 16, 2013, on Space Age Bachelor Pad Records. Following the predominant world music slant of 2008's Susquehanna and the 2009 ska album Skaboy JFK, White Teeth, Black Thoughts marks the Cherry Poppin' Daddies' first album since their 1997 compilation Zoot Suit Riot to focus exclusively on swing and jazz music, eschewing the ska, rock and pop influences which typically feature on their albums. A two-disc "deluxe" version of White Teeth, Black Thoughts was released concurrently with the main swing album, featuring an additional full-length album of material composed in an "Americana" vein covering rockabilly, country and western swing.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Alcorn started playing guitar at the age of twelve and quickly immersed herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas. Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country- western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros.
Working closely with stars like Jim Reeves, Johnnie & Jack, Slim Whitman, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, Red Sovine and Hank Williams was invaluable experience, and positioned him well when Lefty Frizzell came to the Hayride in 1954 seeking a band to back him on a six-month West Coast tour. Floyd Cramer (piano), Jimmy Day (steel), D.J. Fontana (drums), Bill Peters (fiddle), Chuck Wiginton (bass) and Howard (rhythm guitar and vocals) and Frizzell earned wide exposure, especially after performing with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show in Hollywood as well as with Tex Williams and his band. During the tour, Frizzell's manager began working with Ray Price. Near the end of his relationship with Frizzell, he contacted Howard and asked if he would join Price's nine-piece western-swing band as their front man.
"Bob Wills Is Still the King" is a song written and performed by American country music artist Waylon Jennings, as a tribute of sorts to the Western swing icon Bob Wills. It is known in two forms. A live recording of the song was released in June 1975 as the concluding track on the album Dreaming My Dreams, and then appeared in August 1975 as the B-side of "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way", the second single from the album. By early November, the A-side had risen to number one on the country singles chart, but the B-side gained considerable airplay as well, enough so that Billboard listed it as a two-sided hit whereas Cashbox showed it with just the A-side listed.
We can make radio records, and I really wanted to, because I love radio records. So I'm jazzed about this album." Following the critical and commercial success of 1993's Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Benson and Asleep at the Wheel deliberately decided to focus more on modern radio- friendly country music than old-school Western swing for The Wheel Keeps on Rollin', although the frontman admits that pressure from record label Capitol Records also played a part in this change. Speaking to Texas Monthly reporter Gary Cartwright about the decision to record Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally", Benson admitted that "Frankly, I put it on [the album] hoping it would get a lot of radio time ... We still have to make a living.
Media response to Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys was overwhelmingly positive. Writing about the album for The Tennessean, country journalist Robert K. Oermann suggested that the band had "prove[d] that the diversity, flexibility and breadth of Bob's western-swing sound can still astound young listeners," praising the added "star-power" of the featured artists. Similarly, Indianapolis Star columnist John Hawn wrote that "bandleader Ray Benson has outdone himself here by recruiting a diverse group of 18 musicians ... All perform within the framework of Bob Wills-style fiddlin' and yodelin', yet all inject their personalities". Shirley Jinkins of the Casper-Star Tribune called the release "one of the must-haves for any serious music collector", while AllMusic's Michael McCall dubbed it an "exemplary album".
In 1944, Merle Travis moved to Hollywood, California, where he made a living by performing minor roles in a Western films and playing with Ray Whitley's Western Swing Band.Shelton, Pamela L. "Merle Travis Biography" At the time, Capitol A & R man and producer Lee Gillette was looking for a way to enter the rising market for traditional American folk music created by singers and musicians such as John Jacob Niles, Burl Ives, Josh White, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and The Golden Gate Quartet. Travis was known for his broad repertoire of country standards and outstanding guitar playing. Gillette signed him to a recording contract in 1946 and asked him to record a series of folk and folk- inspired songs accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar (although he usually played a hollow-body electric).
This method of playing greatly restricts the number of chords available, so lap steel music often features melodies, a restricted set of harmonies (such as in blues), or another single part. David Gilmour playing lap steel guitar - 26 January 1977 The steel guitar, when played in Hawaiian, country, bluegrass, or western swing styles, is almost always plucked using a plastic thumbpick affixed to the right hand's thumb, and metal or plastic "fingerpicks" fitted to the fingers of the right hand. This allows the player greater control when picking notes on non-adjacent strings. Some blues players, especially those who use a round-neck resonator guitar played upright, conventional-guitar- style, with a bottleneck or hollow metal slide on one left-hand finger, forgo the fingerpicks and thumbpicks, and use their bare fingers and thumb instead.
The Ace in the Hole Band is the backup band for country music performer George Strait, who was the band's lead singer before beginning his solo career in the early 1980s. The band formed at San Marcos, Texas in the 1970s, and recorded several singles for "D Records" including the Strait-penned "I Just Can't Go On Dying Like This" and "I Don't Want To Talk It Over Anymore". After Strait attained status as the "King of Country", the group released an album of its own in 1995 featuring vocals from Darrell McCall and Mel Tillis. The band, originally known as "Stoney Ridge", performs such styles of traditional country music as honky-tonk and western swing and were influenced by such performers as Bob Wills, Johnny Bush, and The Strangers.
Buck Owens and the Buckaroos developed it further, incorporating different styles of music to fit Owens' musical tastes. The music style features a raw set of twin Fender Telecasters with a picking style (as opposed to strumming), a big drum beat, and fiddle, with an occasional "in your face" pedal steel guitar. The Fender Telecaster was originally developed for country musicians to fit in with the Texas/Western swing style of music that was popular in the Western US following World War II. The music, like Owens, was rebellious for its time and is dependent on a musician's individual talents, as opposed to the elaborate orchestral production common with Nashville-style country music. Buck Owens not only aided in the development of the Bakersfield sound, he also helped preserve its history.
The band played a combination of traditional Cajun songs (sung in Cajun French), as well as covers of Western Swing classics (particularly the songs of Bob Wills), early American jazz and blues covers (Stuff Smith, Count Basie, Fats Waller and more), and honky tonk and dance-hall music, as well as dozens of tradition-inspired original songs. The Red Stick Ramblers have appeared in a season finale of the Travel Channel's "No Reservations", with chef Anthony Bourdain, entitled "Cajun Country". Following this appearance the band scored a role in the third season of HBO's Treme, starring as Lucia Micarelli's character Annie's band the "Bayou St. John Playboys" and later "Annie T's Bayou Cadillac." Three Red Stick Rambler original songs, Made in the Shade, Katrina, and Morning Blues, are featured in season three of Treme.
Many of his songs, such as "Pipeliners Blues", "Hey! Mister Cotton- Picker" and "Cherokee Boogie" (his biggest hit, in 1951) directly foreshadowed the style adopted by Haley and later rock'n'rollers. Mullican also influenced many others, some of whom recorded tribute CDs to mark Mullican's 100th birthday in 2009, and the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, who recorded his song "Cherokee Boogie" on their 1973 album Comin' Right At Ya. Mullican is also believed to have co-written "Jambalaya," a song made famous by Hank Williams that could not be credited to Mullican because of his contract with King Records.[ allmusic ((( Moon Mullican > Biography )))] Mullican's recording of the song was released in July 1952, the same month as Williams' version, but differs significantly in having a different order of verses and extra rhyming couplets.
However, prior to that time they had gone under the names the Down Homers, the Texas Range Riders, the Four Aces of Western Swing, and finally, The Saddlemen. At one point in the 1940s, Haley was even awarded Indiana State Yodeling Champion for his skill; this might have been a fact that his skillful manager, Colonel Tom Parker, felt not important to mention to his screaming teenage rock 'n' roll fans. Yodeler Kenny Roberts was another member of the Down Homers; he had taught Bill Haley to yodel before he did a stint in the Navy when Haley took his place in the band. In later years Roberts was popular on children's TV shows where he used to leap over two feet in the air while playing guitar and yodeling.
The solid body allows the guitar to deliver a clear and sustaining amplified version of the strings' sound; this was an improvement over previous electric guitar designs, whose resonant hollow bodies made them prone to unwanted acoustic feedback when volume was increased. These design elements intentionally allowed guitarists to emulate steel guitar sounds, as well as "cut-through" and be heard in roadhouse Honky-Tonk and big Western Swing bands, initially making this guitar particularly useful in country music. Since this, Fender has developed even more in the way of pickups and tones for the telecaster, with changes from Alnico III magnets to Alnico V magnets. Its wide range of tonalities allows the Telecaster to be used successfully for many styles of music including country, pop, rock, blues and jazz.
The band's name comes from two sources: "Hot Club" from the hot jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli's Quintette du Hot Club de France, and "Cowtown" from the western influence of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and other early Western swing combos, as well as the band's love of fiddle tunes, hoedowns, and songs of the American west. Whit Smith (from Cape Cod, Massachusetts) and Elana James (from Prairie Village, Kansas) met through an ad in the classified music section of The Village Voice in 1994. They played together in New York City before moving to San Diego in 1997, where they spent a year playing for tips and building up their repertoire. In 1998 they moved to Austin, Texas and two years later added Jake Erwin (from Tulsa, Oklahoma) on bass.
The Charms (De Luxe 6080).Marv Goldberg,"Otis Williams & The Charms: Based on Interviews with Otis Williams" (2003; 2009).The Billboard(February 12, 1955):32.Jon Hartley Fox, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (University of Illinois Press, 2009):104.Jay Warner, American Singing Groups: A History from 1940 to Today (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2006):109, 110. a "vigorous country" version by Alabama disc jockey Jack Cardwell with Jackie Hill (King 1442),The Billboard(February 26, 1955):58.The Billboard(March 19, 1955):48. that was recorded on January 20, 1955 at radio station WKAB in Mobile, Alabama; a country version by Goldie Hill & Red Sovine (Decca 29411); and a rockabilly/Western swing version by country singer Hawkshaw Hawkins with Rita Robbins (Victor 47-6022);The Billboard (March 19, 1955):30.
He played steel guitar on the 1972 top-five hit Nice to Be With You by Gallery. Franklin has worked with many well known acts during his career, including Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, Barbara Mandrell, Rodney Crowell, Notting Hillbillies, Sting, Peter Frampton, George Strait, Alan Jackson, Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Barbra Streisand, Reba McEntire, Patty Loveless, Kathy Mattea, Big & Rich, Clint Black, Etta James, Jake Owen, Kane Brown, Kenny Rogers, Kid Rock, Lauren Alaina, Lee Ann Womack, Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan, Olivia Newton-John, Peter Cetera, Randy Travis, Ronnie Milsap, Sheryl Crow, Thomas Rett, Tim McGraw, Toni Braxton, Trace Adkins, Vince Gill and Megadeth. Franklin is a member of The Time Jumpers, a country and western swing band. In July 2013, he and Vince Gill released a collaborative album called Bakersfield.
O'Connor has developed a string instrument technique for music teachers and students, The O'Connor Method — A New American School of String Playing. The method places an emphasis on music and playing techniques from North America, in addition to focusing on rhythmic development, ear training, and improvisation. The method is published as a series of books that also contains short essays about famous Americans who played fiddle, such as Johnny Gimble, Ray Nance, Byron Berline, Pinchas Zukerman, Eddie South, Kenny Baker, Benny Thomasson, Scott Joplin, Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett, and the history of a wide variety of music including jazz, bluegrass, Romani, western swing, cajun, blues, African American Spirituals, ragtime and Mariachi. Teacher training sessions based on the Method take place around the United States and in other countries including at O'Connor Method String Camps.
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were a major influence on the music of Asleep at the Wheel during its formative years. According to frontman Ray Benson, the band was initially "pretty primitive ... playing hippie-country-western-rock", before he heard Merle Haggard's tribute to Wills, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills), which was released in 1970. Describing the album as "the Rosetta Stone I'd been looking for", Benson added that he was drawn to Wills' Western swing because it "incorporated both jazz solos and blues songs". As a result, almost every album since the group's 1973 debut Comin' Right at Ya has featured at least one recording of a song composed or made popular by Wills, which Benson claimed "the public has always zeroed in on [and] responded very strongly to".
Led by brothers Willy (vocals/guitar) and Cody Braun (vocals/fiddle/mandolin/harmonica), the alternative country-rock outfit Reckless Kelly formed in Bend Oregon in February 1996 before moving to Austin, Texas. The Brauns had previously toured with their father in Muzzie Braun & the Boys, a Western swing band, and were joined in their own group by the lead guitarist Casey Pollock, the bass guitarist Chris Schelske and the drummer Jay Nazz. With their younger brothers Micky and Gary, Cody and Willy were raised in central Idaho near the Sawtooth Mountains, between Clayton and Challis in Custer County, and were homeschooled by their mother. Originally they were "Muzzie Braun & the Little Braun Brothers", as Muzzie and his brothers Gary and Billy were the "Braun Brothers" from Twin Falls in the 1970s and early 1980s, sons of the musician Eustaceus "Mustie" Braun (1917–1981).
Critical response to Asleep at the Wheel was generally positive. In an uncredited review, Cash Box magazine credited the band for the "gaining momentum" of progressive country, stating: "The group has gained considerable repute for their live act and their first album for Epic marks a worthy label debut as these seven dyed-in-the-wool country buffs confidently rip their way through numbers like "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," "I'm Gonna Be a Wheel Someday," and "Bloodshot Eyes."" In a retrospective review for website AllMusic, James Allen gave Asleep at the Wheel three and a half out of five stars, praising the "multitude of styles" present on the record including Western swing, jazz and honky-tonk. Music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B rating, lower than the A– awarded to Comin' Right at Ya, comparing it to the style of Bob Wills.
Merrill Everett Moore (26 September 1923 - 14 June 2000) was an American swing and boogie-woogie pianist and bandleader whose style influenced rockabilly music during the 1950s. He was born in Algona, Iowa, and learned piano as a child. By the age of 12 he was performing occasionally on a Des Moines radio station. After leaving school he joined the Chuck Hall Band, which played in local ballrooms, before serving in the US Navy during World War II. He then married, and moved with his wife to Tucson, Arizona and then San Diego, where he worked as a clothes salesman and performed in clubs, often with guitarist Arkie Geurin. He became a full-time musician in 1950, and formed his own band, the Saddle, Rock and Rhythm Boys, who played boogie-woogie and Western swing at the Buckaroo Club.
It was recorded in the same studio where the group had made their demos and first two studio albums. The sisters noted that previous producers had wanted to highlight their "softer" sound, whereas Byrne was willing to include country rock and Western swing. Lead single "Men", co-written by Byrne, went on to chart at number eight on Hot Country Songs that year. Kim said of "Men", a novelty song about the relationships between men and women as seen from a woman's perspective, that she found it relatable because she had listened to it after having an argument with her husband. The song's success also led to a parody called "Women", recorded on Curb Records by a studio band called the Bandit Brothers; by mid-1991, this parody had charted on Hot Country Songs as well.
The Americana genre has prominent folk and rock influences and omits the outlaw, rockabilly, hillbilly, western swing and Cajun sounds perfected by traditionalists. Watson believes the entire country music nomenclature has been irrevocably corrupted beyond repair, insisting the newly created Ameripolitan music genre helps rebrand, honor and preserve contemporary music rooted in the earlier traditions of country music. Rebranding efforts heightened after reported remarks were made by contemporary country pop singer, Blake Shelton, during his appearance on an episode of GAC Backstory: Though Shelton later apologized for the comment, his remarks, Watson felt, let the "proverbial cat out of the bag" and set the internet abuzz with regard to the true feelings of Music Row and the roots of country music, further fueling the fire to rebrand the Ameripolitan music genre, designed to honor and preserve the roots of Country music.
Lana Chapel (Cherokee ancestry) is the daughter of songwriter and country and rock & roll singer Jean Chapel aka Mattie O'Neil, and her husband, western swing artist and songwriter/musician/comedian, Salty Holmes, of the Prairie Ramblers. Some of Chapel's song credits are: "Sweet Marilyn" by Eddy Arnold, "On Second Thought" by Tompall Glaser, "The Hemphill Kentucky Consolidated Coal Mines" & "Plastic People" by Henson Cargill Peters, "Kentucky Ridgerunner" by Lester Flatt, and "It's For My Dad" by Nancy Sinatra. She was a staff writer for several major music publishing companies in Nashville including: Owen Bradley of Decca Records, Tree Music, Frank and Nancy Music, Frank Sinatra, Tammy Wynette's company, First Lady Music and Resaca Music, Kris Kristofferson, President. Lana was the youngest published songwriter in Nashville at age 11, and the youngest songwriter to be signed with Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), in 1967.
According to Colin Escott's 2004 biography of Hank Williams, producer Fred Rose initially saw "Cold, Cold Heart" as a B-side and regarded "Dear John" a more appropriate A-side, since jukeboxes preferred up-tempo singles. The song was originally recorded by Jim Boyd, younger brother of Dallas-based western swing artist Bill Boyd. Eventually Tex Ritter got a credit on the song likely after promising songwriter Aubrey Gass he would get the song cut by a big name or get Gass a contract with his label Capitol if he got a piece of the composition. Williams recorded the song at the same session that he cut "Cold, Cold Heart," with Fred Rose producing and backing from Jerry Rivers (fiddle), Don Helms (steel guitar), Sammy Pruett (electric guitar), Chet Atkins (rhythm guitar), and Ernie Newton or "Cedric Rainwater," aka Howard Watts (bass).
Haggard depicted on a publicity portrait for Capitol Records (1975, age 38) Haggard's 1970 LP A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, dedicated to Bob Wills, helped spark a permanent revival and expanded the audience for western swing. By this point, Haggard was one of the most famous country singers in the world, having enjoyed an immensely successful artistic and commercial run with Capitol, accumulating 24 number-one country singles since 1966. In 1972, Let Me Tell You about A Song, the first TV special starring Haggard, was nationally syndicated by Capital Cities TV Productions. It was a semi-autobiographical musical profile of Haggard, akin to the contemporary Behind The Music, produced and directed by Michael Davis. The 1973 recession anthem, "If We Make It Through December," furthered Haggard's status as a champion of the working class.
The basic group instrumentation features pedal steel guitar and harmonica, both of which lend credibility to the performance's Western origins. The song gained some renown even before it was released on record, as one verse of it was quoted by a United Press International story published on May 14, 1975, following the death of Wills the day before: :You can hear the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville, Tennessee :It's the home of country music, on that we all agree :But when you cross that ol' Red River, hoss, :That just don't mean a thing. :Once you're down in Texas, Bob Wills is still the King. The song concludes, in another verse about Texas, with lines directed at his friend and occasional collaborator: :It's the home of Willie Nelson, the home of Western swing :He'll be the first to tell you, Bob Wills is still the King.
Wills' band at the time consisted of two fiddlers, two bass fiddles, two electric guitars, electric steel guitar, and a trumpet. Wills's then-drummer was Monte Mountjoy, who played in the Dixieland style. Wills battled Opry officials and refused to perform without his drummer. An attempt to compromise by keeping Mountjoy behind a curtain collapsed when Wills had his drums placed front and center onstage at the last minute.Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz by Rich Kienzle p 255 In 1945, Wills' dances were outdrawing those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and he moved to Fresno, California. Then in 1947, he opened the Wills Point nightclub in Sacramento, California and continued touring the Southwest and Pacific Northwest from Texas to Washington State. While based in Sacramento, his radio broadcasts over 50,000-watt KFBK were heard all over the West.Gerald W. Haslam.
Hank Williams Another type of stripped down and raw music with a variety of moods and a basic ensemble of guitar, bass, dobro or steel guitar (and later) drums became popular, especially among poor whites in Texas and Oklahoma. It became known as honky tonk and had its roots in Western swing and the ranchera music of Mexico and the border states, particularly Texas, together with the blues of the American South. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys personified this music which has been described as "a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, a little bit of black and a little bit of white ... just loud enough to keep you from thinking too much and to go right on ordering the whiskey." East Texan Al Dexter had a hit with "Honky Tonk Blues", and seven years later "Pistol Packin' Mama".
David Virgin now lives in Dublin, Ireland and continues to write, record and perform music solo and with his two sons Rohan Healy and Alex "Al Quiff" Healy, of The Dublin City Rounders, in the vintage, western swing and blues act David Virgin & The Stanley Knife Brothers. In November 2013, Virgin released a 23 song best-of album titled "Three Decades of David Virgin" through Beardfire Music and in January 2014 Virgin released solo album "Boots 'N' Tooths". Virgin released an album titled The Beautiful Album in September 2017. The Beautiful Album is a selection of mainly duets by Virgin featuring Leslie Dowdall (of In Tua Nua), Leila Jane, Kate Dineen, Klara McDonnell and Elga Fox. The songs on the album were backed instrumentally by the Dublin City Rounders, Rohan Healy on guitar, Al Quiff on double bass, Adam Byrne on drums and Caoimhe O’Farrell on Irish harp.
The song was also recorded on small budget labels by Vincent Lopez, Harry Reser and Annette Hanshaw. In Britain, it was covered by Bob and Alf Pearson. Ella Fitzgerald recorded this in the spring of 1939 with Chick Webb's band, it was released on Decca. Moon Mullican also recorded the song in 1939 as featured vocalist with the Cliff Bruner Western swing group. A hit version was recorded by Dick Haymes on November 3, 1947. The recording was released by Decca Records as catalog number 24280. The record first reached the Billboard magazine charts on April 2, 1948 and lasted 23 weeks on the chart, peaking at #3. The song was also recorded by Dinah Shore on December 12, 1947 and released by Columbia Records as catalog number 38114. The record first reached the Billboard magazine charts on June 25, 1948 and lasted 1 week on the chart, at #28.
Production on what would eventually be entitled The Boop-A-Doo began in Spring 2015 in Eugene, utilizing vintage recording techniques as well as the use of pre-1940s instruments to achieve an authentic jazz-era sound. The Boop- A-Doo was released on January 22, 2016, promoted by a music video for the 1930 Eubie Blake/Andy Razaf song "That Lindy Hop", directed by Perry. Initially, the Daddies announced that Please Return the Evening and The Boop-A-Doo would comprise two parts of a planned trilogy of cover albums designed to showcase the band's swing and jazz influences. Although Perry revealed in a November 2016 interview that the Daddies' third volume of cover songs would focus on either western swing or a Babs Gonzales/"beatnik"-style bebop, as of March 2019, there have been no further updates on the status of this album.
In recent years, however, Perry has dismissed attempts to apply labels to the Daddies' music, often casually describing them in vaguer terms as "a rock band with horns" or "a dance band that uses jazz a bit". Perry has compared the Daddies' style of musical eclecticism with that of Fishbone, Mink DeVille and Oingo Boingo, while also citing major influence from The Specials and Roxy Music, as well as from Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and Duke Ellington on his composing and arrangements. Alongside the constants of swing, ska, and on earlier recordings, funk, each of the Daddies' studio albums feature a collective assortment of varied and often diametrically opposed genres of music. Some of the musical styles the band has experimented with include blues, country, disco, Dixieland, flamenco, folk, glam rock, hardcore punk, jump blues, lounge, psychedelic pop, rhythm and blues, reggae, rockabilly, soca, soul, western swing and zydeco.
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen formed in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, with Frayne taking the stage name Commander Cody. The band’s name was inspired by 1950s film serials featuring the character Commando Cody and from a feature version of an earlier serial, King of the Rocket Men, released under the title Lost Planet Airmen. After playing for several years in local bars, in 1969 the core members migrated to Berkeley, California and soon got a recording contract with Paramount Records. (About a year later, Commander Cody invited western swing revival group Asleep at the Wheel to relocate to the Bay Area.) The group released their first album in late 1971, Lost in the Ozone, which yielded its best-known hit, a cover version of the 1955 song "Hot Rod Lincoln", which reached the top ten on the Billboard singles chart in early 1972.
In Texas and Oklahoma, Western swing bands, such as Bob Wills, combined elements of big band, blues and country music into a new style of dance music. As musicians from different areas and cultures heard each other's music, so styles merged and innovations spread. Increasingly, processes of active cross-fertilisation took place between the music played and heard by white people and the music predominantly played and heard by black people. These processes of exchange and mixing were fueled by the spread of radio, 78 rpm and later records and jukeboxes, and the expansion of the commercial popular music business. The music also benefited from the development of new amplification and electronic recording techniques from the 1930s onward, including the invention of the electric guitar, first recorded as a virtuoso instrument by Charlie Christian. Louis Jordan in 1946 In 1938, promoter and record producer John H. Hammond staged the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert in New York City to highlight black musical styles.
He had a more severe one a few days later. The musicians completed the album without him. Wills by then was comatose. He lingered until his death on May 13, 1975. Reviewing For the Last Time in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau wrote: "This double-LP doesn't represent the band at its peak. But though earlier recordings of most of these classic tunes are at least marginally sharper, it certainly captures the relaxed, playful, eclectic Western swing groove that Wills invited in the '30s." In addition to being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968, Wills was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category along with the Texas Playboys in 1999, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. From 1974 until his 2002 death, Waylon Jennings performed a song he had written called "Bob Wills Is Still the King".
Ritter was one of the most successful singing cowboys, having starred in Western films since the mid-1930s. Two other performers associated with such roles had number-one songs in 1945: Dick Thomas and Gene Autry, who was the biggest star of the singing cowboy genre and a hugely successful performer across music, film and television from the 1930s until the 1950s. The lyrics of Autry's chart-topper "At Mail Call Today" dealt with a soldier separated from his sweetheart, one of several military-themed songs to top the chart in the latter days of World War II. Texan fiddler Bob Wills, hailed as the "King of Western swing", topped the chart for the first time with the war-themed "Smoke on the Water", and later returned to the top spot with the patriotic "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima". In December he topped the chart again with "Silver Dew on the Blue Grass Tonight", making him the only artist to achieve three number ones in 1945.
The classically trained Bradley tried, but could not quite match the sound, so Tubb said Bradley was "half as good" as Moon. When Tubb called out Bradley's name at the start of one of the piano interludes, the singer always referred to him as "Half-Moon Bradley". In 1949, Tubb helped the famed boogie-woogie Andrews Sisters crossover to the country charts when they teamed on Decca Records to record a cover of Eddy Arnold's "Don't Rob Another Man's Castle" and the Western swing-flavored "I'm Bitin' My Fingernails and Thinking of You". Tubb was impressed by the enormous success of Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne Andrews, and he remembered that their 1947 recording of "The Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn)" with folk legend Burl Ives produced a top-10 Billboard hit,Sforza, John: "Swing It! The Andrews Sisters Story;" University Press of Kentucky, 2000; 289 pages and he was then eager to repeat that success.
By 1996, the Cherry Poppin' Daddies had established themselves as a staple of the West Coast third wave ska scene, carving out a steady touring niche alongside bands such as The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. However, the Daddies' next album strayed from the brass-heavy swing and funk which dominated their first two releases in favor of further exploration into punk and ska. With lead singer Steve Perry now assuming a role as a rhythm guitarist, Kids on the Street predominantly features guitar-driven ska and punk, though also branches into such genres as southern rock ("Luther Lane"), western swing ("Silver-Tongued Devil") and jazz ("Here Comes the Snake"). Perry has stated that the abundance of straightforward rock and punk songs on the album in place of the eclecticism of their previous records was partially due to his playing guitar on the album, as he described his guitar skills as "limited".
The disc includes obscure B-sides with some of Wills' most popular work, including Big Balls in Cowtown and Stay a Little Longer, Osage Stomp and The Devil Ain't Lazy. In 2016, the Hot Club of Cowtown released its ninth studio album, Midnight on the Trail (Gold Strike Records), a vintage mix of 12 Western swing songs and cowboy ballads "hand-collected to reflect the spirit and joy of the American West," including traditional songs as well as works by Cindy Walker, Gene Autry, Bob Wills, Johnny Mercer, and more. The band's previous release, "Rendezvous in Rhythm" (Gold Strike Records, 2013) was a collection of hot jazz standards and gypsy instrumentals played acoustically in the style of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli (The Quintette of the Hot Club of France). The Hot Club of Cowtown released a live DVD, "Continental Dance Party," in 2012 which was filmed at the Continental Club Gallery in Austin, Texas.
Most notably, the album features appearances by Grammy Award-winning accordionist Buckwheat Zydeco on the zydeco-styled song "Tchoupitoulas Congregation", and Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo, a Eugene resident and personal friend of Perry's, on the psychobilly cover "Flat Butts and Beer Guts". John Fohl, a former member of Dr. Johns Lower 911 band and Daddies guitarist from 1990–1992, provided baritone and slide guitar for the western swing track "Peckerheads and Badasses". Although the band originally announced a projected release date of winter 2011, updates on the album's development went entirely unheard of until a December 2011 interview with Perry, where he vaguely mentioned continued work on the album but finally confirmed its title, White Teeth, Black Thoughts. Perry later revealed that following initial completion of recording in late 2011, the band ultimately decided to record an additional batch of songs and release an exclusive version of White Teeth, Black Thoughts as a double album.
One of the sisters' first paying gigs was in 2000, when Red Steagall heard and invited them to perform at The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering and Western Swing Festival in the Fort Worth Stockyards, a festival to which they returned to perform for 13 years straight. Entering fiddle contests, they had success early on, winning several state, regional, and national fiddle championships. In their respective age groups Sophia Quebe was Texas State champion in 1999 and 2000, Hulda Quebe was Texas State champion in 2000 and 2001, and Grace Quebe was Texas State champion in 2001. Then in 2002, at the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, ID, oldest sister Grace took first place in the junior division with middle sister Sophia placing second and youngest sister Hulda winning the junior-junior title.Jesse Mullins, Jr., "Throwbacks and Naturals", American Cowboy, Oct-Nov 2014, p.20, retrieved 8 May 2018 In 2003 they released their first album, Texas Fiddlers, backed by Joey McKenzie on rhythm guitar, Mark Abbott on bass, and others, including steel guitarist Tom Morrell.
Elana James met guitarist Whit Smith in 1994 through an ad in the Village Voice while both were living in New York City. They played together for some years, later adding Jake Erwin, a slap bass player, and forming the American swing trio Hot Club of Cowtown. The group plays original material as well as a mix of pre-WWII Western swing, a style made famous by Bob Wills and Milton Brown, combined with the Gypsy jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli. Other influences include American swing violinists Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti, and Johnny Gimble. Hot Club of Cowtown, which has been based in Austin, Texas since 1998, is not named for any specific "Cowtown," but is rather just intended as state of mind, or "The Cowtown of the Imagination." James toured with Bob Dylan in 2004, 2005, and 2006 (James came to Dylan's attention when The Hot Club of Cowtown opened for him and Willie Nelson during a joint tour of historic baseball parks in the Summer of 2004).
Since plans for a new record were announced, singer/songwriter Steve Perry stated the primary musical direction of the next Daddies album would be returning to swing and jazz music, the band's first swing-oriented album since their 1997 breakthrough compilation Zoot Suit Riot. White Teeth, Black Thoughts features few of the ska and punk influences which the Daddies are generally recognized for incorporating into their swing music, instead primarily drawing from various periods of traditional jazz and swing, including the hot jazz of the 1930s and the jump blues and big band of the 1940s and 1950s. A limited "deluxe edition" of White Teeth, Black Thoughts was co-released alongside the main album, featuring a bonus disc of additional material which Perry explained didn't fit into the stylistic context of the swing album. Heavily influenced by various facets of Americana music, the songs on the bonus disc cover such styles as zydeco ("Tchoupitoulas Congregation"), country ("You Wiped Your Ass With My Heart"), western swing ("Peckerheads & Badasses") and bluegrass ("Ragged Ol' Flag"), as well as several songs influenced by rockabilly.
He tied the single-season Top Fuel record for victories with nine, and was named Driver of the Year for the second quarter. Dixon became fifth Top Fuel driver to win consecutive NHRA POWERade Top Fuel championships in 2003. He was only the fourth driver in NHRA history to sweep the Western Swing. That year he moved to fourth on Top Fuel all-time win list and in the process recording his career-best speed (332.75 mph) which stood as national record for 15 events. He won the rain delayed 2002 Budweiser Shootout, which was completed at '03 season-opener In 2004 he earned two victories in three final round appearances and finished his tenth consecutive NHRA POWERade Series season in the top 10 points. That season he tied legendary "Big Daddy" Don Garlits for third on all-time Top Fuel wins list with 35 career victories.nhra.com driver profile page He finished second at the $100,000 Budweiser Shootout after gaining starting spot in bonus event via wild-card selection. Dixon raced to three victories in seven final rounds in 2005 clocking a career-best elapsed time (4.481s) at Pomona 1 and also posted three No. 1 qualifying positions.
The Daddies' horn section, traditionally a trio of trumpet and alto and tenor saxophones, became a quartet with the addition of trombonist Joe Freuen in 2012. In mid-2012, Perry finally elaborated on the production status of the new album, revealing that the band had written enough material to release White Teeth, Black Thoughts as a double album, consisting of the main all-swing album and a bonus disc of "Americana"-influenced rock songs in styles including rockabilly, country, bluegrass and western swing, the latter disc featuring guest appearances from accordionist Buckwheat Zydeco on a zydeco song and former Captain Beefheart guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo on a psychobilly track. On June 20, 2012, the Daddies launched a PledgeMusic campaign to help finance the final stages of the album's production, successfully reaching its target on August 14 and continuing to collect pledges into the following year, ultimately raising 133% of its goal. Preceded by the release of two singles and music videos for the songs "I Love American Music" and "The Babooch", White Teeth, Black Thoughts was released independently on Space Age Bachelor Pad Records on July 16, 2013.
Their repertoire included country standards, traditional bluegrass, Dawson originals, and a few Dylan covers ("Lay Lady Lay", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Mighty Quinn"). By the summer of 1969 it was decided that a full band would be formed and David Nelson was recruited to play lead guitar. In addition to Nelson, Dawson (on acoustic guitar), and Garcia (continuing to play pedal steel), the original line-up of the band that came to be known as the New Riders of the Purple Sage (a nod to the Foy Willing-led Western swing combo from the 1940s, Riders of the Purple Sage, which borrowed its name from the Zane Grey novel) consisted of Alembic Studio engineer Bob Matthews on electric bass and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead; bassist Phil Lesh also played sporadically with the ensemble in lieu of Matthews through the end of the year, as documented by the late 1969 demos later included on the Before Time Began archival release. Lyricist Robert Hunter briefly rehearsed with the band on bass in early 1970 before the permanent hiring of Torbert in April of that year.

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