Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum

Author:Larry Birnbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Western Swing

When Jimmie Rodgers blended country music with jazz and cloaked it in cowboy imagery, he was embracing two tendencies that combined in the 1930s in a genre that became known a decade later as western swing. But western swing began to evolve independently of Rodgers. A November 1927 recording of “Hesitation Blues” by the blackface singer Al Bernard, accompanied by a white jazz band, the Goofus Five, has been cited as a western-swing precursor, although Bernard first cut the song in 1919 in a similar style. In December 1927, the East Texas Serenaders, a string band led by the fiddler Daniel Huggins Williams, recorded “Combination Rag,” a mildly jazzy hoedown; the group cut the same sort of material over the next few years, changing little by the time of its final session in 1937, when western swing was in full flower.

In March 1928, Prince Albert Hunt’s Texas Ramblers, a Dallas-area fiddle-and-guitar duo, recorded “Blues in a Bottle,” featuring Hunt’s remarkably gritty, authentically bluesy singing and fiddling. Like some other white country bluesmen, Hunt assumes an African American identity in the lyrics, singing “Asked my baby, could she stand to see me cry / [She] said, ‘Whoa, black daddy, I can stand to see you die.’” Hunt died a blues legend’s death, shot outside a Dallas dance hall by a jealous husband at the age of thirty. “Blues in a Bottle” was revived in 1964 by the Holy Modal Rounders, a folk duo, as the waggish “Blues in the Bottle,” which was popularized in 1965 by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a folk-rock band. Another early fiddle-and-guitar duo, the Humphries Brothers, from central Texas, recorded vintage ragtime pieces such as “Black and White Rag” and “St. Louis Tickle” in June 1930.

But it is commonly agreed that western swing was born in Fort Worth in 1930 when singer Milton Brown and his guitar-playing younger brother Derwood joined the Wills Fiddle Band, previously consisting of fiddler Bob Wills and guitarist Herman Arnspiger. Playing on radio shows for different sponsors, the group became the Aladdin Laddies and then the Light Crust Doughboys. Frustrated by the restrictive policies of W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, who managed the sponsoring Burrus Mill and Elevator Company, Milton Brown left the Doughboys to form his own band in September 1932, and Wills followed in August 1933. O’Daniel himself left Burrus in 1935 to found his own Hillbilly Flour company and Hillbilly Boys band, setting a precedent for Jimmie Davis when he used the band in his victorious 1938 campaign for the Texas governorship. (O’Daniel won a U.S. Senate seat in 1941, handing Lyndon Johnson his only electoral defeat. A character in the 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? is loosely based on him.) The Light Crust Doughboys, featuring such musicians as pianist Knocky Parker, enjoyed continuing success as a radio and recording group until World War II. The group re-formed after the war and still exists today.

Bob Wills, the son of a traditional fiddler, grew up mostly in the southern Texas Panhandle, picking cotton alongside black workers.

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