Western Swing

there's a pretty excellent tribute album to bob wills by the pine valley cosmonauts (really just the waco brothers and a bunch of guest stars). it could have been terrible but it's pretty great. just got a ray price bob wills tribute as well from '61, also great.

Was talking about Bob Wills to someone the other day! Has there ever been a definitive set? Seems like the box sets around always skip one era or another.

Merle H's a Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player s well worth picking up - Merle and the Strangers plus a host of Texas Playboys

What about Spade Cooley? Is there a boxset there, or are they just waiting for the inevitable biopic of him to drop it?

Hello Dom!

There are many many Bob Wills compilations worth picking up and he was pretty much my entry point for the genre, the Tiffany Transcriptions are good in particular. Also The Light Crust Doughboys.

swingin' on the strings the speedy west collection is v nice for the pedal sound

Theres a 4 cd box set just called Western Swing which you can pick up easily. i dont have it here with me so cant check the label

How do you feel about Hawaiian music Dom? There's a good compilation called Honolulu Hollywood Nashville 1927-1944 which might not be exactly what you are looking for here

I have absolutely _no_ idea about Hawaiian music. Is there much of a crossover with the Western Swing sound?

http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Rhythm-Transcriptions-Hank-Penny/dp/B00004U93J

^^^what about this? "Peroxide Blond" is fantastic but I've heard little else.

Speedy West played in Spade Cooleys band i think, amongst others. Also look out for a song he did with Jean Shepard though that is early 50s (twice the lovin in half the time)

Thats available on a comp called Hilbilly Music....Thank God!!! which is more early 50s than the period you looking for, honky tonk and hillbilly

All i will say about this compilation is that for me its one of the best 5 compilations of any music and I highly recommend it

Would a Proper comp not be the best thing here?

eg
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doughboys-Playboys-Cowboys-Golden-Western/dp/B00005EQQE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211734552&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-Back-Tulsa-Bob-Wills/dp/B00005TO15/ref=pd_sim_m_h_?ie=UTF8&qid=1211734552&sr=8-1

The comp that got me into it was from the vinyl era- a Columbia early 80s comp called "Okey Western Swing". That's two LPs and all killer. The best Bob Wills cuts I've ever found: "Who Steps in When I Walk Out", "Oozlin Daddy Blues".

This is a really good 1 cd comp:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Swing-Various-Artists/dp/B00004TAS6/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211734435&sr=8-5

It includes my favorite Western Swing track of all, Milton Brown's "Chinatown, My Chinatown"

Ray Condo was a contemporary guy (died a few years back) who put out my favorite revivalist records. Swing Brother Swing and Door to Door Maniac are particularly good, mixing obscurities, standards and originals with a consistency and energy of the Cramps at their peak.

Haha Frogman that first compilation is actually the one i mentioned upthread, I couldn't remember the title and thought it was just called Western Swing!

I don't have the Bob Wills compilation, but I have plenty on there, it certainly looks good to me! I'd get that!

Also has my fave Bob cut

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOC_4L97jsM

Oh, thats a different version on there!

That Doughboys, Playboys and Cowboys box is a great deal, but a little daunting and difficult to sort through because the tracks are mostly similar.

For the benefit of any non-asswipes stopping by this thread, here's what I swear by:

Hillbilly Fever: Vol 1: Legends of Western Swing (Rhino, 1995) is the best single-disc comp I know of:

http://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Fever-Vol-Legends-Western/dp/B000008OXY

Bob Wills -- Tiffany Transcriptions (4 discs, released separately) generally has the Playboys working in jazzier rhythms overall, so I prefer them, but this 4-disc box just came out a couple years ago, and shouldn't be hard to find:

http://www.amazon.com/Legends-Country-Music-Wills-Playboys/dp/B000GRTR2E

Favorite vinyl comp, mentioned above, is Okeh Western Swing (Epic, 1982), which actually starts out in the '20s, before Western Swing was a genre yet:

http://www.amazon.com/OKeh-Western-Swing-Various-Artists/dp/B000002Z5S

And these single artist sets have proven reliable over the years; worth keeping your eye out for, though I don't know how hard they'd be to find:

Spade Cooley Spade Cooley (CBS/Columbia Historic Edition LP, 1982)

Ocie Stockard and the Wanderers Western Swing Chronicles Vol. 3 (Origin Jazz Library CD, 2004)

Smokey Wood The Houston Hipster: Western Swing 1937 (Mutual Music Corporation LP, 1982) -- totally crazed and wacky proto-beatnik stuff. Did "Everybody's Truckin," on which he actually sings "Everybody's Fuckin'" all the way through.

Adolph Hofner South Texas Swing: His Early Recordings 1935-1955 (Arhoolie LP, 1980) -- Great band, unfortunate name. He works in a lot Czech-Tex polka rhythms.

Milton Brown and his Brownies Country and Western Dance-O-Rama (Western 10-inch EP) -- I'm guessing it might be hard to track this one down, but it's the only Milton Brown record I've got, and he was great.

I used to have a great Roy Newman and his Boys LP too; they may have had the deepest jazz influence of any of these bands, and I was stupid to sell it.

My favorite Hawaiian music collection, fwiw:

http://www.arhoolie.com/titles/7027.shtml

Wills'/Brownie's Sunbonnet Sue is one of my absolute all time favorite compositions. To think it was released in 1932!

Foy Willing's Texas Blues is a close 2nd also.

...and yeah chuck, the sol hoopii/sol k bright (Hollywaiians!!) connection is certainly more than just notable.

Tiffany Transcriptions (4 discs, released separately)

Actually, I just checked my copies (which came out on CDs in Rhino in 1987), and I've got Vols. 1, 2, 3, and 6. Which probably means there are more than 4 discs, though I've never heard the ones I'm missing.

A'nt Idy Harper with The Coon Creek Girls - Poor Naomi Wise

Light Crust Doughboys - Pussy Pussy Pussy

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Big Beaver

Moon Mullican - Pipeliner Blues

Hank Penny - The King of Hillbilly Bebop

xp Moon Mullican (who I used to have good best-of LP by, too) is almost more country boogie, like the early '50s Tennesse Ernie Ford stuff, but (in Moon's case) really paving the way for Jerry Lee-style rockabilly. (Those eras all overlapped, anyway.) He was awesome, regardless, no matter how you file him.

Who invented rock and roll?

prove to me that it's not Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

-- Tracer Hand, Monday, May 7, 2001 12:00 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Link

It seems this thread has never been/will never be taken seriously, but I've been shittin around thinking about Memphis a lot these past few days...

Sepia music/race records/whatever have been around since the days of Boogie Woogie. Juke joint music. The earliest piece I own is 1928, but I'm sure it preadtes that.

Western Swing morphs into Hillbilly Bop when it embraces R&B. 1943's Pistol Packin' Mama is checked here, but Hank Penny's 1943 stuff sounds waaay more R&B influenced to me.

Lucky Millinder & Wynonie Harris's Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well came out in 1944 and *really* hit home with the R&B goes gospel sound. This practically spawns a whole genre of the 2/4 "rockin'" beat for the end of 40's race records.

WDIA is the 1st "all Black" radio station in Memphis (the entire staff was not black, but whatever). It went on the air in 1947. DJ's included Nat D Williams, Rufus Thomas, BB King, etc.

White DJ Dewey Phillips at WHBQ in Memphis followed suit palying Black R&B in 1949. It could be said that it was Dewey's country rambling and speed fueled personality that pumps energy into listeners, generating White fans for "race music".

These were small local Memphis stations, but in Nashville, WLAC had a white ran black radio show by Gene Nobles, John R, and Hoss. They were 50,000 watts, so on a clear night, it reached everywhere on the east coast. They began playing race music due to Fisk university students requesting it.

1951 was the year of "Rocket 88", which all the so-called historians now claim as the first rock record (the original Jackie Brenston/Ike Turner version is always cited). The thing about Rocket 88 was it was just a reworking of Ida Red, which had been traded back and forth between R&B and Hillbilly Bop for years...and the other Jackie Brenston/Ike Turner songs from 1951 sounded similar.

I personally think the criteria that cites Rocket 88 comes from a revisionsit standpoint...but it is pretty damned important to note that Bill Haley and The Saddlemen covered it that year while ditching the majority of their country leanings. The earlier Haley stuff liek Cnady Kisses are pretty much straight-forward country.

So yeah, Alan Freed. In Akron, I don't think he played exclusivly R&B, but rather, had something like a Jazz show that incorporated some race records...but when he moved to Cleveland, Leo Mintz convinced Alan to play all race records records as a way to advertise Leo's Record Rendezvous record store as it specialized in race music.

In 52 Jerry Wexler and Billboard changed the term "race music" to R&B.

Sun Recorsd also comes around in 1952, who early on had somewhat erratic releases, but focusing on Blues and R&B.

It was 1952 when Alan Freed's Moondog Coronation Ball probably grabbed the nation's attention as it more than sold out. Freed was using his term "Rock and Roll" at that time. So many specualtions on where Freed grabbed it from, but it's enough to say that a lot of 1947-1949 R&B songs had the words rock and roll in the title. For all we know, Freed missed out on Billboard changing the name to R&B.

Bill haley still the lone ranger on this thing as he hit it big with Crazy Man Crazy in 1953. Not country...not straight forward R&B either. wasn't this also the year of Doo-Wop? Doo-Wop lacks the beat of Jump Blues styled R&B, but represents the oldies perspective of Rock and Roll more. The Crows' Gee came out in 1953 and represents this well.

At the same time Sam Phillips at Sun claimed to be searching for "a white man that can sing black", which eventually spawned Rockabilly when Rock and Roll wasn't really even a genre per say...more like a marketing scheme. Elvis's first singles for Sun are 54.

Around the same time Sam Phillips was trying to figure it out, Bill Haley finally came crashing through with Rock Around the Clock as it was included in the movie Blackboard Jungle. The song was recorded and released in 1954, but BB Jungle hit in 1955, spreading it everywhere that year.

Needless to say this amounts to Elvis signing his major deal, although Elvis-mania supposedly didn't hit until Heartbreak Hotel in 1956

The question then becomes how much did the R&B market A&R themselves to bend to this new marketing scheme that was Rock and Roll? Seems Chuck Berry wasn't aiming at traditional R&B charts. We know that Alan Freed was "proposistioned" for marketing Berry's Maybeline, so clearly the R&B labels knew this was the new market. Does the bending itself constitute music that was Rock and Roll?

Sort of like House Music...the Disco Frankie Knuckles played at the Warehouse was called House at the time, but we pinpoint the start of the House genre proper when producers began to mimic that old Disco in a contemporary way.

-- Rev. PappaWheelie (PappaWheelie 2), Wednesday, July 12, 2006 7:55 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

a common western swing thing was electric mandolin! so many awesome weird instruments. i'm home at my parents' place and am looking longingly at the tiffany transcriptions set i gave my dad about 10 years ago. it's got a whole disc dedicated to tommy duncan which i'm really curious about, since duncan appears on pretty much every other song from that era too. they must be some pretty standout performances.

one thing i didn't catch onto til recently is the mexican influences threading thru some western swing. i.e. bob wills' famous falsetto "aaa - haaa!" sounds like it comes straight from veracruz-style sones jarochos

(of which "la bamba" is probably the most famous example)

haha, carlos y jose to thread!

ok so my dad has all seven tiffany transcriptions cds! plus a bonus disc of the mckinney sisters instead of tommy duncan singing with the band. maybe i should like, do something with them...

Whoa.

And I thought the 4 disc set I picked up was pretty overwhelming.

i'm missing 8 and 9, apparently :/

You've probably got enough to sift through with those eight other discs :-)

I've hardly got past disc two of my box...

i like western swing, but i didn't know that country mambo and country tango are also things:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/04/hillbilly-mambo.html
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/05/country-tangos.html

Awesome, I'll have to check out both of those later...

Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl do a fine job re-working this Perry Como hit.
!

it's nuts how much country polka there was too. entire country bands would just switch to polka in order to get on the radio. it's like some bizarre parallel universe except that it happened.

Surely Homer and Jethro were in on this, but I didn't see their name on either of those two pages.

Looks like this has pretty deftly handled - excepting the discussion about the Bob Wills Tiffany Transcription; whose volumes number 1-10 (most of which are long out-of-print).

Proper has an amazing-looking Milton Brown set. (I don't have it, just an out-of-print LP, so I can't vouch for it...but boy, he was great.)

http://music.barnesandnoble.com/Daddy-of-Western-Swing/Milton-Brown/e/805520020596/?itm=2

Rhino offers all the Tiffany Transcriptions as... WMA files

Hello Dom! Did you try any of these? What did you like?

press release in today's email:

BOB WILLS & HIS TEXAS PLAYBOYS’ TIFFANY TRANSCRIPTIONS 10-DISC, 150-SONG COLLECTION IS COLLECTORS’ CHOICE MUSIC’S FIRST-EVER BOX SET, DUE OUT ON JANUARY 27, 2O08

Western swing king’s rare 1940s San Francisco radio transcriptions are remastered with revelatory new sound. Set features liner notes by Rich Kienzle with testimonials from swing disciples Ray Benson, Ranger Doug and Big Sandy’s Fly-Rite Boys.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys were the originators and best-known practitioners of Western swing, their repertoire including classics like “New San Antonio Rose,” “Faded Love” and “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” In 1945, Wills teamed up with Oakland, Calif. disc jockey Cliff “Cactus Jack” Johnson and businessman Clifford Sundlin to launch Tiffany Music, Inc. The company’s goal was to supply syndicated radio programs to subscribing stations. Wills and the Playboys were the featured performers.

These programs, known as the Tiffany Transcriptions, have been assembled into a 10-disc, 150-song box set — the first-ever box set from venerable reissue label Collectors’ Choice Music. The collection, due for a January 27, 2008 street date, is fully and lovingly remastered by Bob Fisher (who has been waiting years for a crack at ‘em) and features liner notes by Wills expert Rich Kienzle, who writes: “For all the great records Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys made in 1946-47 for Columbia and MGM — and there were plenty — the Tiffany sessions captured something deeper, intangible and vibrant, music that even the occasional miscue or missed note can’t diminish. It represents the very soul, spirit and musical passion of Bob and the band as they really were on those Western and Southwestern bandstands. Sixty years later, it still sounds like yesterday.”

The package also features written testimonials from the next generation of Western swing stars. “To be honest,” writes Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson, “without the Tiffany Transcriptions, Asleep at the Wheel would not have had the materials needed to become proficient Western swingers . . . which I hope we are.” Riders in the Sky’s Ranger Doug adds, “I am honored, I am blessed, I am grateful, and I am a fan of the Texas Playboys forever.”

Over the course of the 1946-47 Tiffany Transcription sessions, Wills and the Playboys recorded sores of tunes — not just their hits and their bandstand repertoire. They utilized the sessions as an opportunity to work out new tunes, revisit older Playboys recordings, and, in true Western swing fashion, cover songs by other country & Western acts along with pop, big band classics, fiddle tunes, blues and instrumentals created on the spot. Not bound by the space restriction of 78 rpm singles, the programs were furnished to subscribing radio stations on 26 16-inch vinyl discs, encouraging the band to stretch out and jam. When you had a band that included such stars as singer Tommy Duncan, steel guitarists (not pedal!) Noel Boggs, Ray Honeycutt and Herb Remington, guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Lester “Junior” Bernard, and fiddler/mandolinist Tiny Moore among others, space was an asset — and the jazz-like room for improvisation distinguishes the Tiffany Transcriptions from Wills’ studio recordings. The band often recorded the sessions directly following tours, which is why they were always in top form.

The Tiffany sessions were broadcast over a network of radio stations that spanned Wills country (Oklahoma and Texas) to Oakland (home of Tiffany), plus Houston, Texarkana, Austin and even the Pacific Northwest and Santa Monica. Tiffany partner Cliff Sundlin retained ownership of the material until he died in 1981. El Cerrito-based Kaleidoscope Records later purchased the materials from Sundlin’s estate, issuing selected tracks on a series of LPs, later reissued on long out-of-print CDs. The Collectors’ Choice collection reissues the original Kaleidoscope albums intact.

The Tiffany tracks have proven influential in the later development of country music, informing the sound of Merle Haggard’s classic 1970 Wills homage A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, and inspiring a new generation of Western swing revivalists including Asleep at the Wheel, the Hot Club of Cowtown, the Saddle Cats and Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys. They’re also quite possibly the hottest country music ever recorded.

“Play it loud and listen,” Kienzle writes in the notes. “The magic is still there.”

(I assume they mean Jan 27, 2009, though, not 2008.)

Surely if it's a complete set there will be much duplicate material? (same song, different performance) right? or is it edited down to the best takes of each track?

listening to a bunch of bob wills and milton brown to bone up for a country gig. some of these bob wills forms are pretty funny...sing 12 bars, solo over it, and repeat for five minutes.

(i like it but maybe it works better for 2 minutes?)

Willie and the Wheel, Willie Nelson's new western swing collaboration with Asleep at the Wheel, is one of the best CDs of the year, IMO. I think it's all covers, including some great Bob Wills.

i like some stuff from the album with wynton.

I just happened to catch a Western Swing show on the radio today and was gonna come searching for a thread! I need to hear that Willie record.

Great record:
http://www.dagmar-anita-binge.de/lp88-rome.johnson/cattle.lp.88-rome.johnson.jpg

I had like a four or five disc Bob Wills box that I'm really really missing lately.

Milton Brown was...... 33 when he died. He looks 55 here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Brown#/media/File:Milton_Brown.jpg