Out in Texas and Oklahoma in the early thirties, Country music fans were beginning to swing to a new sound being pioneered by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies (Brown played with Wills from 1929-32). Western Swing was an offshoot of the old country string band tradition, Black and White, integrated with New Orleans/Dixieland jazz, swing, and elements of Norteño, Cajun,[1] Mariachi, and blues.
[1] Blues is a core element in the music played by White Cajuns. This is often overlooked by Cajun fans.
If Texas seems like kind of a White and Mexican place, don’t let’s forget Texans Scott Joplin, Charlie Christian, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey and Huddie Ledbetter. White jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden grew up near the same time and place as Wills, and credited his own rhythm and style to Black gospel tent revivals across from his home. (Fletcher Henderson would ask Jack, “Tell me, are you colored?”) Sleepy Johnson, guitarist with the Playboys, said the White musicians in Forth Worth studied all the “race” records that came out. Wills’ band made friends with a furniture store owner to listen to the records they sold—pop, blues, Dixieland, “race music.”
As a child in the Texas Panhandle, Bob Wills picked cotton; in the cotton camps he met Black families. Some of the pickers played trumpet at night, and Bob was fascinated. He danced jigs with the Black kids and heard the adults sing blues in the fields. Later, when the Wills family had their own farm, they hired Black workers.
Bob’s dad played fiddle, and Bob picked it up. In 1929 he entered a traveling medicine show fiddle contest and won out over the troupe’s fiddler, then blacked up his face to join the show. He told jokes and cut a jig. (You can watch his grownup stepping on YouTube.) In this dying corner of minstrelsy he was like the other bookend to Joel Sweeney: born and bred in the cotton fields of the southwest, he grew up singing and dancing with Blacks, unlike the northern minstrels who had learned their chops from Sweeney and other White southerners. Bob was kind of like Elvis that way. Or like Jimmie Rodgers—”he was more colored, really.” (Wills recorded Rodgers’ songs, but only the blues and jazz tunes.) And he idolized Bessie Smith, riding 50 miles on horseback to catch her show.
Wills’ first record featured a Bessie Smith song, along with a breakdown[2]—a multicultural recording gambit Elvis would repeat 25 years later in his own debut recordings. But Wills was dedicated to the dance hall, and dancers needed their bands to swing. He studied jazz records, adopting not only the swing but also the exchange of solos typical of jazz. This was new to Western music: he was transforming it into Black-influenced music for White dancers. Bandmate Ray DeGeer, who went on to play with many jazz greats, said “he was the first man I ever heard who made breakdowns swing…it swung on the Dixieland side. It had a very New Orleans Dixie beat.” Short-stroke breakdown fiddling was for square dancing, but the long, smooth bow strokes were for swinging.
[2]Breakdowns are defined by the Library of Congress fiddle tunes folks as “instrumental tunes in duple meter (2/4 or 4/4) at a quick dance speed. This general term in the American South is roughly equivalent to the term ‘reel’ elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But it does not imply a particular type of dance; a “breakdown” tune may be used for square dances, longways dances, or other group dances, as well as for solo fancy dancing.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/henry-reed-fiddle-tunes/about-this-collection/related-resources/
Wills’ early bands essentially played jazz on country folk instruments. It was sometimes called “hot dance” or “hot string dance” music—hot being a nickname for dance music, and for jazz. Out of 200 songs recorded in his peak period, three-fourths were jazz tunes or close to it—rags, stomps, Dixieland, swing. According to Wills, the music was called western swing not to distinguish it from other western bands, but to mark it off from other swing bands. Among his 35 blues and jazz recordings were “Drunkard Blues,” a re-write of ‘St. James Infirmary,” “Jelly Roll Blues,” by Morton, and “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks; also “Basin Street Blues,” “Wang Wang Blues,” and “Trouble In Mind,” a 1920s “race record” tune.
Wills himself was not a soloist, didn’t improvise choruses—only played the melody—and some in his audience preferred the melody to the improvisations anyway. But his sense of rhythm—ah, that came from his sense of blues and jazz. And as for his melody, “He did not hit the notes right on the nose,” said clarinetist Woodie Wood, “he sort of oozed into it.”[i] He was capturing the sound of the human voice, like a jazz musician. “I slurred my fiddle…to play the blues,” he said.
In performance, even on record, Wills also felt free to let fly with a cry every so often, an “ah haa” he picked from his dad and granddad. Some people came to his shows just to hear ah haa, it was that cool. He bantered with the musicians, joking, taunting, cracking wise, hollering—the sort of thing he’d heard Black musicians do in his childhood. His own impoverished childhood gave him the blues, and having shared it with Black sharecroppers gave him a means to express it.
The string bands out west diverged from the ones back east. What the heck is the difference between Country and Western anyhow? Well for one thing, there’s a kind of shuffle rhythm, which you can detect by listening to the staccato style of the rhythm guitar. (That shuffle also set the “western” swing bands like Count Basie’s in Kansas City apart from the backeasters. Hear it as triplets, 1-2-3, with the accent on the one and three.) Country and Eastern guitar players didn’t do that. East of the Mississippi, music was played more for sit-down shows. On the frontier, dancing was more important. In the early 1900s, west Texas and Oklahoma were still frontier-like places.
Let’s pause for a minute and talk about the fiddle once agin. There had been a number of early jazz fiddlers, but they went by the boards because they couldn’t cut through the volume of the horns. Jazz bands and dance groups were leaving violins behind around the time Wills brought them to the fore. He brought the Southwest into the jazz age—despite prejudice from elitists who called the fiddle backward, an instrument for hicks, and from racists, who called the music “nigger fiddling.”
The guitar had volume issues too, but right about this time Reddy Kilowat showed up with an amp. Strings are the things in Country music, so here we have Country instruments playing jazzy runs on an instrument no longer associated with jazz. But you can fix that:
♬substitution: Listen to a fiddle or guitar solo on a western swing tune and imagine it as a trumpet, sax, or clarinet. Listen to classic jazz (New Orleans-style) and replace the horn with a guitar or fiddle. Now you’re in the middle of all American music of the period, obliterating categories. In fact you can skip this exercise—just get a Wills record with a horn section on it. And replace the vocalist with….your choice.
Now about those Playboys: second fiddler Jesse Ashlock idolized jazz violinist Joe Venuti. He said of Wills’ band, “We tried to do the same thing on strings they did on horns.” Vocalist Tommy Duncan was hired in part because of his ability to do Emmett Miller. Pianist Alton Strickland, who had never played Western music, was a disciple of Earl “Fatha” Hines. Guitarist Eldon Shamblin came from swing and went West, helping—along with Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang—to transform the guitar from a mere rhythm instrument into a lead one.
Also note that western swing developed in the wake of the Hawaiian music tsunami, which left its imprint via the pedal steel guitar. This instrument later became important in Nashville and helped to meld east and west into the new Country, for better and worse. The Texas Playboys use of the steel guitar was important in making the instrument popular down the decades, and it’s interesting to speculate how much the jazz-oriented Wills band affected the steel’s subsequent style. Leon McAuliffe often would slide his bar up the steel in imitation of a trombone, especially after the Playboys lost their trombonist. This stuff was so influential that in the forties the music journals started referring to both Texas and Nashville product as “country and western”—in case you wondered where that came from. And you can hear the influence already in the forties—listen, for starters, to Hank Williams’ fiddlers. And Wills fiddler Johnny Gimble went on to a career as a Nashville sideman.
This was also the first band in Country music to use drums, which opened up a new rhythmic connection between Black and White music. In 1935 Bob recruited drummer Smokey Dacus, who commented “I didn’t have to change from the Dixieland jazz style I’d been playing.” His rhythm was the 2/4 of Dixieland, brush stroking on the down beat, and accenting with the stick on the back beat (two and four). They called it the “suitcase rhythm” because, in an effort to strengthen the backbeat, he hit his drum case with the wide end of the stick. Outrageous? It worked.
And against the advice of jazz and western players and producers alike, Bob added horns. The folks he hired had played with the likes of Joe Venuti, Red Nichols, and Jack Teagarden; after the war he hired players from the old Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller bands. He added enough so they could drive dancers like a regular swing band did. Better maybe, because in Texas—and Tulsa—you swing with strings. And further west, on the coast, they liked their western to swing, too. It was kinda like what Bill Monroe was doing at just about the same time: giving an old music a kick in the rhythm. In fact, Monroe was a Wills fan, and his fiddler, Kenny Baker, allowed that bluegrass was just jazz played on strings.
The 1950s brought rockabilly,[3] with a rhythm and a swing closer to the Western one than anything else. In fact, Bill Haley’s band was originally “The Four Aces of Western Swing.” And Fats Domino, leading R&B voice in New Orleans, said he modeled his rhythm section after Wills’. The Western Swing sound, along with the Texas honky-tonk style played by smaller bands, was eclipsed in the fifties, but it remains a pervasive influence in Country music generally, giving it more of a blues-jazz tinge than in the old days. This tinge can be heard by listening closely to guitar and especially pedal steel solos, then comparing them to solos from earlier times.
In the formal sense, Wills was a relatively uneducated musician. But he knew the feel he wanted; it was based on his childhood, his musical influences, and his need to create music that people of a certain place and time would dance to. The feel took over from the hidebound structures and rules that others kept trying to impose. In his efforts to fit form to function, he drew on his closeness to the Black music that helped its people to survive. The challenge Wills met was that people wanted to dance to the latest thing; Wills provided it, and made Texas a swing state.
[3] “Rockabilly is white lyric with black rhythm, speeded up with a little bluegrass.” – Carl Perkins