Cowtown: Sprawling Ground of Western Swing
Such a blurring during 1929-1930 in Fort Worth produced the distinctive music known as Western swing. The fiddle-based ruckus created new roles for the guitar — proved a direct ancestor of the 1970s' fusion-jazz phenomenon — and established a unique instance in which the merchandising term "progressive country" could truthfully apply. Fusion? Yes: Some folks call it corn-fusion.
A near-century after that initial stirring, Fort Worth has formally embraced its contribution to the roots-music wellspring: The festival known as Cowtown Birthplace of Western Swing, Nov. 7-9, at National Hall on Roberts Cut Off Road, has become an international attraction. The event showcases such stylistic descendants as Billy Mata, Jody Nix, Jason Roberts with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, Steve Markwardt & the A-List Band, and Italy's Mary Lee & Caesar's Cowboys (their U.S. début).
One prominent legacy artist, Jody Nix of Big Spring, has devoted 64 years to the music — having joined the primary-source band of his father, bandleader Hoyle Nix, at age 8. Jody continues the pace, logging more than 100 engagements a year.
Founding producer Michael Markwardt has developed a crowd-pleasing documentary film, "The Birth & History of Western Swing." The two-hour feature takes remarkable pains to illustrate the welcoming ethnic diversity that made Western swing an ahead-of-its-time argument for multiculturalism (birthplaceofwesternswing.com).
Practically every element of Western swing arises from some other tradition. Among its generations of loyalists, some refer to this musical gumbo as "hillbilly boogie," others "cowboy jazz" or "cowbop." All such terms express the predominant elements of rural white and urban Black musical influences, with an assimilation of rhythms and melodies from Mexico and Europe. Had the early shapers (white rustics, for the most part) been unaware of the African-rooted blues idiom, there could have been no Western swing.
Nor could the fusion have occurred without the transcultural mingling that Texas had experienced during the prior century. The countrified experimenters who first made this music had laid a foundation (by instinct, more so than design) upon fiddle breakdowns from their own heritage and upon blues laments and celebrations remembered from childhoods spent in naturally integrated farming settlements. (Hence, Tony Joe White's Black-and-white anthem of 1969, "Willie and Laura Mae Jones.") Onto this trunk, such Fort Worth-based trailblazers as Bob Wills and Milton Brown grafted Cajun and Creole strains from Louisiana; polyrhythms from Black and Native American traditions; harmonic and melodic crossovers from Mexican and Middle European traditions; and at length, the make-believe cowboy glamour of Hollywood.
The assimilation was so thorough that Western swing, at the hands of an accomplished bandleader like Wills or Brown or Oklahoman Spade Cooley, cannot be seen as ersatz anything. It was from the start — or anyhow, from its earliest preservation on phonograph records — its own music, more than a sum of influences. Such freedom of expression was offered neither by traditional country music (which shunned improvisation or between-the-beats rhythm) nor by the structured jazz community (which resisted a folksy image).
The guitar and the fiddle (not to be confused with the violin — same instrument, different approaches) were the key beneficiaries. New Yorker Joe Venuti had transformed the classical violin to a jazz instrument during the 1920s. Texas Panhandle native Bob Wills would transform down-home, barn-dance fiddling to a bluesier state, influenced by the baroque stylings of the Arkansas-to-Amarillo master Eck Robertson, the first country-pure fiddler to record on commercial platters.
The guitar, in turn, has a triple importance to Western swing: In addition to traditional rhythmic and solo functions on a standard six-string guitar, there also is the wholly different steel guitar, essentially a solo instrument embodying the capabilities of a piano or a horn section.
Jimmy Wyble's crossover from the Western swing of Bob Wills to mainstream ensemble jazz with Benny Goodman, during the 1960s, is a striking instance of jazz's acceptance of its bucolic cousin. But Wyble did not begin playing jazz upon joining the Goodman band in Chicago; he had developed as a jazz guitarist while playing in the country-image bands of Wills, Cooley, and Tennessean Hank Penny.
Much the same could be said for Penny; and for Amarillo-based "Honest" Jess Williams; and for the lesser-known Fort Worth guitarists Herman Arnspiger and Weldon Gidley, all propulsive presences; for the brilliant lead guitarist Eldon Shamblin, who preceded Wyble in the Wills lineup but never developed a jazz-elite identity; for dependable stylists like Durwood Brown, Benny Garcia, Muryel "Zeke" Campbell, and Frankie Kinman; and for steel guitarists epitomized by Bob Dunn, Leon McAuliffe, Billy Briggs, and Joaquin Murphy — all bearing responsibility for the ways in which steel is played today.
"It was jazz we were playing..."
Like the man said: "It was jazz we were playing," Jess Williams told me in 1980. "We just couldn't call it that and get away with it — not with our audiences thinking it was honky-tonk." Williams' pre-WWII Sons of the West recordings (based at Amarillo, with Fort Worth-bred Billy Briggs) bear him out in the precipitous thrust of a rhythm-guitar heartbeat. Such forceful intensity bespeaks the Chicago-blues influence of Big Bill Broonzy as much as it represents the technique of using the guitar as a backstop for imaginative flights of hoedown fiddling.
Such reliance upon the guitar is an essence of Western swing, which began not as a guitar showcase but rather as fiddle music with guitar accompaniment. The first syncopated swing-tempo application of guitar to traditional fiddle music may be reasonably attributed to Herman Arnspiger, accompanist to Bob Wills during the 1920s in a duo that would grow into the Wills Fiddle Band. A third party, all-around string artist Ocie Stockard, would join them to play for Saturday-night dances at a schoolhouse east of Fort Worth.
"It was our custom to play the old hoedowns, Texas fiddle breakdowns like 'Great Big Taters' and 'Texas Wagoner,' and an occasional yodel or a minstrel song or a blues, with the fiddle in the spotlight," Stockard recalled in 1981 during breaks from his bartender job in downtown Fort Worth. "Our guitars would hold the rhythm, drummer-like, with me switching to my banjo or my own fiddle off and on, for the sake of change."
The genesis dates from such an occasion during the winter of 1929-1930. No documentation exists outside of the memories of participants (all long since deceased), but accounts given separately by Stockard and Wills dovetail. Both declared that a sit-in vocal performance of "The Saint Louis Blues" by an unbidden visitor, a salesman named Milton Brown — nattily dressed in contrast with the others' farmer-boy attire — provided the turning point. All concerned sensed a broader audience in need of seeking. In this expansion of appeal, in the addition of music-making talents, the guitar gained the freedom to challenge the fiddle for prominence. The Light Crust Doughboys, a pride-of-place ensemble, emerged as a radio-and-records attraction.
These formative years, turbulent and productive, found the de facto bandleaders, Wills and Brown, striving to make the hottest music they could with such instruments as their players knew. The early-1930s departure of the Brown brothers, Milton and Durwood, to form the Musical Brownies, prompted a search that led Wills to guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Leon McAuliffe. Both joined Wills after Milton had augmented his brother's six-string prowess with Bob Dunn's stinging lap-steel guitar. And in a radical break with string-band tradition, Brown persuaded the jazz pianist Fred "Papa" Calhoun to join.
Calhoun in 1981 recalled a prejudice that might have stalled him: "I said, 'Why, they're a string band, aren't they?' Y'see, I didn't want anything to do with that hillbilly stuff. I liked horn bands — Dixieland. That was all I cared to play." But when lured to a Brownies dance near Fort Worth, Calhoun warmed to the notion. He was sitting in before the night was done and became a member soon thereafter.
Meanwhile, Bob Wills' departure from the Light Crust Doughboys, the better to launch his Texas Playboys ensemble as a riposte to Milton Brown, affirmed an entrepreneurial pattern for many other bands.
About That Markwardt Connection
Event producer and filmmaker Mike Markwardt states a succinct case for Western swing as an overriding passion, born of purposeful nostalgia: "My brother, Steve Markwardt, and I were born in far West Texas. Our mother and father would often travel to Big Spring, during the late 1950s and 1960s, to the legendary Stampede Dancehall to hear one of the most popular bands of that era — Hoyle Nix & the West Texas Cowboys.
"I returned to my love for this music after I had retired in 2015 from a long career in international trade," Mike Markwardt continues. "I fulfilled a promise to my father to take him to the long-running Bob Wills Day weekend of music festivities in Turkey, Texas. There, fans from around the world make the pilgrimage each year to celebrate the music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys.
"I met Bob Wills' biographer, Charles Townsend, and read his book, San Antonio Rose: The Life & Music of Bob Wills, with great interest. I soon began devouring every book I could get my hands on about this joyous music that — to my surprise — proved to have been created in Fort Worth, where I was raised.
"In late 2019, I established a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to launch a Western swing festival — hence, Cowtown Birthplace of Western Swing. COVID-19 would force its delay to 2021, but that delay also gave me the time to begin planning a documentary film. Four years later, I have completed this film, with a team of accomplished historians, writers, production staffers, editors, and creative minds who love this music."
That film, "The Birth & History of Western Swing," will play during the Nov. 7-9 festival.
Stretching Those Strings
As the guitar had bolstered the fiddle, now the piano supported the guitar and virtually all other leads under Milton Brown's method. By the middle 1930s, Bob Wills had resettled in Tulsa and added not only piano but also horns and drums. In later years, Wills would pare his organization to a Brown-style, meat-and-potatoes lineup. If not for Brown's death in 1936 — while in seeming recovery from a motoring accident along the Jacksboro Highway — many enthusiasts hold that there would have been no such preeminent name as Bob Wills.
Countrified guitarists, intent upon stretching, have traditionally turned to the blues. The blues had attracted such prominent white-guy players as Jimmie Rodgers and Riley Puckett, who used that idiom to develop a blood-kin ancestor of Western swing. Such breakthroughs included the assertion of distinctive styles by jazzman Charlie Christian, blues sophisticate T-Bone Walker, and Durwood Brown — not to mention the European Django Reinhardt, whose recordings had a gut-reaction impact upon American jazz, and Western swing in particular. The evolution of amplification from radio technology also played an important part in the guitar's changing role.
As idiomatic and stylistic influences changed, then, so did the mechanical possibilities. A fiddle-band guitarist by the mid-1930s no longer had to emulate a country-blues guitarist: Amplification permitted single lines like those from a horn — even trombone-like chromatic swoops.
So it was that the electrified steel guitar emerged. Close kin to Hawaiian steel, Deep Blues bottleneck, and Dobro, the first such device in Western swing was built by Bob Dunn (also a trombonist) from a standard guitar, to which he attached a crude pickup made from the magnets of a radio headphone. Contrary to established styles, Dunn chose not to make chords, so much as to indulge in headlong plunges along the strings with the steel-bar slide while plucking in staccato bursts. Dunn's performances — especially on "Some of These Days" with the Brownies and "Stompin' at the Honky-Tonk" with his own Vagabonds — are at once self-indulgent and generous, unnerving when first heard, exhilarating on replay.
Dunn persisted as a working artist after Milton Brown's death but retired to teaching before he could take part in the emergence of a dominant swing-band industry, inspired several imitators who would develop their own voices.
Leon McAuliffe's early work with Bob Wills' Tulsa band shows a Dunn influence. McAuliffe was among the first to become a distinctive steel stylist. His astringent single-string leads (as on the standard "Steel Guitar Rag") lack the cerebral, free-form quality that was Dunn's stamp, but McAuliffe's ear for angular chord-patterns and harmonies made him a model.
Less celebrated (on account of provincial Panhandle-area isolation) but as fine a steel innovator is Billy Briggs, who by age 19 in 1938 was a veteran of the country-style swing-band scene. Briggs had filled in on occasion for Bob Dunn, from whom he learned about magnetic pickups. Briggs improved upon the Dunn method of building an instrument: Using a guitar neck as a foundation, Briggs fashioned a platform, adding seventh-through-ninth strings and a long-legged framework that allowed him to stand (for greater visibility) while playing. Briggs' invention helped to inspire the design of a mass-marketed steel instrument by Leo Fender, who approached Briggs about testing a prototype. "When I've learned all there is on this one," Briggs once recalled telling Fender, "then I'll tackle yours." (Briggs declined to license his unique instrument for reproduction.)
Briggs's style was an equivalent of ragtime-based stride piano — a combination of admitted Dunn imitations with lush, three-string chords in syncopation. With the Sons of the West, on the OKeh and Decca labels, Briggs enjoyed a modest recording career. He had an enduring radio-and-dancehall following in Northwest Texas and became briefly a bestseller at Los Angeles' Imperial Records with a jovially vulgar novelty called "Chew Tobacco Rag," which also crossed into rhythm-and-blues and pop-jazz via cover-versions by additional artists. (Speaking of multicultural barrier-busting.)
A quiet influence among six-string electric guitarists was the rural West Texas-born jazz sophisticate Frankie Kinman, a Fort Worth real estate broker who composed a Western swing hit (with bandleader Ted Daffan) with "I've Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night." Kinman often spoke during the 1980s of discovering amplification at age 15 in 1937: "Now, here was this gizmo that would let us shine... The projection compensates for the loss of pure sound."
Wartime Turning Point
Western swing, then, had one distinctive guitar sound as early as the waning 1920s — a beat-keeping mode, embodying the bass line, chordings, and percussive emphasis of a rhythm section. The second characteristic guitar style, a steel approach like no other, caught hold during the 1930s. Not until Jimmy Wyble's path crossed that of Bob Wills in 1942 in Los Angeles, however, would the lead guitar come into a truer focus.
Wills had lost the core of his Tulsa-based big band to the WWII military draft. He had moved to Hollywood, chiefly to retain his Southwestern following, what with vast numbers of his Oklahoma-and-Texas following having migrated to defense-plant work on the West Coast. Wyble, a Port Arthur native, had absorbed guitar influences as diverse as Django Reinhardt and Bob Dunn. Wyble came to the West Coast with a band known as the Village Boys; he and fellow guitarist Cameron Hill sat in one night with Wills' Playboys — fortunate timing, for Wills needed such a team to replace his diminished horns-and-strings sections.
And with the Wyble-Hill teaming, Wills coined the term twin guitars, and this became the idiom's third distinctive guitar sound — an up-front style, with the grace of a harmonized vocal solo and the thrust of a horn section. Heard to best advantage on the 1940s Wills recording of "Roly Poly," this duality advanced a sophisticated, arranged feeling. Such lushness would reach fruition in bandleader Spade Cooley's full-blown symphonic arrangements. Wills' Playboys would remain essentially a string band, with occasional horns for punctuation.
Jimmy Wyble's association with Wills connected the six-stringer with such pop-and-jazz guitarists as Al Hendrickson and George Van Epa, but Wyble retained a country-music marketplace identity, often to his disadvantage. A hitch with Hank Penny failed when a sponsor argued that Wyble's style was insufficiently pure for a C&W program. Some call it "contrarian Western music."
The year 1953 marked a turning point with the release of Wyble's solo-jazz collection, Diane, which affected a French musette style with fellow guitarist Laurindo Almeida. A touring stint with Benny Goodman led Wyble toward a teaching career, where he proved disinclined to discriminate between idioms.
And so disinclined, it appears, are increasing numbers of jazz aficionados and country-music buffs, with the understanding that the one type of music nourishes the other. Provoked in great measure by the persistence of fundamental swingster Willie Nelson and Ray Benson's tenured band Asleep at the Wheel, the self-renewing interest has transcended nostalgia to reveal new dimensions in progressive interpretation.
Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker's insightful jazz critic of the last century, defined jazz as "the sound of surprise," and so titled a collection of his essays. Predictably so, Balliett neglected to consider Western swing. But anyone who has been stung by a bolt of blue-steel lightning from Bob Dunn or calmed by a twin-guitar interlude will know that sound of surprise more intimately than words can tell.
Keepin' On Keepin' On
The new film, "The Birth & History of Western Swing," gathers voices from the long sweep of history, including hitherto unseen archival interviews. The late Roy Lee Brown, kid bother of founder Milton Brown, appears as the last survivor to have witnessed Brown's history-making dance band in person. Participating scholars include Brown biographer Cary Ginell, Wills biographer Charles Townsend, and Jazz of the Southwest author Jean Boyd, Western Swing Monthly editor Barbara Martin, and social-media authority Paula Jungmann.
Lending additional voices are the show-business likes of Vince Gill, Michael Martin Murphey, Junior Brown, Ray Benson, the modern-day Texas Playboys' Jason Roberts, the Quebe Sisters, Billy Mata, Floyd Domino, Whit Smith, Paul Anastasio, Jake Hooker, Louise Rowe, Kristyn Harris, Devon Dawson, and Barry Corbin.
In a 1997 review of the CD box The Complete Recordings of Milton Brown & his Musical Brownies, the journalist Robert Palmer argued that "Milton's music has proved too jazzy and swinging to [claim] a prominent place in the annals of country music, too 'hillbilly' to be taken seriously by jazz scholars, too full of regional quirks to be accepted as mainstream pop." A more recent Ken Burns documentary series, "Country Music," dismisses Western swing as a sub-genre, with tunnel-vision recognition of Bob Wills. Mike Markwardt's collaborative film, by contrast, offers a definitive correction of such lapses while inviting even deeper digging.
The unavoidable question: Have Markwardt's film and its attendant festival chomped down on more than one labor-of-love project can digest? Not by a long shot, it seems, given the four-year persistence of the festival and its documentary offshoot.
Nor has Markwardt called the work finished: "The end-goal," he says, "is that of establishing a Birthplace of Western Swing Museum in the city where it all began nearly a century ago — Fort Worth."
