Treasures of The Texas Collection
Western Swing
Script for KWBU-FM and Texas NPR Stations
Music: “San Antonio Rose,” Bob Wills [fade in about 1:33, fade under intro after
singer stops]
HOST (Mary Landon Darden)
The start of the Great Depression was a time of great ferment for Texas.
The big city was a place where rural and urban, tradition and modernity
collided — and colluded. Out of this fertile ground came a new kind of music,
a mix of jazz and down-home that would come to be called western swing.
Writer Joseph Abbott and expert Dr. Jean Boyd guide us through the
twists and turns of how western swing was born.
Welcome, Joseph and Dr. Boyd.
BOYD: Thank you very much, I am happy to be here.
ABBOTT: Thanks
Joseph, can you set the stage for our discussion on Texas Swing?
WRITER (Joseph Abbott):
Sure. In the early 1930s, cities are getting bigger because a lot of people
from the country are moving there, but that’s not entirely by choice — it’s not all
young adults looking to escape the small town. A lot of them are chased to the
cities by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the
horrific drought going on at the time. They’re in the city because they have to be,
but many don’t like it. They’re homesick.
One of the cures for that homesickness was to bring the traditional music
with them, and dance to it.
Dr. Boyd, tell us about what that music was like.
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BOYD:
Western Swing grew out of the Texas fiddle and string band tradition. The
string band in the Southwest consisted of a fiddle, a guitar – possibly more than
one guitar, banjo – maybe, bass – maybe. This is the band that played for dances.
Prior to the depression, before so many rural people moved to town, these bands
were playing mostly at ranch dances – where the ranchers would throw a dance
and ranchers from all around would come with their families and spend a day or
two – and the swing bands provided the dance music.
When rural south westerners moved into urban areas during the depression,
looking for jobs and trying to escape the dustbowl conditions, this music went with
them. It was still the ensemble that played their dance music, but now – instead of
playing at a ranch house – it was played in a house in town at house dances. The
people would simply roll up the rug, if they had any, and the string band would
play and people would dance, sometimes to get enough money to pay the rent.
Also, there were outlying dance halls that catered specifically to rural inhabitants
of cities like Houston, Dallas or Ft. Worth. The swing bands would play in these
places as well.
Radio played a big part in that change, didn’t it?
BOYD:
It did. Radio played a huge part. In fact, radio is one of the reasons that
string bands converted into swing bands. Because the radio brought all of the
music – Tin Pan Alley, pop music, all types of jazz, light classics, even sacred
music. A lot of this music was created in northern cities, but through the radio,
south westerners could hear this music. The musicians were drawn to it because
they had a natural proclivity to improvisation, especially when they listened to a
jazz band – be it a Dixieland jazz band or one of the larger swing bands – that was
the music they wanted to play. They did not want to be perceived as country
pickers. They wanted to be perceived as jazz musicians and so they incorporated
elements of jazz into their performances.
ABBOTT:
The other big thing about radio for the dance bands was — it was sort of like
a MySpace page or a YouTube video would be today. The dances were where the
bands made their money, but to get the dance gigs they had to have the radio
exposure.
OK. This story comes from California and a bit later on, but it still illustrates
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the point. Back in 1993 Dr. Boyd talked to western swing violinist Bobby
Bruce about his days at a radio station in Fresno. Let’s listen.
RECORDING: [Bobby Bruce: Side 1, 16:19-17:09]We had a daily radio
show with Luke Wills at 6:15 in the morning, and another one — and another one
at noon or something like that, and then we’d take off and work up and down the
San Joaquin Valley. I remember that we’d just make it in, like if we were working
in some town up and down the valley like Bakersfield or something like that, you
worked until two in the morning. You get back to Fresno after you packed the bus
and drove in, and it would be 4:30, quarter to five. At 6:15 you have a radio show,
so we’d sleep in the parking lot for 45 minutes and then get on into the building,
and we had this radio announcer… [EDIT 17:31-18:03] … he had this enthusiasm,
and here we are bleary eyed, half drunk, you know, and we had slept for 45
minutes in the parking lot, and we go in to do this show with toothpicks to hold our
eyes open, you know. And he says, [shouting] “IT’S THE MUSIC OF LUKE
WILLS AND HIS RHYTHM BUSTERS!” And we can hardly keep our eyes open, or
our head up.
BOYD:
The reason that so many Texans and “Okies” made the move from Texas
and Oklahoma out to California was because The Depression was, evidently, not
as severe there. They didn’t have the Dust Bowl conditions and in places like the
San Joaquin Valley, agriculture was thriving. This was a mass exodus from Texas,
especially West Texas, and Oklahoma to places like the San Joaquin Valley in
California. And, of course, they wanted the same music that they had back home.
Consequently, you have this large population of former Texas and Oklahoma
residents and the bands began to tour out in California and the audiences were
there.
ABBOTT:
Anyway, these guys understood the power of radio — both figuratively and
literally: the higher powered the transmitter, the bigger area the station reached, the
more chances these bands would have for gigs.
So we’re back in the late ’20s, early ’30s — you’ve got all these influences
lining up, the stage is set. What happens next?
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ABBOTT
Well, if you’re telling this the Hollywood way, there’s got to be — The
Fateful Meeting. And the best candidate for that is likely to be a house dance that
took place in Fort Worth in late 1929 or early 1930. The Wills Fiddle Band — Bob
Wills on fiddle, Herman Arnspiger on guitar — was providing the music, and at
some point someone requested “St. Louis Blues” — and asked a guy at the dance
named Milton Brown to sing it.
Here’s Brown singing the song with his later group, the Musical Brownies.
Music: “St. Louis Blues,” Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies [0:51-1:21]
ABBOTT
So Wills and Arnspiger were much taken with Brown’s singing and asked
him to join their band, and he did.
As it turned out, that also meant that they gained a publicist, didn’t it?
BOYD:
Yes, this is true. Milton Brown came from a background of sales. He had
been a cigar salesman before he was laid-off from that job. He did – to some
extent – begin to promote the band. Milton Brown was not the leader of the band,
nor was Bob Wills, they were all working together. But with his connections,
Milton was able to get them gigs to play, like house dances. He got them a regular
Saturday night gig at a place called Eagles Lodge Hall on 5th Street in Ft. Worth
and he also worked a deal with Sam Cunningham at Crystal Springs Resort so that
the band could play there regularly. Crystal Springs was a fishing place, a
swimming pool and a dance hall all combined. It was outside the city limits of Ft.
Worth.
ABBOTT:
One of the things I love about this story is that the band’s big hangout was a
furniture store. ’Cause, yeah, when I think of jazz hotbeds, I think of furniture
stores. But it actually makes sense when you think about it, because back then,
radios and record players WERE furniture. And the guy who owned the store —
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his name was Will Ed Kemble — had a pretty extensive selection of jazz and pop
records, and so the band would gather there at the store to listen to them and to
rehearse. And it was Kemble who convinced the band to audition for a show at a
lower-powered Fort Worth station called KFJZ.
And they got the show?
They got the show, and the engineer at the station — Truett Kimzey, who
would become the band’s announcer — went looking for a sponsor, and the
company he approached was Burrus Mill, which made Light Crust Flour.
Now, again, in the Hollywood movie way of telling things, this is where the
villain appears — and like all the best villains, he starts off seeming to be a big
huge benefactor. He was the general manager of Burrus Mill, and his name was W.
Lee O'Daniel. Yes, the same W. Lee O'Daniel who in another eight years would
get himself elected governor of Texas. The way he would get there — or at least,
get started toward there — was to hitch his wagon to the rising star of Wills,
Brown and company. But it would be a little while before he saw reason to do that.
See, O'Daniel didn't approve of dance halls, or the sort of people who played
in them — or the sort of music they played. (That the Crystal Springs audience
included folks like Bonnie and Clyde didn't help.) So he wasn't what you'd call real
enthusiastic about this idea. But he understood the power of radio in a way few
others did — one of the big traits that would soon enough get him to the governor's
mansion — and in his job the biggest commandment of all was Sell More Flour.
Besides, the price was right for an experiment. KFJZ — low power, low ad rates
— less than a tenth of what he'd pay for the same airtime on WBAP. So he decided
to take a flyer on the show, and a Texas institution was born.
Music: "Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill" theme (no problem here – the
whole thing’s just 30 seconds)
The show was an instant smash. And less than a month later O'Daniel
canceled it.
Oh, my. Why did he do that?
BOYD:
Well, he never said why he did that, so this is mostly supposition. He did
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make it perfectly clear that he did not trust dance-musicians. He didn’t trust their
morality. But also, and I’m just guessing here, that he didn’t feel that he had as
much control as he wanted to have over what was going on, so he fired them.
RECORDING: Pappy didn’t like it and he fired them. In the meantime, he
had them working in the mill. Let’s see, Bob was driving a delivery truck, Milton
was out trying to sell flour, and Herman was sweeping up the dust, and this was
downtown Fort Worth. So he had them going in there at 8:00 in the morning and
staying until 5:00 doing all that, and then they’d stay in the program and then
going on back to work. Well, so when Pappy fired them, he got so much mail and
everything, he realized he had something there that was worth something. Had a
tiger by the tail, so he wanted to hire them back. So Bob and Milton go to him and
say, Well, we’ll come back, but we’re not going to work anything except music.
Pappy says, Okay, you punch the time clock in at 9:00, and while we’re not
rehearsing our program I want you to be learning new tunes and practicing, and
you punch out at 5:00.
So the Light Crust Doughboys are back on the air.
ABBOTT:
And Burrus Mills is selling more flour, and O’Daniel is starting to see
opportunity. Eventually, the Doughboys go out on a tour where Kimzey, stuck at
KFJZ, is unable to accompany them. O’Daniel elects himself announcer and then,
with Truett Kimzey out of the picture, moves the show to WBAP — he can easily
afford their rates now, and wants the bigger power and bigger audience. And even
that’s not big enough, so he forms the Texas Quality Network and hooks together
WBAP with other high-powered stations like KPRC in Houston, WOAI in San
Antonio and WKY in Oklahoma City — that last being important to what comes
after, as we’ll see. (By the way, you can tell we’re dealing with the real old-time
stations here by the number of them whose call signs start with “W”; it’s not until
later that W only comes to be used east of the Mississippi.)
So now the Light Crust Doughboys have a really big audience — or, more to
the point as far as he’s concerned, O’Daniel does. And O’Daniel starts taking over
more and more of the broadcast for himself. To him, it’s become his show, and the
Doughboys are just his backing band.
How bad did that get?
Texas Swing 7
BOYD:
Evidently it got pretty bad. O’Daniel really did take over the show. He
began writing and reading poems and orating. He considered himself a great
speaker. He refused to give the names of the band members, like they didn’t
matter. He imposed limits on what the band could play. He critiqued the titles, for
example, they were not supposed to use the term “jazz” on the radio. And one of
their favorite tunes, “The Beer Barrel Polka,” they could not refer to the word
“beer,” so it could either be called “Barrel Polka” or “Roll out the Barrel.” But
more importantly, he would not let the band play in dance halls. And, quite
honestly, this was where the money was to be made.
This song is another case in point of what we were talking about – about
how bad things became with W. Lee O’Daniel, because Milton Brown helped to
create this piece and W. Lee O’Daniel took all of the credit for “Beautiful Texas.”
Music: “Beautiful Texas,” Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies [1:10-1:45]
BOYD:
Milton Brown had a large family to support, and his brother Derwood, who
had been playing rhythm guitar from the inception of the Light Crust Doughboys,
was married and expecting a baby. So, Milton went to O’Daniel and asked
O’Daniel to go ahead and hire Milton and put him on the regular payroll and
O’Daniel said “no,” he refused. If you added that, that was probably the straw
that ended it for Milton Brown, but if you add that to the fact that they couldn’t
play dances and that Milton was not free to do what he wanted to in the band,
Milton Brown left. He formed his own band called “The Musical Brownies” and
experienced all the freedom he had never had working with W. Lee O’Daniel.
Music: “Takin’ Off,” Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies (around 1:30-2:00)
What’s Wills doing while all this is going on?
ABBOTT:
Largely sympathizing. This is a lot of the stuff he’d like to be doing, and he,
too, is chafing under Pappy’s hand. But it takes another year, almost, before Wills
finally leaves the Doughboys. And this is when he moves south to Waco — to
WACO (I love that — do you know there’s only a couple of other stations that got
to name themselves after their hometown like that?) — and forms the Playboys.
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How long did that last?
BOYD:
Not very long. Bob Wills left the Playboys about 11 months after Milton
Brown did and came down to Waco and started a band, which he referred to as
“The Playboys.” This band was doing pretty well and them W. Lee O’Daniel
comes down and takes Bob Wills to court because they were using the phrase
“formerly of The Light Crust Doughboys.” The judge immediately threw this out,
this was ridiculous, but Bob Wills wanted to put some distance between himself
and W. Lee O’Daniel – he was a powerful man – so he moved up to Oklahoma City
to WKY. But WKY was a part of the network that O’Daniel had put together, so
O’Daniel followed Bob Wills up to Oklahoma City and got him fired from WKY.
So, the Playboys went to Tulsa and radio station KVOO and there they found a
manager who would not bend to W. Lee O’Daniel and that became their home.
RECORDING:[Smoky Dacus, Side 1, 6:26-6:50] And I asked Bob — it was
unheard of, you know, fiddle band and string band, I mean, that’s what country
music was. And I said, “What in the hell do you want with a drummer in a fiddle
band?” And Bob bit his cigar and poked me in the chest. He said, “I want to take
your kind of music, my kind of music, put it together and make it swing.”
And then he adds horns…
BOYD:
Yes he did. Bob Wills loved horn bands. He really liked mainstream jazz
with horn bands. So he started off adding horns. At first it was just a couple of
horns, maybe a trumpet player or clarinet player or saxophone player, but by the
early 1940s, Bob Wills had a complete horn section. He had a horn line, a string
line, he had such a versatile band that he could play anything and everything.
Music: “Big Beaver,” Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys [3:47 to end]
ABBOTT:
Meanwhile, of course, as Wills gets successful, one of the first things he
does is sign up a rival flour mill as his sponsor, getting his poke in the eye back at
Pappy O’Daniel.
Texas Swing 9
What ultimately happens to him?
Well, he turns out to be one of those folks who talks a good game about the
Ten Commandments but doesn’t really think they apply to him. According to
Smokey Montgomery, he gets caught pocketing the proceeds from Doughboys
concerts — money that was supposed to go to Burrus Mills — and also using mill
workers to do personal work at his farm. So Jack Burrus, the mill owner, fires him.
And in the Hollywood movie, that would be the end of the story — the hero
triumphs and the villain gets his comeuppance.
In real life, of course — remember he got fired from Burrus Mills, but the
Texas Quality Network, the radio network, isn’t tied to Burrus Mills. It’s his. So all
he does is get his own mill selling his own brand — Hillbilly Flour — and hire a
band — the Hillbilly Boys, notionally led by his son, Pat — that knows its place
and won’t get any ideas, and he immediately starts going great guns on the radio
again.
You know, in a way, leaving the Doughboys was as liberating for him as it
was for Milton Brown and Bob Wills — he might pretend to be selling flour, but
the real product he was now completely free to sell was Pappy O’Daniel. And he
sold his way right into the governor’s mansion, and eventually into the U.S. Senate
— the famous only election defeat ever for Lyndon Johnson.
And what about the heroes?
BOYD:
Milton Brown died as a result of a car crash. He didn’t die instantly, but he
died about three days afterward – apparently he had a broken rib and punctured
lung and he developed pneumonia and died. That meant that Bob Wills, nowadays,
is given solo credit for creating Western Swing, but if anyone could be called the
creator of Western Swing, it is probably Milton Brown. And I would add this:
Western Swing came from everywhere. There were so many bands doing similar
things at the same time that it appears – just by the dates – that Milton Brown was
the first band leader to record what we think of as Western Swing.
So, Dr. Boyd — you’ve been campaigning for a while now to get western
swing acknowledged as being jazz.
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BOYD:
Yes, I have. It is interesting to me how people argue against this. I have
been told that jazz is an urban music and Western Swing is rural and, therefore,
doesn’t count as jazz. I have been told that the instrumentation is a problem. Well,
people who say this are forgetting that even Dixieland jazz occasionally had
violins in the front line.
And then there is the repertoire issue. True, most mainstream jazz bands
don’t play fiddle tunes, but Western Swing bands play fiddle tunes plus Big Band
swing arrangements and Dixieland arrangements and every other kind of jazz.
And the latest thing I heard, some jazz scholars said, “Well the phrasing is
different, the phrasing isn’t right.” Well, excuse me, the Western Swing musicians
were in many ways taking their phrasing from the recordings that they were
hearing and the radio programs where they were hearing mainstream jazz being
played. So they got at least some of their ideas about phrasing from the radio and
recordings.
ABBOTT:
You know, there’s a pretty big elephant in the room that we’ve been mostly
talking around for the last half hour, and that’s race. It’s probably taken as
assumed, but just to be clear: All of the western swing musicians we’ve been
talking about are white. They freely acknowledge black influences, but they
themselves are all white.
BOYD:
Well, I don’t know a single racist musician and, for my first book, I
interviewed more than 60 musicians. Race was not a concern. They all talked
about the African-American musicians from whom they had learned. There’s a
story that Smokey Dacus calls his “chicken wire story.” They were playing in a
club and when the band got in to the club – Dacus was with Bob Will’s Texas
Playboys – they noticed this chicken wire strung up in front of the bandstand.
Somebody asked what that was for and the proprietor said that that as for the one
time a week that an African-American band played at this particular club and the
white folks in the audience would throw things at them. Racism is a part of any
discussion of jazz. Whether you are talking about mainstream jazz or Western
Swing, the racial issue is a part of that discussion, but not from the musicians
themselves, from the audiences.
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ABBOTT:
Atlantic Online writer Andrew Sullivan, who came here from Britain, talks
about how he immediately noticed how deeply black culture is woven into
American culture — and has been since the birth of the Republic! That’s not
anything new. Look — the stereotypically Southern instrument, the banjo — where
did it come from? Africa!
And he’s mainly talking about blacks, but it’s not just blacks — go back to
what Dr. Boyd said about how many cultures contributed to western swing.
THAT’S America.
Now, you can turn that around and call it theft, cultural appropriation.
Thank you Joseph Abbot for your excellent work on this show. Let’s get a
last opinion from Dr. Boyd.
Dr. Boyd, what would the musicians you’ve interviewed call it?
BOYD:
They would just call it using all of their resources. All jazz musicians use
their ears, their minds, they listen, they absorb everything around them. That’s
part of their creativity, being able to take what they have heard and make it their
own. All musicians do this.
Dr. Boyd, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your great
expertise on Swing. Can you set up this next recording for us?
BOYD:
I sure will. Bobby Bruce was a great fiddle player. I interviewed him in the
early 1990s at his home in California. We had a great talk and this is from that
interview. He is going to verify what I said, they were playing jazz.
RECORDING: [Bobby Bruce, side 1: 30:26-30:58] They used to take one
song a week and put it aside. We’d take our pick of whatever we’d like to play and
kick around, and they’d give us like five minutes of air time to pass some choruses
out and have some fun with it, you know. Oh, god, that was fun. But it shows you
that it was nothing but jazz, you know. You put a ten-gallon hat on it, but it was
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jazz.
These and more oral memoirs by western swing musicians are available
at the Texas Collection on the Baylor University campus.
Property of The Texas Collection at Baylor University
Final Edit: January 9, 2010
_________________________________________________
Joseph Abbott, Writer
_________________________________________________
Dr. Mary Landon Darden, Executive Producer
_________________________________________________
Pattie Orr, Vice President of Information Technology and Dean of
University Libraries
_________________________________________________
John Wilson, Associate Director of The Texas Collection
_________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas L. Charlton, Director of The Texas Collection