Bob Sanders: Western Swing still taps my toes

Bob Sanders
Columnist
Published: October 13, 2008

In the early 1930s, in the heart of the Great Depression, there sprang up on the plains of Texas a new musical genre. It was a hybrid — part plain ol’ hillbilly country and part jazz. Spade Cooley named it Western Swing.

Among its early practitioners were people like Milton Brown (and his Brownies) and Bill Boyd (and his Cowboy Ramblers). Later on, there’d be many others. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys being the most famous. Also Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, and so on.

I’ve read that some of these people had heard Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Figures. Django’s group used guitars, a fiddle, and a bass fiddle, the same instrumentation of, say, the North Carolina Ramblers of the 1920s, not what you’d expect in a real jazz group ... and swung like the very devil. These were not six-chord pickers (with five or six chords, you could play along with almost any country song), No, sir. Some could play, comfortably, the most sophisticated popular song or any jazz piece.

Likewise, the Brownies (for instance). A couple of guitars, a couple of fiddles for harmony, a bass ... but, whoa! Here’s a piano. And later in the Western Swing bands there might be a clarinet or a trumpet. Maybe a Hawaiian-type guitar and an accordian. Perhaps even drums.

Spade Cooley’s group got to be regular Big Band size, and it could play anything from “San Antonio Rose” to modern big band jazz.

Western Swing was first and foremost dance music. Picture those big old Texas dance halls on a Saturday night with Wills’ band or some other band playing into the wee hours, and cowboys and farmers and townspeople dancing away, forgetting for a few hours the drudgery of the week behind and the one ahead. “Ahhh ha. Pick it out, Leon,” with the whole building shaking.

“San Antonio Rose” became kind of the theme song of Western Swing, as much a part of the style as “How High the Moon” was (and remains) for the early bopsters.

But there were many other Western Swing recordings that became very popular.

I was 12 when Mother and my brother and I went with aunt Mila Ree and her two kids to the zoo in Memphis. We somehow found our way to it, and enjoyed seeing the animals.

Later, we walked out about half way on the bridge over the Mississippi.

We’d spit and marvel at how long it took it to get to the water. Jack would get scared every time a train came along, making the whole bridge shake, and I’d sneer and call him a baby.

But the thing about that trip that has stuck in my mind all these years is a song. A concession stand at the zoo had a record player going all the time, and a tune that came up very often was Al Dexter’s, “Lay That Pistol Down, Babe.”

Just a bit of Western Swing that lodged in my 12-year-old brain.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.