Western Swing

Stir old-time fiddle tunes, blues, jazz, big band swing, corridas, and who knows what other strains of Texas Music into a pot and what you get is western swing. This is dance music, so don't expect lyrical significance-just lots of unbelievable guitar, steel, fiddle and piano playing. Modern examples are few, the most prominent of which is Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys. This stuff is the real deal.

Bob Wills
Anthology (1935-1973)
(2 CDs)

Western swing is something like hillbilly jazz, only cooler, and Bob Wills was its most popular performer. Musicians from Wills' band, the Texas Playboys, could populate a Western Swing Hall of Fame all by themselves.

Further Listening: Merle Haggard's A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World features a bunch of original Texas Playboys. I'll confess to not having heard all of them, but Rhino's Tiffany Transcriptions are nine CDs worth of the Playboys live on the radio in the late '40s. They're available separately or as a set.

Recommended Reading: Charles Townsend's San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills is the definitive Wills biography. Duncan McClean's Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys is an amusing travelogue through West Texas with a western swing theme.

Spade Cooley
Spadella!

If you can somehow get past the fact that he stomped his wife to death in a drunken, jealous rage, there's much to like here. Steel player Joaquin Murphy tears it up, and Cooley 's brand of West Coast Western Swing was very big band-influenced, featuring up to 24 musicians and sometimes four fiddle players.

Jimmie Rivers
Brisbane Bop: Western Swing 1961-64

It don't get any wilder and woolier than these live cuts from the 23 Club in Brisbane, California, where "the dancing starts at 9 and the fights start at 10." Rivers was a fabulous, jazz-influenced guitarist and a wisecracking entertainer. This captures the crazy energy of western swing at the end of its popular period.

Missing in Action: Rhino's Hillbilly Fever: Legends of Western Swing is an out-of-print collection that you should snap up immediately if you ever see it.