What a Disc!
The best Texas music-ever-on CD.
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Jumpers and Jivers
THE BIG BAND SOUND that infatuated America beginning in the thirties spun off a regional variation known as western swing, which blended elements of jazz, western, blues, jump, fiddle breakdowns, and even Mexican rancheras into a lively, highly danceable stew distinguished by tight string-and-brass arrangements and wild solos. While every southwestern city large enough to support a radio station and a dance hall had a western swing band, only one made a national impact. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys: Anthology 1935–1973 (Rhino) is a 32-song chronicle of that band’s career, from the days when the Playboys ruled the airwaves of Texas and Oklahoma to Wills’s last session; it covering the original versions of his hits (“New San Antonio Rose,” “Faded Love”), popular standards of the era (“Corrine Corrina,” “St. Louis Blues”), and esoterica (“Big Beaver”). Many hard-core Wills fans prefer the various Tiffany Transcriptions (Kaleidoscope) of radio performances from 1946 to 1947 for their broadcast- quality sound, Herb Remington’s stellar steel playing, and the guitar work of Junior Barnard, a blues player influenced by Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker. Volume Four, “You’re From Texas,” consists wholly of songs with Texas themes.
One of the few available domestic samplers of western swing, OKeh Western Swing (Columbia Special Products), features seven Wills tracks and songs by such significants as the Light Crust Doughboys (“Knocky, Knocky”), Adolf Hofner (“Gulf Coast Special”), future governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel (“There’ll Be Some Changes Made”), the Swift Jewel Cowboys, and the Crystal Springs Ramblers. Hank Thompson: The Country Music Hall of Fame Series (MCA) traces the career of the Waco swingster. Asleep at the Wheel (Epic), a reissue of the 1974 album by the latest conservators of western swing, captures the classic version of the Wheel, including the work of chanteuse Chris O’Connell and droll lyricist LeRoy Preston, as well as Ray Benson’s trademark crooning. A more mainstream take on big-band swing is heard on Vernon-born Jack Teagarden’s That’s a Serious Thing (Bluebird), which covers the manic trombonist’s sessions with Louis Armstrong and Bud Freeman.
What Bob Wills was to the fiddle in big bands, T-Bone Walker was to the guitar. The Oak Cliff native grew up under the influence of Blind Lemon Jefferson and cavorted with Charlie Christian; Walker was the man who put the guitar out front as a horn-backed lead ensemble piece, taking it off the street and defining sophisticated guitar blues in the process. The Complete Recordings of T-Bone Walker, 1940–1954 (available by mail order; $90, plus $4 shipping, from Mosaic Records, 35 Melrose Place, Stamford, CT 06092) is the ideal means to appreciate Walker and his impact on artists from B. B. King to Jimi Hendrix. An alternative is The Complete Imperial Recordings (EMI) boxed set that captures T-Bone at his peak, beginning in 1950, playing such fast and furious jump instrumentals as “The Hustle Is On” and “Strollin’ With Bones” and singing pensively and circumspectly on his best-known hit, “Call It Stormy Monday.”
Also recommended: Truckin’ With Albert Collins (MCA), on which the Houston guitar man carries on the T-Bone sound, stripping it down and dir- tying it up; and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown: The Original Peacock Recordings (Rounder), a frenzied compilation from the one contemporary of T-Bone’s who could hold his own in a cutting contest while tossing in a dose of blues fiddling.
Honky-tonk
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN JIMMIE RODGERS, Bob Wills, and early country pioneers Vernon Dalhart and Eck Robertson lies the heart of Texas honky-tonk, the western half of the country-western equation that made Nashville famous. Though the sound has been an integral part of the Texas music tradition since the rugs were rolled up at the first house dance, it did not come into its own until the fifties, when the jukebox became popular. A constant since then has been George Jones, whose Best of George Jones 1955–1967 (Rhino) is a tribute to the art of stretching a monosyllabic phrase into a miniseries while keeping one’s molars clenched. Old “Possum” continues to crank out hits as predictably as the change of seasons, yet it is his first sides for Starday Records in Beaumont and the early Mercury recordings that set the standard for any male country singer aspiring to stardom. To wit: The southeast Texan simply knows how to evoke without apologizing for his accent. His trailblazing efforts—“Why, Baby, Why,” “The Race Is On,” and “White Lightning”—are so excitable that they verge on rockabilly, while ballads like “Tender Years” will pull tears out of listeners’ eyes even if they’re not paying attention to the lyrics.
Critics charged that Ernest Tubb couldn’t sing worth a lick—and he certainly wasn’t the most accomplished picker to come down the pike— but as a bandleader, singer, songwriter, and human dance machine (two-step and waltz division), he was the total entertainer. Ernest Tubb: Live 1965 (Rhino) is preferable to other collections because honky-tonks were the setting of most of Tubb’s tales about dancing, cheating, drinking, and moaning the blues. All that’s missing is the classic “Waltz Across Texas” and not being able to see Tubb flip his guitar over at the end of the performance, revealing the message “Thanks” taped on the back. As a one-time fiddler in Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys and a contemporary of Ernest Tubb’s, Tyler native Johnny Gimble embodies the Texas honky-tonk tradition. Johnny Gimble’s Texas Honky-Tonk Hits (CMH) concentrates on recordings from the forties and fifties and more recent tracks cut with his own Texas Swing Pioneers. The material includes obscure, forgotten gems like “Fort Worth Hambone Blues”; Ted Daffan’s “Truck Driver’s Blues,” the first musical paean to truckers; “Divorce Me C.O.D.”; “Where Honky Tonk Angels Spread Their Wings”; and twenty other slices of the wild side of life.
There have been several attempts to eradicate all traces of honky-tonk from what is currently known as country music. But every time it appears to be down for the count, someone comes along to revive the genre and put the twang back in C&W. The latest hero is a handsome, one-time heavy metal dabbler named George Strait, whose sound and look spawned a subgenre known as the Hat Acts, setting the scene for the arrival of Garth Brooks. Ocean Front Property (MCA), Strait’s breakthrough album from 1987, is the definitive Hat Act CD: smooth vocals with a Texas accent, an ensemble sound inspired by Bob Wills, rife with fiddle and pedal steel runs that are neither too raw nor too slick, and a passel of excellent songs, notably Whitey Shafer’s instant classic “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
Also recommended: Essential Ray Price (Columbia), the greatest hits of the honey-dripping vocalist who created the “countrypolitan” sound by replacing fiddles with lush string arrangements; Floyd Tillman: The Country Music Hall of Fame Series (MCA), featuring most of the big songs from honky-tonk’s most prolific “cheatin’ ” composer; Lefty Frizzell: American Originals (Columbia), from the paragon of the white Texas jukebox sound; Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s After Awhile (Elektra), featuring a voice as histrionic and as antique as Jimmie Rodgers’ welded onto a transcendental hillbilly sensibility; and Al Dean and the All Stars’ Kick’n (Kik-R), an all-instrumental survey of Texas dance hall favorites highlighted by “Cotton Eyed Joe,” a version so inextricably tied to Texas that it is has replaced “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch of Texas Rangers home games.
Black and Bronze
THE BLACK EQUIVALENT OF HONKY-TONK is juke joint music, a low-down, guitar-driven sound made for the dancing and listening pleasure of nightclub patrons that endures today. The standard by which all juke joint guitar is measured is Freddie King, a native of the East Texas town of Gilmer who spent much of his younger days on the south side of Chicago before settling in Dallas. King’s showpiece, Freddy [sic] King: Just Pickin’ (Modern Blues), is actually one CD containing two albums: Let’s Hide Away and Dance Away With Freddy King, released in 1961, and Freddy King Gives You a Bonanza of Instrumentals, issued in 1965. For every young Texas kid who has fancied himself a blues guitarist over the past thirty years, learning the songs on both records was the equivalent of school: If you mastered 8 of the 24 rocking instrumentals, you were ready to front your own band. Noteworthy are the 12 tracks featuring the rhythm sax of San Antonio’s Clifford Scott, the honker who put the honk in Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” and the inclusion of “Remington’s Ride,” a loping shuffle composed by western swing steel guitarist Herb Remington of Dallas.
In the early seventies, rock pianist Leon Russell “discovered” King and issued three albums on his Shelter label. Though those albums lack the tough edge of King’s earlier work and make a few too many concessions to the rock sound, they demonstrate King’s considerable vocal prowess. Texas Cannonball and Woman Across the River (both unavailable on CD) are more than competent works, but Getting Ready … (Shelter) is clearly the best.
At the same time that King was cutting his instrumentals, Houston nightclub impresario and promoter Don Robey was in his prime. Back in the late forties, Robey rose to national prominence with his Duke and Peacock record labels, the first black-owned imprints in the music industry. Although he recorded all kinds of music in the early years (including Little Richard’s first tracks), by the late fifties and early sixties the Duke-Peacock sound had been honed into a polished version of the blues as defined by house-band conductor Joe Scott and several distinguished vocalists, including Bobby Blue Bland, Junior Parker, O. V. Wright, and Big Mama Thornton.
While Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues (MCA) remains the quintessential Duke-Peacock record, as well the finest recording ever made in the state of Texas, several compilations set for release this November merit attention: Bland’s double CD, I Pity the Fool: The Duke Recordings, Volume One (MCA), containing 44 tracks from the silky growler; Parker’s Junior’s Blues (MCA), from the most underrated vocalist in the Robey camp; The Soul of O. V. Wright (MCA), by the unsung hero of the Duke stable; Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog: The Peacock Records (MCA), from the defiant wailer who inspired Janis Joplin; and two samplers of the Robey sound, The Best of Duke-Peacock Blues (MCA), featuring Parker’s “Driving Wheel” and Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light,” and Duke-Peacock’s Greatest Hits (MCA), a 16-song collection including Johnny Ace’s romance-inspiring “Pledging My Love,” Marie Adams’ “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks,” and Thornton’s reading of “Hound Dog,” which packs more grit and emotion than Elvis’ subsequent version.
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