A style of Country music originating largely in the fiddle and guitar bands in Texas during the 1920s. Such groups regularly played traditional frontier dance music at country dances, but they were more innovative than country bands in the Southeast: they were eclectic in their repertory and improvised like jazz bands, from whom they borrowed freely. An early group, the Light Crust Doughboys of Fort Worth, were of the fiddle and guitar tradition but also performed current popular songs, blues and jazz. After 1934 two former members popularized western swing. The singer Milton Brown led one of the most popular country string bands in the Southwest, the Musical Brownies of Fort Worth. Bob Wills formed the Texas Playboys, which performed in Tulsa (1934–42) and later in California and elsewhere; he was a traditional country fiddler, but receptive to innovative and jazz-oriented musicians. The Playboys began as a fiddle-dominated string band, but soon added drums, piano, electric guitars and wind, and became very similar to the big popular swing bands of the 1930s.
The term ‘western swing’ was not used widely until after World War II, when the bandleader Spade Cooley billed himself as the ‘King of Western Swing’. Similar bands led by Tex Williams (1917–85; a former singer with Cooley’s band), Hank Penny (b 1918), and to a lesser extent Ray Whitley (1901–79) made California the new centre of the style in the 1940s. The western swing bands there, and elsewhere in the USA, influenced the mainstream of country music in the use of drums, walking bass patterns and electric instruments. Western swing experienced a revival in the early 1970s, largely through the performances of such musicians as Merle Haggard, Red Steagall and his Coleman County Cowboys, and, above all, the bands Asleep at the Wheel (led by the guitarist Ray Benson) and Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys.
B.C. Malone: Country Music U.S.A.: a Fifty-year History (Austin, 1968, 2/1985)
J. Zolten: ‘Western Swingtime Music: a Cool Breeze in the American Desert’, Sing Out!, xxiii/2 (1974), 2–5
C. Wolfe: ‘Making Western Swing: an Interview with Johnnie Lee Wills’, Old Time Music, no.15 (1974–5), 11–20
C.R. Townsend: San Antonio Rose: the Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana, IL, Chicago and London, 1976)
C. Ginell: ‘The Development of Western Swing’, JEMF Quarterly, xx (1984), 58–67
T. Dunbar: From Bob Wills to Ray Benson: a History of Western Swing (Austin, 1988)
D.B. Green: Tumbling Tumbleweeds: Gene Autry, Bob Wills, and the Dream of the West (New York and Nashville, TN, 1988)
J.R. Erickson and F. McWhorter, eds: Cowboy Fiddler (Lubbock, TX, 1992)
C. Ginell: Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana, IL, 1994) [incl. discography]
BILL C. MALONE