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Western swing is a style of popular music that evolved in the 1920s in the American Southwest among the region's popular Western string bands. Fundamentally an outgrowth of jazz, much Western swing is dance music with an up-tempo beat consisting of an eclectic combination of rural, cowboy, polka, and folk music, New Orleans jazz, or Dixieland, and blues blended with a jazzy "swing". and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop. The similarities between Western swing and Gypsy jazz are often noted.

History

Western swing originated in the dance halls of small towns throughout the Lower Great Plains in the 1920s and 1930s evolving from the old house parties and ranch dances where fiddlers and guitarists entertained dancers. According to guitarist Merle Travis, "Western Swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have Western Swing." During the early developmental phase an uncoordinated but parallel progression occurred with scores of groups from San Antonio to Shreveport to Oklahoma City playing different repertories with same basic sound."

Bob Wills and Milton Brown are considered to be the seminal band in this style when in the early 1930s they co-founded the stringband that became the Light Crust Doughboys, playing dancehalls and taking advantage of radio broadcasting.

Photographs of the Light Crust Doughboys taken as early as 1931 show two guitars along with fiddle player Bob Wills. On February 9, 1932 the Fort Worth Doughboys: Milton Brown, Durwood Brown, Bob Wills, and C.G. "Sleepy" Johnson were recorded by Victor Records at the Jefferson Hotel in Dallas, Texas. Brown played guitar and Johnson played tenor guitar. Both "Sunbonnet Sue" and "Nancy Jane" were recorded that day. This record was released by Victor (23653), Blue Bird (5257), Montgomery Ward (4416 & 4757), and (Canadian) Sunrise (3340). Montgomery Ward credited Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies.

When Milton Brown left the Doughboys in 1932, he took his brother Durwood along with him to play rhythm guitar in what would be called the Musical Brownies. In January 1933, fiddler Cecil Brower, playing harmony, joined Jesse Ashlock to create the first example of harmonizing twin fiddles. Brower, a classically-trained violinist, was the first to master Joe Venuti's "double shuffle" and his improvisational style was a major contribution to the genre. Photos from 1933 show three guitar players in the Doughboys.

In October 1933, Wills was fired and a new group of Doughboys went to Chicago for a recording session with Vocalion (later Columbia) Records. The years between 1935 and World War II were the most successful for the group. By 1937, some of the best musicians in the history of Western swing had joined the band. Kenneth Pitts and Clifford Gross played fiddles, and in 1939, Brower joined the Doughboys, replacing Buck Buchanan as fiddler in the string section but playing lead (Buchanan had played harmony).

In late 1933, Wills organized the Texas Playboys in Waco. Recording rosters show that from September 1935 on, Wills utilized two fiddles, two guitars plus Leon McAuliffe playing steel guitar, banjo, drums and other instruments during recording sessions.

In 1935, Brown and the Musical Brownies recorded W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" (Decca 5070) using a shortened arrangement of what they did while playing at dances at the Crystal Palace outside of Fort Worth. In the dance hall arrangement the band would play at slow-drag tempo for as long as 10 – 15 minutes with an accompanying vocal. The tempo would then increase to presto for the final choruses. The crowds of dancers loved the arrangement and eagerly anticipated the change in tempo. Waltzes and ballads were interspersed among faster songs if the dancers, who would dance two-step or round dances at that time, became worn out after faster numbers.

1938, session rosters for Wills recordings show both "lead guitar" and "electric guitar" in addition to guitar and steel guitar. The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.

That helped the style gain a much wider following through the music of Wills and his Playboys in Tulsa, Brown in Fort Worth and the Light Crust Doughboys, also in Fort Worth.

Wills recalled the early days of Western swing music in a 1949 interview. "Here's the way I figure it" he said, "We sure not tryin' to take credit for swingin' it." Speaking of Milt Brown and himself—working with popular songs done by Jimmie Davis, the Skillet Lickers, Jimmie Rodgers, songs he'd learned from his father and others—he said that "We'd ... pull these tunes down an set 'em in a dance category. ... They wouldn't be a runaway ... and just lay a real beat behind it an' the people would began to really like it. ... It was nobody intended to start anything in the world. We was just tryin' to find enough tunes to keep 'em dancin' to not have to repeat so much."

By the mid-1930s, Fort Worth was a hub for western swing music, and The Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion was at the center, and the pavilion continued to prosper as a country music venue until the 1950s. On New Year's Eve 1955, about 1,800 persons danced there.

Fred "Papa" Calhoun recalled that around 1930 he played in a band in Decatur, Texas that played "a lot of swing stuff like the Louisiana Five was playing back in those days. We also liked Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke."

Western swing differed in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands—even the fully orchestrated bands—vocals and the other instruments followed the fiddle's lead. Additionally, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively. Popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music.

The rhythm and the use of electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel and guitar, also gave the music a distinctive sound. As early as 1934 or 1935 Bob Dunn electrified a Martin O-series acoustic guitar while playing with Milton Brown's Brownies.."

According to Jimmy Thomason "It happened when Dunn was working at Coney Island in New York... he ran into this black guy who was playing a steel guitar with a homemade pickup attached to it...hooked up to this old radio or something and was playing blues licks... and he got this guy to show him how he was doing it. I never knew this black musician's name but both Bob and Avis talked to me about him often."

Origin of the name

Western swing in its beginnings had no name—it was just dance music. Just the term "swing," meaning big band dance music, wasn't used until after the 1932 hit "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)". Recording companies came up with several names before World War II trying to market it—"Hillbilly," "Old Time Music," "Novelty Hot Dance," "Hot String Band," and even "Texas Swing" for music coming out of Texas and Louisiana. Most of the big Western dance bandleaders simply referred to themselves as Western bands and their music as Western dance music, many adamantly refusing the "hillbilly" label.

Bob Wills and others thought the term "Western swing" was used for his music while he and his band were still in Tulsa, Oklahoma between 1939 and 1942. Circa 1942, Spade Cooley's promoter, Foreman Phillips, began using "Western swing" to advertise his client. The first use in print was a 1944 Billboard item mentioning an forthcoming song book by Spade Cooley titled Western Swing . After that the music was "Western swing."

Some credit Spade Cooley with coining the term 'Western swing' in the early 1940s, as a play on Benny Goodman's reputation as the "King of Swing." At least one historian and two web sites, however, credit Cooley’s then manager Bert “Foreman” Phillips with creating the term.

Height of popularity

Western swing reached its "golden age" during the years preceding WWII, blossomed on the West Coast during the war, and was extremely popular throughout the West. In the 1940s the Light Crust Doughboys broadcasts went out over 170 radio stations in the South and Southwest, and were heard by millions of people. Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys played Western swing nightly at the Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa from 1934 until 1943. Crowds at Cain's were as large as 6,000 people. Daily shows were broadcast on KVOO radio, which had a far-reaching 50,000 watt signal. Regular shows continued until 1958 with Johnnie Lee Wills as the bandleader.

Burt (aka Bert) "Foreman" Phillips developed a circuit of dance halls and bands for each of them. Included in the venues beginning in 1942 were: the Los Angeles County Barn Dance at Venice Pier Ballroom, the Town Hall Ballroom in Compton, the Plantation in Culver City, the Baldwin Park Ballroom, and the Riverside Rancho. These "western" dances were a "huge" success. According to Hank Penny, Phillips had said, "I don't want any of that Western Swing!" But that's what he got, and it got him huge eclectic crowds. Writer Gerald Vaughn wrote that , "a Dance band hopes to make people move , not stand and listen, so the emphasis has to be on beat, rhythm, syncopation."

One of the groups which played at the Venice Pier Ballroom was run by Jimmy Wakely with Spade Cooley on fiddle. Several thousand dancers would turn out on Saturday night to swing and hop. "The hoards

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