Treasures of The Texas Collection

Beyond the Beginnings of Western Swing

That was Leon McAuliffe’s Cimarron Boys out of Tulsa, and this was their cover of Sy Oliver’s “Opus 1.” Leon McAuliffe was the most famous of Bob Wills’ steel guitar players; he was the “Leon” of Bob’s frequent chant, “Take it away, Leon.” After serving in the military during World War II, McAuliffe returned to Tulsa and put together his own band. The arrangement we just heard was the creation of McAuliffe and his outstanding fiddle player, Bobby Bruce. They waxed their version of “Opus 1” in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I chose this recording to begin the show in order to illustrate that western swing possesses many faces and sounds, and that it is always changing.

Other bands in Southeast Texas brought a mainstream jazz orientation to their dance music by playing their own arrangements of numbers popularized by Goodman, Ellington, Armstrong, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, and others.

What seems not to have been especially important to dance bands that populated Southeast Texas was the tradition of fiddle tunes and western music that informed southwestern swing bands in other parts of Texas and Oklahoma.

Do we have an example of this Southeast Texas swing dance music?
MUSIC: “Tulsa Twist,” Twin fiddle opening, piano chorus, fiddle chorus, twin fiddle tag
That was a “HOT” band! Who was that?
That was a band out of Houston, Dickie McBride and the Village Boys. The title of the tune is “Tulsa Twist,” and it was written by the outstanding fiddle player for this band, Buddy Ray, and recorded in Dallas on May 1, 1941. I interviewed Buddy Ray in the early 1990s for my first book, and he raved about the mainstream jazz nature of this band. He told me that the Village Boys band was too jazzy for rural audiences, and not jazz at all to mainstream jazz enthusiasts, who insisted that string bands could not and did not play jazz. He also told me that the Village Boys were denied admittance to the Houston local musicians’ union because their instrumentation made them “hillbilly” performers.

“Tulsa Twist” is a tune that bears a greater resemblance to a mainstream jazz arrangement or a popular song than to a fiddle tune or country song. In the solo choruses of this entirely instrumental number, players move away from the main melody. The Village Boys was just one of the many western swing bands, each unique, that worked the many clubs and dance halls of the Houston-Beaumont-Port Arthur area.

Probably the best known and longest lived of the San Antonio bands belonged to the Hofner brothers, Adolph and Emil. These two grew up in a home in which Czech was their first language, and polka music their first musical genre. They recorded in Texas and Los Angeles and kept going after many western swing bands had shut down. Their recordings included rags and blues, popular songs, and, of course, polkas.

Yes, that would be North Texas where the Doughboys and Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies got started. For bands in North Texas that were transforming from string to swing bands, Milton Brown’s Brownies was an important model. But Milton Brown hired a fiddle player, Cecil Brower, from a Fort Worth band called the Southern Melody Boys that could easily have been a model for Brown’s band. The Southern Melody Boys never recorded, so we will never know for sure. But Brown did record and influenced numerous bands in the North Texas area.

When I compare this recording to those of Leon McAuliffe, The Village Boys, or Newman and his Boys, I notice that the Lone Star Playboys play a simpler and more straightforward style of western swing. I am convinced that this was not from lack of talent, but from a desire to please audiences.

One of the leading figures in West Texas swing, and a good personal friend of Bob Wills, was Hoyle Nix, whose West Texas Cowboys worked out of Big Spring, Texas. Hoyle Nix was a great contest fiddler, who always incorporated fiddle tunes into his playlist. Hoyle’s West Texas Playboys also played all of the Bob Wills standards. Hoyle Nix is credited with writing a tune that remains a staple among current western swing bands, “A Big Ball’s in Cowtown.” Let’s listen to this recording.

We have already discussed the most progressive of the Oklahoma western swing bands, Leon McAuliffe’s Cimarron Boys. One of the most popular bands in Oklahoma was led by Bob Wills’ younger brother, Johnnie Lee Wills. Johnnie Lee, though less of a showman than Bob, created his own unique band sound, with a tightly together group of excellent musicians.