Speaking of genres I've never been clear on, here are a couple of videos on the history of these three styles. I did not realize how new bluegrass and Western swing are.
I like them all.
Music below the fold.
Some old-time music, now that I know what that is. You can tell it's dance music rather than sit-in-the-audience music.
Bluegrass
Western swing
Here's some fun people had with these styles:
Douglas, Barenberg, & Meyer
The Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo Yo Ma, Duncan, Meyer, and Thile
Asleep at the Wheel
9 comments:
I don't know who this Brit is who's narrating the first video, but he misses a significant hinge point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmie_Rodgers
"...the Hillbilly is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white... with the intelligence of morons."
Obviously that opinion hasn't changed in a hundred years. Some of us can read, though, in spite of our press.
Gringo will be by to comment on Western Swing. He is the expert. Bob Wills is, we should note, still the king.
Where do you think Jimmie Rodgers fits in to the story of old time & bluegrass?
When I listen to his "Blue Yodel No. 1", it doesn't seem to be either.
https://youtu.be/qEIBmGZxAhg?si=y-vBHlxsdqMYghKy
Like a bad penny, I show up.
That was a good video on comparing Western Swing and Bluegrass. I'm glad they mentioned Bill Haley's roots in Western Swing. He was quite the yodeler.
While I like the music of Asleep at the Wheel, in my opinion they do not improvise very well. One time in a local restaurant, showing my sister some Texas music, we heard Cornell Hurd's band---a musician w a day job. He would play straight country style most of the time, but on occasion would improvise. At the end of one set, I asked Cornell Hurd if he had his druthers, would he swing it every time. "Absolutely," was he reply. The crowds preferred straight country, so that is what he concentrated on. He was originally from the Bay Area.
Speaking of dance halls, I recently read an article on Ray Benson, the leader of Asleep at the Wheel. He had Brooks & Dunn--before they became famous---open for the Wheel at a dance hall in Amarillo.
Ray tells it:
They finished their set, and they were like, 'Oh man, we bombed. Nobody clapped.' I said, 'Did they dance?' 'Well, yeah.' That's Texas dance halls. As long as they're dancing, they loved you.
I consider myself fortunate to have seen some members of the Bob Wills band play in the 1980s----and to have had some second hand connections w Al Striklin, one of Bob's "piano pounders." I knew an old gent who played saxophone in Guy Lombardo type dance bands. When I praised Bob Wills, he told me that when his band played in the Dallas area they used a pianist who had played for Bob Wills. That must have been Al Striklin, who lived in Cleburne from the 40s until he died in the '80s. When I taught math, one of my students was in the band. Her father worked at a Kinkos near my house. After school was out, I handed her father a tape of Bob Wills to give to his daughter. He told me that he had gone to high school in Cleburne w a son of Al Striklin,
Like Charlie Parker said when asked why he listened to country music on the jukebox, his reply was, "The stories, the stories."
Gringo
Jimmie Rodgers is at the hinge of the trifurcation of what the video calls 'Old Time' music into three different streams. In Jimmie's day, his stream was the one called 'hillbilly music.' He was from Asheville, but toured the South and eventually settled in Texas because the dry climate was helpful to his failing health. This is where he picked up the cowboy influences that transformed 'hillbilly music' into what we now call Country Music, which was in the 70s and 80s even called "Country Western Music" (though the Blues Brothers correctly distinguishes that this is really two different streams: "We like both kinds, Country and Western!")
When Bob Wills et al began building out Western Swing, they were drawing on Hollywood's interest in both cowboy culture (Westerns having been a mainstay of Hollywood from the beginning due to the relative economy of filming them in Southern California) and swing music (very popular in the cultural centers of the day, especially New York's Harlem and in Chicago). They were already picking up on Rodgers influence on the style of cowboy music that they were transforming.
Because he infused hillbilly with Texas cowboy Western music as well as experimental "blue yodel" styles (of his own, combining Blues music, yodeling he learned from a troupe of Swiss yodelers he once saw perform, and the earlier Old Time/Hillbilly streams), Rodgers also set the conditions for the later breakout of Outlaw from mainstream Country. It made sense for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings to go back to Texas from a Nashville Country background and then start experiments of their own; Jennings invokes Rodgers explicitly in "Waymore's Blues," which opens by memorializing him and later includes a clear reference to Blue Yodel #9's lyrics.
Bluegrass is a late style, as the video correctly notes; it is downstream of all of that. Rodgers is why they wear cowboy hats, I think. Bill Monroe was admitted to the Grand Ole Opry as a member on the strength of a performance of one of Rodger's songs there, "Muleskinner Blues."
Interesting! Thanks for filling out that part of the story.
Cool stories.
I guess the jazz influence on Western swing has made improvisation important.
"I guess the jazz influence on Western swing has made improvisation important."
Made it more the highlight is what I would say. Old Time players are still improvising, but in smaller ways that are more integral- kind of a Hillbilly Goldberg Variations kind of thing. It's about the totality rather than the individual parts.
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