The History of Western Swing

In the weeks post, I am going to be talking about the history of Western Swing!

Western Swing began in the dancehalls of  small towns throughout the lower Great Plains in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is a subgenre of American country music. It is a type of dance music with an up-tempo beat, which ultimately attracted large crowds to the dancehalls. Western swing is a combination of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing. In a western swing band the main instruments are drums, saxophones, pianos, and, most importantly, the steel guitar. The string instruments, especially the steel guitar, gives the music a very distinctive sound. It is the first music genre indigenous to Texas. It brought the steel guitar, which is the most distinctive sound in the genre, to country music and also brought the drums to the front of country music stages. Horns were also used in many western swing bands. The western swing dance is a ballroom dance with a western flair, which is played primarily on string instruments. Some other characteristics of western swing is heavy rhythm sound for dancing and the preceding improvisation. Although the genre started in Texas, it gained a voice and grew in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

  

 The prominent groups during the peak of Western swing includes The Light Crust Doughboys, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, Spade Cooley and His Orchestra, and  Hank Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys.  Western swing music was created by Milton Brown and made famous by Bob Wills. While Milton Brown was selling tobacco and singing in an amateur band, he met and joined Bob Wills and Herman Amspiger and formed a group that later became The Light Crust Dough Boys, which was the first western swing band and had a standup bass, jazz piano, tenor banjo and twin fiddles. 

Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys were another famous western swing band. Hank Thompson's musical style was characterized as honky tonk western swing, which is a mixture of fiddles, electric guitar, and steel guitar along with his distinctive, smooth baritone vocals. The primary difference between Bob Wills and Hank Thompson is that Thompson used the swing beat and the instrumentation to enhance his vocals and did not use intense instrumental soloing like Wills did.