Western Swing

Western swing was invented by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in the dance halls of Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1930s. Wills took the string-band format of country music and enlarged it into something approaching a jazz orchestra: fiddles and steel guitars sitting alongside trumpets, saxophones and Eldon Shamblin’s jazz-inflected electric guitar. Over this ensemble, Wills shouted rhythmic encouragements to his musicians while singer Tommy Duncan delivered vocals in a laid-back, swing-derived style entirely unlike the nasal country singing of the same era.

The music was born to be danced to — the Texas Playboys could play for six hours straight at a ballroom like Cain’s in Tulsa, with Wills directing the band and keeping the energy at exactly the level the dance floor needed. “New San Antonio Rose” (1940), “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” and “Faded Love” are its canonical texts. Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies were the parallel development in Texas; Spade Cooley brought western swing to California.

Western swing’s jazz connections gave it an improvisational freedom that was unusual in country music, and its use of electric instruments (steel guitar, amplified string bass) made it one of the first American genres to fully embrace amplification. Its influence on Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and the Bakersfield Sound connects it to the outlaw country movement decades later.