“Cowboy Libretto is dedicated to my grandmother, who gave me a love of her ‘cowboy singers’ and the stories we shared while listening to them.”

— Ron Thompson

Western Swing is American dance music born in the 1930s in Texas and Oklahoma. It draws from fiddle tunes, blues, jazz, big-band swing, conjunto, mariachi, and the polkas and waltzes carried into the region by German and Czech settlers. Bandleaders such as Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Spade Cooley, and Adolph Hofner built working ensemble sounds from these traditions, performed in dance halls and broadcast on radio from Fort Worth, Tulsa, and San Antonio. When the Dust Bowl migration pushed hundreds of thousands west, the music traveled with them, took root in the ballrooms of California, and moved into the American popular mainstream. Honky-tonk, rockabilly, the Bakersfield Sound, country and western, rock and roll: Western Swing ran beneath all of it.

Cowboy Libretto is an independent journal of original research, artist monographs, close readings, and cultural histories devoted to the music, people, and places that shaped Western Swing. All work is drawn from primary sources and close attention to the recordings themselves. New work appears on the first and fifteenth of each month.

Western Swing has received a fraction of the serious, sustained scholarship given to jazz or the blues. The musicians who built it, the communities that danced to it, and the migration patterns that carried it across the country deserve the same quality of attention.

Cowboy Libretto is written and produced by Ron Thompson.