Ex Libris

Bob Dunn’s first session with the Brownies

Recorded January 27, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois, for Decca Records. Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, with Bob Dunn on amplified electric steel guitar.

Bob Dunn had built his own pickup, reportedly modeled on a contraption he had encountered on the Coney Island boardwalk and followed to New Orleans to study. What he played through it was trombone-like, full of bent tones and harmonic substitutions that pointed twenty years forward to the moment when amplified guitars would become the standard sound of American popular music. The session is documented as the first commercial recording to feature an electrically amplified instrument.

Cited in · Milton Brown: The Founder-to-Be · Leon McAuliffe and the Steel Guitar

“St. Louis Blues”

Composed by W. C. Handy, 1914.

Recorded March 1936 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, for Decca Records, during the sessions at which the Brownies cut forty-nine songs in three days. Milton Brown, vocal.

Handy’s blues had been a standard for two decades by the time Brown took it to New Orleans. The Brownies compressed a fifteen-minute live arrangement into a three-and-a-half-minute side and held the form together at full intensity throughout. The recording is the best surviving evidence of how the band sounded in the final weeks of its working life.

Cited in · Milton Brown: The Founder-to-Be

“Avalon”

Recorded approximately February 1936 for Decca Records. Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies.

Two months after Brown recorded “Avalon,” his car struck a telephone pole on the Jacksboro Highway directly across from the Avalon Motel. He survived the crash and died of pneumonia five days later. The recording is a working dance number from a band at the height of its powers. The coincidence of the location is the kind of detail the historical record cannot resolve and cannot stop noting.

Cited in · Milton Brown: The Founder-to-Be

“Spanish Two Step”

Composed by Bob Wills, adapted from a fiddle tune Wills learned in Roy, New Mexico, in 1927.

Recorded by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in their early sessions for the American Record Corporation. Issued on Vocalion.

Wills first played this melody for Mexican American dancers in northern New Mexico, where he was working as a barber and fiddling for community dances. The rhythmic feel was unfamiliar to him at first, and he adjusted his playing for the floor in front of him. Three years later, working backward through the bridge of this melody in a Dallas studio, he would build “San Antonio Rose.” The genre’s deepest borrowings came from communities the formal record of Anglo Texas overlooked.

Cited in · “San Antonio Rose”

“San Antonio Rose”

Composed by Bob Wills, November 1938, working backward through the bridge of “Spanish Two Step.” Title suggested by Art Satherley.

Recorded November 1938 in Dallas, Texas, for the American Record Corporation, with Satherley producing. Bob Wills, fiddle. Leon McAuliffe, steel guitar. Issued on Vocalion.

Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, 2015.

This is the genre in its own voice. Wills’ fiddle and McAuliffe’s steel guitar trade the melody between them, the fiddle carrying the folk tradition and the steel guitar carrying the jazz one, both leaning into the mariachi warmth of the underlying harmony. The 1940 vocal version that came two years later is a different recording with a different argument. Both belong in any working library of the music.

Cited in · “San Antonio Rose”

“New San Antonio Rose”

Composed by Bob Wills, with contributions from members of the Texas Playboys including Everett Stover. Lyric authorship contested. Published by the Irving Berlin firm.

Recorded April 16, 1940, at the Burrus Sawmill studio in Saginaw, Texas, for the American Record Corporation. Eldon Shamblin, arrangement. Tommy Duncan, vocal. Eighteen-piece ensemble built around saxophones and trumpets. Issued on Vocalion.

Bing Crosby’s 1940 cover reached number seven on the pop charts. Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, 1998. Added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, 2003.

The 1940 recording is the genre in translation. Irving Berlin’s firm wanted a lyric, a vocal, and a horn arrangement that could be heard on jukeboxes in cities far from any Texas dance hall. Tommy Duncan delivered the lyric as if the memory it described were his own. The recording carried Western Swing into the American popular mainstream and eventually to the surface of the moon, where Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad sang it from orbit in November 1969.

Cited in · “San Antonio Rose” · Tommy Duncan: The Voice That Made the Band

“Ida Red”

Traditional fiddle tune, arranged by Bob Wills.

Recorded 1938 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys for the American Record Corporation. Issued on Vocalion.

Chuck Berry first heard this recording on KMOX in St. Louis, made it a staple of his live sets at integrated clubs across the Midwest, then carried a rewritten version to Chess Records in 1955 under the title “Ida May.” Leonard Chess thought the title sounded too rural. Someone in the studio spotted a mascara box on the floor, and the song became “Maybellene.” The line from this Wills recording to the founding of rock and roll runs as directly as any line in American music history.

Cited in · A Musical Taproot

“Steel Guitar Rag”

Composed by Leon McAuliffe, adapted from Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Rag” (OKeh, 1923).

Recorded fall 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, for the American Record Corporation, with Art Satherley producing. Leon McAuliffe, electric steel guitar. Bob Wills, fiddle and announcement. Released on Vocalion in 1936.

Satherley refused to record this song at the band’s first ARC session in September 1935, on the grounds that the melody was too close to Sylvester Weaver’s blues recording. Wills threatened to cancel the follow-up session in Chicago unless Satherley relented. The recording that resulted opened with McAuliffe sliding into an E chord, Wills calling out “Look out, friends. Here’s Leon. Take it away, my boy, take it away,” and McAuliffe stating the Weaver melody and lifting it through variations that became the founding vocabulary of country steel guitar. The phrase outlasted the song.

Cited in · Leon McAuliffe and the Steel Guitar

“Cherokee Maiden”

Composed by Cindy Walker.

Recorded 1941 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Tommy Duncan, vocal.

Walker’s first major composition for Wills was a romantic ballad that became one of the band’s signature numbers. The song’s structure, a melodic line that arrives once and returns, with a lyric asking the listener to share a single image rather than follow a story, is characteristic of Walker’s working method, which began with a title and let the words and music find each other. Asleep at the Wheel revived the song in the 1970s, beginning a new run for it that continues.

Cited in · Cindy Walker: The Architect of Western Swing’s Enduring Voice

“Dusty Skies”

Composed by Cindy Walker, written when Walker was twelve years old, drawn from newspaper accounts of the Dust Bowl.

Recorded 1941 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Tommy Duncan, vocal.

Walker wrote this song from newspaper accounts of the dust storms while she was still a child in Mart, Texas. Eight years later, Wills recorded it with the Texas Playboys, and it entered the canon of Depression-era songs that documented the environmental and human cost of the storms in the language of working people. The recording sits at an unusual intersection: a song composed by a child, recorded by a working dance band, about a catastrophe still in living memory for nearly everyone who first heard it.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“Miss Molly”

Composed by Cindy Walker.

Recorded 1942 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Tommy Duncan, vocal.

Both Bob Wills and Johnny Cash named daughters after Cindy Walker on the strength of this song. The melody carries the rhythmic insistence of a working dance number, and the lyric does the kind of light, specific character work Walker preferred to grand statement. The song became a standard of the Western Swing dance repertoire and is carried forward by every revival band that takes the genre seriously.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“Bubbles in My Beer”

Composed by Tommy Duncan and Cindy Walker.

Recorded 1948 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Tommy Duncan, vocal.

The composition story belongs in the annotation. Tommy Duncan was sitting in a bar with Cindy Walker when he noticed a man across the room staring at his drink. Duncan pointed and said the man was just watching the bubbles in his beer. Walker and Duncan recognized the song immediately. The result is a honky-tonk classic about the distance between where a person is and where they thought they would be, written in an instant by two people who understood that distance from the inside.

Cited in · Cindy Walker · Tommy Duncan

Together Again, A Living Legend, and Mr. Words and Mr. Music

Three reunion albums by Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan, recorded between 1960 and 1961 after their reconciliation in 1959.

Duncan and Wills had parted in 1948 over a dispute about pay scales and the burden Duncan had been carrying as the band’s front man during Wills’ missed shows. They reunited in 1959 and made these three records over the following two years. The albums sold well and demonstrated that the partnership still produced something neither man could fully replicate alone. They are the closest thing the catalog has to a coda for the original Texas Playboys vocal sound, and they reward attention from anyone who has heard the 1940s recordings and wondered what survived.

Cited in · Tommy Duncan

“Panhandle Rag”

Composed by Leon McAuliffe.

Recorded 1949 for Columbia Records. Leon McAuliffe and the Cimarron Boys. Reached number six on the Billboard country charts.

McAuliffe served as a flight instructor in the Army Air Corps during the war and returned to Tulsa in 1946 to build his own band. He took over the noon KVOO radio slot the Texas Playboys had vacated and opened the Cimarron Ballroom in a remodeled Akdar Shrine Mosque. “Panhandle Rag” is the recording that proved the steel guitar could carry a country hit on its own merits, in a new decade, under a new bandleader’s name. It is the second chapter of the McAuliffe story.

Cited in · Leon McAuliffe and the Steel Guitar

“Lone Star Trail”

Composed by Cindy Walker.

Recorded 1940 by Bing Crosby. Walker’s first chart hit and the song that opened her thirteen-year Hollywood career.

Walker spotted a building bearing the Crosby name on Sunset Boulevard while accompanying her parents on a business trip to Los Angeles in 1940. She walked in, sang the song for Larry Crosby, and sang it the next morning at Paramount Studios for Bing Crosby himself. The recording became her first chart hit and launched the Hollywood years. The story is the kind of professional audacity that ran underneath Walker’s quiet daily craft for the next sixty years.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“You Don’t Know Me”

Composed by Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold, 1955.

Eddy Arnold, 1956. Reached number ten on the country charts.

Ray Charles, 1962. Reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

Eddy Arnold approached Walker with a song title and a premise, a person confessing unrequited love to someone who sees them only as a friend, at a WSM disc jockey convention in 1955. Walker wrote the complete song from Arnold’s concept and shared the credit. The Arnold recording was the original. Charles’ recording six years later turned the composition into a soul standard and demonstrated the song’s reach across the lines that usually divided American popular music. According to BMI, the song has now received more than six million terrestrial radio plays.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“Distant Drums”

Composed by Cindy Walker.

Recorded by Jim Reeves and released posthumously in 1966.

Reeves died in a plane crash in July 1964. The Walker composition he had recorded was released two years later, in the third year of the American war in Vietnam. The lyric’s invocation of distant drums and a soldier called away from a woman he loved took on a weight in 1966 that came entirely from the moment of its release. Walker’s catalog is full of songs that found their meaning in moments she had not anticipated when she wrote them.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“Blue Canadian Rockies”

Composed by Cindy Walker.

Gene Autry recording featured in his 1952 film Blue Canadian Rockies.

The Byrds recording on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Columbia Records, 1968.

Walker wrote this song for Gene Autry’s singing-cowboy films during her Hollywood period. Sixteen years later, the Byrds revived it on the album that brought country music to the rock audience and launched the country-rock movement. Walker’s compositions outlived the contexts she wrote them for because their foundations were strong enough to carry new freight. The recording is the clearest single example of that durability in her catalog.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker

Album by Willie Nelson, Lost Highway Records, March 2006. Thirteen Walker compositions.

Nelson released this tribute album days before Walker’s death in Mexia, Texas, on March 23, 2006. She was eighty-seven, though she had successfully kept her exact age a secret throughout her life. The album is the closest thing the catalog has to a single-volume introduction to Walker’s body of work, performed by an artist who knew her songs from inside the tradition that produced them.

Cited in · Cindy Walker

“Wichita Falls Blues” and “Trinity River Blues”

Composed by Aaron Thibeaux Walker.

Recorded 1929 for Columbia Records. Walker billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone, after the Dallas neighborhood where he lived.

Walker was nineteen years old when he made his first record. The two sides are blues in the older Texas tradition Walker had absorbed from his stepfather Marco Washington of the Dallas String Band and from his teenage years guiding Blind Lemon Jefferson through Deep Ellum. The record sold modestly. Columbia moved on. Walker waited thirteen years before recording again under his own name, by which point he would be playing an electric guitar in Los Angeles and inventing the next thing.

Cited in · “T-Bone Shuffle”

“I Got a Break, Baby” and “Mean Old World”

Composed by Aaron T-Bone Walker.

Recorded 1942 for Capitol Records, at a session led by boogie-woogie pianist Freddie Slack with a quartet drawn from his band. T-Bone Walker, electric guitar and vocals. Released in 1945.

By broad consensus, these two sides are the first electric blues guitar recordings. Before Walker, the guitar sat in the rhythm section, and soloing on the instrument belonged to horn players. Walker moved the guitar to the front of the arrangement and played it with the fluency and rhythmic ease of a jazz soloist. He was doing for blues what his Dallas friend Charlie Christian had done for jazz with Benny Goodman three years earlier, with the same basic technology Bob Dunn and Leon McAuliffe were using in Western Swing bands a few hundred miles to the east.

Cited in · “T-Bone Shuffle”

“Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)”

Composed by Aaron T-Bone Walker.

Recorded 1947 in Los Angeles, California, for Black & White Records.

B. B. King heard this recording shortly after its release and wrote in his autobiography that he became Walker’s disciple from the moment he first heard it, comparing the experience to a religious encounter. The song became one of the most enduring standards in American music, carried forward by Bobby Bland, the Allman Brothers Band, Eric Clapton, and a long line of other performers.

Cited in · “T-Bone Shuffle”

“T-Bone Shuffle”

Composed by Aaron T-Bone Walker.

Recorded November 1947 in Los Angeles, California, for Black & White Records. T-Bone Walker, electric guitar and vocals. George Orendorff, trumpet. Bumps Meyers, tenor saxophone. Willard McDaniels, piano. John W. Davis, bass. Oscar Lee Bradley, drums. Released in 1949 on the Comet label.

Reached the Billboard Top Selling Rhythm and Blues Artists chart in July 1949.

The shuffle rhythm underneath this recording is the same pulse that powered every Western Swing dance hall in Texas and Oklahoma. Walker grew up in Dallas in the same musical ecosystem that produced Bob Wills, Milton Brown, and Charlie Christian, and his playing carries that shared inheritance forward into a different tradition. The song belongs to the blues canon, and Walker belongs in the first rank of blues musicians. The shuffle, the clean electric guitar tone, the horn-driven arrangement, and the absolute commitment to making people move all grew from the same Texas soil that produced Western Swing. The traditions were siblings raised in the same house.

Cited in · “T-Bone Shuffle”

Sylvester Weaver, “Guitar Rag”

Composed by Sylvester Weaver.

Recorded 1923 for OKeh Records. Sylvester Weaver, slide guitar.

Weaver’s “Guitar Rag” was an OKeh recording from 1923. Leon McAuliffe adapted the melody as a teenager in Houston and recorded it in 1936 with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys under the title “Steel Guitar Rag.” The line from Weaver’s recording to the founding of country steel guitar runs straight through that adaptation. McAuliffe acknowledged the source.

Cited in · Leon McAuliffe and the Steel Guitar

Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang

Joe Venuti, jazz violin. Eddie Lang, guitar. Recordings made in the late 1920s and early 1930s for various labels.

Venuti was an Italian American jazz violinist working in New York in the late 1920s when his recordings reached a young classical violinist in Fort Worth named Cecil Brower. Brower studied Venuti’s bowing technique, particularly the off-beat double shuffle that allowed the violin to function as a rhythmic and melodic instrument simultaneously, and brought it to Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies in 1933. The jazz vocabulary that Western Swing fiddlers from Brower forward used to take their improvised solos came directly out of these sessions. Bob Wills, whose own playing remained in the Texas breakdown tradition, was the bandleader who hired the players who could improvise.

Cited in · The Fiddle’s Double Life

Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”

Composed by Chuck Berry, adapted from Bob Wills’ “Ida Red.”

Recorded 1955 for Chess Records in Chicago, Illinois. Chuck Berry, vocals and guitar. Released July 1955. Reached number one on the Billboard R&B chart and number five on the pop chart. Sold one million copies before Christmas 1955.

Berry brought a quickened version of “Ida Red” to Chess Records under the title “Ida May.” Leonard Chess thought the title sounded too rural. Someone in the studio spotted a mascara box on the floor, and the song became “Maybellene.” Rolling Stone later described the recording with the line “Rock and roll guitar starts here.” The guitar had already been plugged in, turned up, and set to a dance beat in Fort Worth dance halls two decades earlier. The recording that carried that idea across the color line and into the popular mainstream was this one.

Cited in · A Musical Taproot

Merle Haggard, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills)

Album by Merle Haggard and the Strangers, Capitol Records, 1970. Featuring surviving members of the Texas Playboys.

Haggard was a child of Oklahoma migrants who carried Bob Wills’ radio broadcasts west to California in the 1930s. By 1970, when he recorded this album, Wills was nearing the end of his career and the original Texas Playboys had been dispersed for years. Haggard reassembled the surviving members in a Capitol studio and made the record that brought Wills back to a generation of country listeners who had grown up on Nashville production and the Bakersfield Sound. The album is one of the most consequential acts of intergenerational stewardship in the genre’s history.

Cited in · A Musical Taproot

Ernie Fields and His Royal Entertainers, “In the Mood”

Arranged by Ernie Fields, from the Joe Garland composition.

Recorded 1959. Ernie Fields, trombone and bandleader. Reached the pop charts.

Ernie Fields led a Tulsa-based territory band that worked the Midwest and Southwest for decades. He was the first Black performer to play Cain’s Ballroom, a booking made possible because Bob Wills threatened to pull out entirely unless Fields was permitted to perform and to be paid fairly. The 1959 chart hit came two decades after the after-hours jam sessions Fields and Wills shared in Tulsa, and it carries forward the documented musical exchanges that crossed the segregation lines the formal social structure was built to maintain.

Cited in · Sawdust and Saturday Network