Journal
A Journal of Western Swing History and Culture
Original research, artist monographs, close readings, and cultural histories devoted to the music, people, and places that shaped Western Swing.
Latest
Most Recent Publication“San Antonio Rose”
In 1938, Bob Wills improvised a melody in a Dallas recording studio from the reverse bridge of an older song, then did not have a name for it. What happened next is American music history.
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Organized by Editorial TypeClose Readings
Focused studies of a single recording, song, or performance moment, read closely and placed in historical context.
Artist Monographs
Long-form essays on the musicians, arrangers, and writers whose work formed the core of the music.
Cultural Histories
Essays on radio, migration, dance halls, labor, and regional culture as the larger world that made Western Swing possible.
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“San Antonio Rose”
Bob Wills’s 1938 studio improvisation, the reverse bridge of “Spanish Two Step,” and the making of one of the best-known recordings in American music.
Artist Monographs
Leon McAuliffe and the Steel Guitar
How an eighteen-year-old from Houston built a vocabulary for an instrument that had no settled place in the music.
Milton Brown: The Founder-to-Be
Milton Brown died at thirty-two, having already helped invent the music that would continue after him.
Cindy Walker: The Architect of Western Swing’s Enduring Voice
Cindy Walker wrote more than 650 songs across five decades and helped define the music’s enduring lyrical vocabulary.
Cultural Histories
The Fiddle’s Double Life
Bob Wills was the music’s best-known fiddler. The sound that made him famous came from the players around him.
Radio and the Geography of Taste
KVOO, WBAP, and the broadcast infrastructure that carried Western Swing across the Southwest and beyond.
Sawdust and Saturday Night
The Texas dance hall as a social world, a physical space, and a crucial setting for the emergence of the music.
Western Swing as a Cultural Indicator
Migration, identity, and the evolution of music in the American Southwest.