Western swing

This article is about the musical subgenre. For the dance, see Lindy Hop. For other uses, see West Coast Swing.

Western swing
Stylistic origins
Cultural origins1920s–1930s, Southwestern United States
Derivative forms
Fusion genres

Western swing is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands.[1][2] It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat,[3][4] which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.[5]

The movement was an outgrowth of jazz.[6][7][8] The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing;[9] and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar.[10] The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound.[11] Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.

Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands, even fully orchestrated bands, vocals, and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead, though like popular horn-led bands that arranged and scored their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively.[12]

According to country singer Merle Travis, "Western swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have Western swing."[13]

  1. ^ Brink, Western Swing, p. 550
  2. ^ Logsdon, "Folk Songs", p. 299.
  3. ^ Townsend, San Antonio Rose, p. 38.
  4. ^ Malone, Stars of Country Music, p. 170.
  5. ^ Stomping the Blues. Albert Murray. Da Capo Press. 2000. page 109, 110. ISBN 978-0-252-02211-1, ISBN 0-252-06508-5
  6. ^ Boyd, Jazz of the Southwest, p. ix-x.
  7. ^ Townsend, San Antonio Rose, p. 63: "Without exception, every former member of Wills's band interviewed for this study concluded, as Wills himself did, that what they were playing was always closer in music, lyrics, and style to jazz and swing that any other genre."
  8. ^ Price, "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing", p. 81.
  9. ^ Price, "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing", p. 82.
  10. ^ Coffey, Merl Lindsay and His Oklahoma Nite Riders, pp. 3-4.
  11. ^ Wolff, Country Music, "Big Balls in Cowtown: Western Swing From Fort Worth to Fresno", p. 71.
  12. ^ Boyd, "Western Swing", p. 208.
  13. ^ "Merle Travis on 'Western Swing'". JEMF Quarterly. 16 (57): 215–216. Spring 1980. Retrieved April 6, 2017.