Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present by Jean A. Boyd (review)

Musicologist Jean A. Boyd has, for the past two decades or more, conducted interviews with dozens of western swing musicians and published three monographs documenting the history of the genre and exploring western swing's jazz roots: The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (University of Texas Press, 1998), We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills (University of Texas Press, 2003), and, most recently, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present (Texas Tech University Press, 2012). In Dance All Night, Boyd offers an encyclopedic study of forty-one western swing bands spanning the genre's eight-decade history in Texas and Oklahoma. In so doing, she challenges the historical dominance of the Milton Brown and Bob Wills bands by drawing much-needed attention to the lesser-known regional bands that dominated local radio, dance halls, and festival stages. Boyd divides the genre's history in the region into two epochs: a pre-1945 golden age in which local and regional bands thrived and a post-World War II era in which the dance hall and festival scenes were dominated by revivalists who preserved the music of the earlier generation and crossover acts who brought jazz, mainstream country, and rock and roll into the genre. In her discussion of the golden age, Boyd organizes the study geographically, providing short entries on bands in North, Central, South, and West Texas and in Oklahoma, while the postwar era is divided into two chapters exploring crossover and revivalist groups, respectively. Within each chapter, Boyd presents brief biographical and musical portraits of key bands and bandleaders, each drawing upon her extensive oral history research, musical analysis, and transcriptions of reissued and commercially available recordings.

Readers will, no doubt, find Dance All Night to be a valuable resource when seeking information on important Texas and Oklahoma western swing bands. The structure of the book, however, offers little room for broader historical or musical contextualization. Brief introductions and conclusions in each chapter and a broad introduction to the book as a whole provide a backdrop for individual case studies, but a more thorough integration of these case studies may have made it easier for readers to draw connections between bands and between western swing and the broader popular music landscape. Moreover, one of the greatest strengths of Boyd's study, the musical transcriptions, is underutilized, in large part because they are located in a somewhat awkwardly placed third section. Although the transcriptions offered here can provide valuable information pertaining to the improvisational approaches of many of the musicians under examination, Boyd offers little detail in her musical analysis, leaving the traces of musical innovation and influence largely unexamined.

Despite these shortcomings, Boyd has made an important contribution to the western swing literature that will certainly prove useful to scholars, fans, and practicing musicians alike. Written in an accessible tone, the text is approachable, and Boyd's use of extended quotations from oral histories skillfully cedes authority to western swing practitioners. Moreover, musicians will appreciate Boyd's transcriptions, which stand as a valuable ancillary to the original source recordings, despite occasional typesetting errors that make them difficult to read. An ambitious project, Boyd's Dance All Night is essential reading for anyone interested in western swing, musical hybridity, and Texas dance hall culture.