Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas

Chapter 12. The Contemporaries of Marvin Montgomery: Western Swing, Texas Fiddling, and the Big “D” Jamboree

The Contemporaries of Marvin Montgomery Western Swing, Texas Fiddling, and the Big “D” Jamboree S mokey Montgomery’s mainstay band, the Light Crust Doughboys , from its earliest incarnation as the Wills Fiddle Band, was the incubator of the music that came to be called Western swing.1 Many, notably including Wills biographer Charles R. Townsend, give Bob Wills virtually all of the credit for establishing the genre when he left the Doughboys and founded the Texas Playboys. Others, such as Milton Brown biographer Cary Ginell, say that Brown’s post-Doughboys band, the Musical Brownies, was the first Western swing group and that Brown’s contributions have been overlooked because of his early death as the result of a 1936 car crash. At any rate, when Brown died, the music that he and Wills played had not yet been labeled “Western swing.” At the time, the term referred to the African American music of the Southwest that fueled the raucous nightlife of politically corrupt Kansas City. The Carolina Cotton Pickers’ 1937 recording of “Moten Swing,” popularized by the seminal Kansas City bandleader Benny Moten, was called “Western (Moten) Swing.” Texas-born musician Henry “Buster” Smith, who began his career in Deep Ellum and went on to play with Count Basie and to mentor Charlie Parker, said years later while ruminating on his success as an arranger, “Several cats wanted me to do some arrangements for them. Out of all them great arrangers, they thought I had somethin’ special—that Western swing.”2 Within a few years, however, “Western swing” had come to mean the highly eclectic music of white bandleaders that incorporated elements of country, jazz, popular music, and what Wills called “the Spanish tinge.” Brown had experimented briefly with horns, but others, such as Wills and Oklahoma-born California bandleader Spade Cooley, included large horn sections and, in Cooley’s case, even a harp. The transition in meaning of “Western swing” seems to have taken place in the early 1940s. In April 1942 a white Los Angeles–area publication, the C h A p t e r 12 177 Contemporaries of Marvin Montgomery Wilmington Press, ran a series of ads for local performances by an unnamed “Western swing orchestra” playing a “square dance.” A few months later disc jockey Al Jarvis dubbed Cooley the “King of Western Swing,”3 which was also the title of a short 1945 Warner Brothers film featuring Cooley and his band. However complex and multilayered it became, Western swing had its roots in the fiddle music brought by settlers from the Appalachian region of the southeastern United States.4 The early fiddlers who were part of this migration were exposed not only to African American music but also to the traditions of Mexicans and to those of Germans, Bohemians, and other Central Europeans who brought polkas, schottisches, and waltzes. Moreover , in southeast Texas, the influences of Cajun French and Creole cultures were prominent. It is known from oral accounts that the tradition of fiddling was fairly widespread among rural African Americans in Texas during the nineteenth century. A white fiddler who requested anonymity when interviewed at a fiddle contest in Hallettsville, Texas, in 1984 explained that “in the 1800s the fiddle was considered the devil’s instrument, and Roy Newman and His Boys, Dallas, ca. 1930s. Courtesy of Walker Kirkes. 178 C h A p t e r 1 2 only blacks could play the instrument because it was believed they didn’t have any soul.” The string and fiddle band traditions were, to some extent, carried on by African American musicians such as Coley Jones in Dallas and John T. Samples in Sweetwater, in West Texas. While Samples never recorded with his band, it is evident from Jones’s recordings that black and white musicians drew from a shared repertoire. The origin of these tunes is unknown, but it is clear that the musicians were very much aware of each other, either through recordings or from simply hearing each other perform on the streets or on rare occasions playing together in sessions such as those in which Montgomery took part at the Jim Hotel in Fort Worth. The improvisation that is a key element of Western swing evolved from the Texas style of fiddling, characterized by long bow strokes and intricately fingered and rhythmically varied interpretations of traditional tunes. In the 1920s, however, while this style was developing, some performers still...