[Harp-L] Help find Western swing player

[Arthur Jennings]

According to Wikipedia,

"Western swing music 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. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, 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.
The movement was an outgrowth of jazz. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing; and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound. 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. Additionally, although popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively."


> On Sep 27, 2022, at 4:56 PM, Rick Dempster <rickdempster33 at xxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 27 Sep 2022, 23:23 Slim Heilpern, <slim at xxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> Here's the thing, it's all about what you do with it.
>> 
>> For instance, accordion was prominent in the Tex Williams and Spade Cooley
>> western swing bands and Jeff Taylor of The Time Jumpers carries on that
>> tradition beautifully (great player!). I can certainly see how a harmonica
>> player could fill that stylistic slot, especially on chromatic, if one had
>> the chops.
>> 
>> - Slim
> 
> 
>> 
> Define "western swing". Until the post war era, it wasn't even  known as
> that. The term originally meant outfits like Basie, et al, from Kansas
> City. How's about "Bluegrass bassoon"?
> RD
> 
>> 
>>