On That Day at 508 Park Avenue

 June 6-25, 1937: American Record Corporation recording sessions captured some of the most significant country, blues, and western swing of the depression era.  Al Dexter recorded "Honky Tonk Blues," paving the way for Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams and the whole string of honky tonk heroes to follow.  Robert Johnson made what turned out to be his last blues recordings there, meeting his mysterious and untimely end the following year back in his home state Mississippi.  The Chuck Wagon Gang, still active 75 years later, came to do some of their earliest gospel recordings.  

The most representative style of music recorded at these sessions though was played by a collection of ensembles described as "hot string bands" or "hillbilly dance bands" or some similar phrase.  These musicians had no idea they were inventing the style of music that today we call western swing, a label first applied in the 1940s by the west coast western swing band leader, Spade Cooley, that eventually stuck.  The Light Crust Doughboys, the band started by Bob Wills and Milton Brown around 5 years earlier credited with spawning the style, and incidentally, also still active 75 years later, recorded with one of their most dynamic and talented lineups.  "Papa" Sam Cunningham, owner of western swing ground zero Crystal Springs Pavilion, brought one of his house bands, the Crystal Springs Ramblers (the other being the Musical Brownies).  W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel recorded his Hillbilly Boys.  Having been fired from Burrus Mills for financial improprieties, O'Daniel was no longer managing the Light Crust Doughboys, but was preparing a successful campaign for Governor of Texas the next year.  Other prominent early western swing bands from north Texas were the Hi-Flyers and Roy Newman and his Boys.  Austin was four decades from being known as the live music capital, but was represented at the session by the Nite Owls.

It may be the perspective that we bring from the 21st century that would give the impression that Bob Wills and Robert Johnson were the "headliners" of these sessions, since both legends grew mostly long after these sessions.  Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys been playing for three years, first based in Waco, but hailing from Tulsa as of these sessions.  Wills' cohort in the Wills Fiddle Band, Aladdin Laddies, and Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown had died the year before as a result of a car accident, and Brown's band the Musical Brownies, fronted by his brother Derwood, recorded their last session for Decca in February 1937. So these sessions occurred as Bob Wills was emerging to lead western swing through a remarkable dominance of the music scene in Texas and throughout the southwest for decades to come.

June 19, 2012: The 75th anniversary of those recording sessions was commemorated with the production of On That Day "a theatrical spoken word and musical evocation of the world of Dallas on June 19 & 20, 1937 when Robert Johnson, the Crystal Springs Ramblers, and Light Crust Doughboys recorded in a makeshift studio at 508 Park Avenue, Dallas," by Alan Govenar and Akin Babatunde.  The focus on June 19-20 gave it a Robert Johnson center with western swing highlights and made it kind of a Juneteenth celebration event.  The event actually took place across the street at the Stewpot with a Bar-b-que dinner, and then around the corner at the Chapel of First Presbyterian Church since the actual 508 Park Avenue building had been closed for decades, though Eric Clapton did recordings for his tribute album to Robert Johnson there in 2004, "Me and Mr. Johnson."  Several accomplished  Robert Johnson influenced blues artists performed, including the historian Elijah Wald, musicians Aaron Burton, Christian Dozzler, Joel Foy, and Rev K M Williams.  The western swing performances were memorialized by Shoot Low Sheriff and the Light Crust Doughboys - yes, the same band, though with different personnel of course, that recorded at the 1937 sessions.  The chapel has a capacity of around a hundred.  Another room in the campus was set up with a live video feed for around a hundred more attendees.  Admission was free!  It was filmed, so we can hope and expect that Govenar's Documentary Arts will produce the film and it will be available through some venue.  The poster shown here is by Michael Shoaf.

 Before the show I walked around and checked out 508 Park Avenue.  Aside from the anniversary commemoration and the film project, the event was also a promotion of a new outreach program of The Stewpot and the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas that seeks to bring together people of all cultures and faiths through dialogue, education, music, and art.  Opening in 2013, it consists of:

The Museum of Street Culture features permanent and rotating exhibitions that link the growth of blues, jazz, country and other styles of vernacular music with the living history of tramp, hobo, and homeless art.

The Open Art Program provides opportunities for  homeless and at-risk individuals to improve the quality and enjoyment of their lives by developing and expanding  their creativity.

The Community Garden provides individuals with access to a space for plants and herbs.

Check out the 508 Park Avenue program at http://www.508park.org/index.asp.  A couple clips from Eric Clapton's "Me and Mr. Johnson" sessions are on the history tab.  

Here are some pictures from the performance.  Didn't get everyone, unfortunately.  

 This is Reverend K. M. Williams.  He is both an ordained minister of the Holiness Church and an accomplished blues musician who with his band the Blues Train, has opened for Robert Lockwood, Little Milton, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and others.  His performances were inspired and did Robert Johnson justice.

This is Aaron Burton, with members of the ensemble who were part of the performance.  His studied representation of Robert Johnson's style is authentic and engaging.

 Shoot Low Sheriff is a 21st century Western Swing band led by Erik Swanson (left) that performs both classic western swing and original compositions.  They performed some of the songs popularized by Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys from the 1937 sessions.


Below are the Light Crust Doughboys of today led by Art Greenhaw (front and center), with members of Shoot Low Sheriff sitting in.  Art Greenhaw took the lead of Light Crust Doughboys form Marvin Montgomery, who was part of the 1937 Park Avenue recording session version of the Light Crust Doughboys, so there is a pretty close linkage connecting the 75 year versions of the band.  Today's version plays the classic western swing songs in addition to gospel material which has earned the band Grammy nominations in the last decade.  Just behind Greenhaw playing lead acoustic guitar is the newest Doughboy, Dion Pride, yes, Charley Pride's son.

Austin Weekend

Since nothing has been posted here since January, here is something from the family blog, Fortyleven Bostons, that deals mostly with Texas Music.  Oh yeah, it was since January 2010, sheesh!  Well, we'll have to start up blogging about Texas Music again for sure.

Nancy had been recovering from a fractured Sternum for four weeks when spring break came.  We had made arrangements with Claire that Madeleine's spring break visits would be the second weekend starting Thursday night.  Owen had plans as usual, so we decided it looked like an opportunity to get off for a weekend.  Nancy had also had an MRI on her knee that indicated knee replacement surgery would be happening in the near future, so it looked like this would be our opportunity to celebrate our anniversary a couple weeks early.  We now know the surgery is going to be April 4, so we made right call going while the going was good.

I had suggested we go to Austin because I got a notice from the Texas Historical Society that the Bullock Museum of Texas History was kicking off an exhibit of Texas Music History called the "Texas Music Roadtrip."  For the opening of the exhibit, they had enlisted the Texas Tornados for a free concert in the plaza.  The Texas Tornados have revived in the last few years around the legendary musicians Augie Meyer, Flaco Jimenez, and Doug Sahm's son, Shawn.  For the most part, they pay musical tribute to their founders, Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender.

 The down side was that the week also coincided with South by Southwest in Austin, and we were worried about crowds, traffic, and the high prices for hotels and everything else.  Fortunately, we found that we only had to get out to Round Rock to get a very reasonable rate at the Marriot Courtyard.  So we decided we would try to have a fun and musical weekend around the fringes of SXSW.  When we got settled in at Round Rock, we decided to check out the local live music venue, Junior's Icehouse and Grill.  They had a rock band outside in the beer garden and a folk singer inside, whom we sampled in succession.  No trouble with crowds here, but we had a good time.


 One of the things I intended to check out was the "Dangfest" at Threadgills.  We tried to get in there Friday morning for their event called "Roky Erikson's Ice Cream Social," but couldn't find a parking place, so we proceeded to plan B, which was Lucy's Fried Chicken Revival, chosen because John Fullbright was scheduled to perform there.  Lucy's has a great menu for lunch, and we saw a rockabilly-ish band called the Belfurries when we got there - quite enjoyable.  Lucy's just opened last year, but is adorned with memorabilia from Austin's rich musical past, kind of like Threadgills.  They called their event South by South Austin, so it kind of fit our fringe of SXSW motif. 

Then came John Fullbright's set, which was exquisite as expected.  Ian and I had seen him at the Kerrville Folk Festival as an opening act, and he hushed the crowd with his first couple songs.  I read in the newspaper that he is one of the SXSW performers that is really expected to break out in the coming year with his debut album to be released in May.  He played songs I heard him do last year and some new ones and some covers that I hadn't heard before.  Could be Kerrville this year will be the last chance to see him before it is a pretty expensive concert ticket.




 Friday afternoon we drove down to Gruene for another shot at fringe of SXSW fringe live music.  Gruene Hall had free live music Friday afternoon by a band called Grey Hogg, led by a guy named Pat Green, to the left of Nancy below.  He relate how he met the famous Pat Green and they came to an agreement about the use of their names and played a song or two together.

Saturday morning, we went to Threadgills again and were successful this time in finding a parking place because we got there 20 minutes before they opened at 11:00.  The "Dangfest" event for Saturday was the Folk Alliance concerts, with an excellent lineup of musicians.  When they opened, we got a great table for the indoor acts, which began with the DBs.  The DBs were celebrating 30 years as a band and their first time performing together in 17 years.  A lot of their die hard fans showed up to celebrate the event, and they clearly still had what the audience came looking for.  They were from the time shortly after I left Austin, but I could see why they had such an enthusiastic following.  Next up was our second chance to hear John Fullbright, which we were very satisfied to get.  He played several songs we didn't hear the day before.  Then we went out to the beer garden and listened to a band from Nashville called the Farewell Drifters, who played kind of a folk/rock/alt country blend - in other words, not very Nashville-like. 

Then we went to the Texas Music Road Trip opening at the museum.  It was a great collection of memoribelia, both old time and new and everything in between.  It was a little strange to see museum exhibits for people like Beyonce, who are actually still in their prime, but on the whole it had a good balance of the various eras of music going back over the last hundred years.  We toured all that, then went to the cafe on the second floor and sat on the balcony for most of the Texas Tornados concert - picture is our view from there.  

Saturday evening we went back to Junior's Icehouse in Round Rock, just to round out a music filled weekend.  

Armadillo Heroes and Texacali Blues

This past weekend we stopped in at Threadgills North and as it happened, Eddie Wilson was there. We got to talking about blogs - he has a nice one on the Threadgills site:

Supperman Stories

You'll notice the last post was a memorial to his friend Bill Narum from last November - Eddie hasn't gotten back into a blogging frame of mind since then. The other person he talked about in that post is Hank Alrich. Eddie said to watch the Austin American Statesman the next day for a story about the real hero fo the Armadillo World Headquarters. As it turned out, we had already read the article on Austin 360:

Home with the Armadillo

What a great story about the behind the scenes manager that turned the chaotic phenomenon that was the Armadillo World Headquarters into a financially sustainable concern until the landlord saw more lucrative opportunities in Austin's development boom. Eddie Wilson during this time was already working on his plan to resurrect the Historic Threadgills gas station/beer joint as a destination for fine southern cooking and, frequently, excellent live music.

Eddie said that he's going into seclusion the next three months so he can finish his Armadillo World Headquarters "MemNoir." Losing friends from those time may provide additional incentive. As an historical era passes the forty year mark, the first hand remembrances aren't everywhere you look around any more. We look forward to Eddie Wilson's MemNoir as a contribution to those who were there and those who wish they could have been.

There is this amazing book called Lone Star Swing by Scottish writer Duncan McLean in the 1990s that documents the Scotsman's road trip through Texas in search of the original heroes of western swing. It is a very entertaining read, on account of McLean's skill at juxtaposing his passion for the music with his ironic observations about the culture he encountered versus what might have produced the astounding innovative jazz/country/blues/cajun/tejano/and-more fusion some six decades earlier. Bob Wills had been dead for twenty years. He met some better known and some lesser known heroes from the beginning of the western swing era. His encounters with them are purely fascinating. Several were crazy octogenarians that probably hadn't changed much in sixty years, except physically. But now, fifteen years later, many of them have passed on. We feel fortunate to have met them courtesy of McLean and his Lone Star Swing. Would we never have known these heroes of Texas Music without someone from another continent to appreciate what we had ignored or forgotten? Texas Songbook does not want that to happen, so here we are.

Now back to Threadgills, we had the opportunity to enjoy a Bluegrass Brunch this past weekend, after having on several occasions enjoyed the Gospel Brunch at Threadgills South. Now it could be the exceptional quality of the musicians on this Sunday, but we discovered that bluegrass provides a very pleasurable setting for a Sunday brunch. The players were Billy Bright and Wayne "Chojo" Jacques and they have a very nice CD Texacali Blues, which we recommend you pick up if you can track it down. They have a slightly jazz tinged style, which many do these days, thanks to influences introduced by Bela Fleck and David Grisman. There isn't a very strong tradition of bluegrass in Texas music, if you discount Robert Earl Keene's "Bluegrass Widow," which you can go ahead and do. But, since we mentioned western swing, we might point out that in the thirties, that label hadn't been invented - Bob Wills and Milton Brown called the music they invented "hot string band" music. The jazzy "newgrass" music these days could be called "hot string band" and would be sort of a cousin of the early western swing. In any case, thanks to Eddie, Billy, and Wayne and the rest of the Threadgill folk for a great weekend.

Well, we've taken about three weeks off from the Texas Songbook blog as you may have noticed. That may not have inconvenienced you, at least we hope, but it has put us behind schedule considerably, so we thought we'd give you a preview of what you've missed the last three weeks:

January 12 - Joy in Hillbilly Heaven - Cowboy Music Lives - being Tex Ritter's birthday, yes, just a week after the anniversary of his death, but it is very fitting to give him some more attention and talk a bit about cowboy music and Michael Martin Murphy, who inherited his mantle and has ensured that cowboy music will remain vital for the next few decades.

January 12 - Last of the Breed - also being Ray Price's birthday, and since we have already talked about two of his protegees, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson, we should pay attention to this 84 year old honky tonk patriarch.

January 19 - Texas Pearl - Janis Joplin's birthday, so we will pay a little tribute and speculate on what might have been with her and two others from the top ten list of "tragically taken from us in their prime" musicians, Milton Brown and Buddy Holly.

January 22 - Music from the Heart - Rod Kennedy's birthday, and we'll have to pick and choose what to talk about in this post and what to leave out for another time. If we can catch up to here by next week, we may just give a review of his big eightieth birthday celebration at the Paramount in Austin February 2.

Coming Hayride Will Be the Ride of a Lifetime

We are on the cusp of a media innovation that will propel the next creative explosion in Texas music. It may be here now, just under the radar of the general public. Technologies that have become popular in the past decade - music downloads, social networking, streaming video, mobile devices - are waiting to be harnessed in an imaginative way to create a new kind of hayride to delight Texas music listeners.

Hayride? Let's explain...

In the early 1920s commercial radio stations started popping up in the larger cities around the country. Some brave early adoptors bought receivers to find out what was going on out there on the airwaves - their great grandchildren became those first people on your block to by a Blue Ray player or iPhone. It took a while though for the radio station operators to figure out what to broadcast and how to make it work as a business. Amon Carter started WBAP ("We Bring a Program") in Fort Worth in 1922and on January 4, 1923, rolled out a "Hayride" format consisting of "a fiddler, a square dance caller, and ... a familiar mélange of wisecracks, music both lugubrious and jolly, and country costumes" as described by the Handbook of Texas Online. The original star of the show was the fiddler Captain M J Bonner (Captain as in Confederate army Captain, so he was no spring chicken). The format was a hit, and spread to Chicago as the "National Barn Dance," and then to Nashville, where it became the "Grand Ole Opry," which of course is still thriving today. These venues helped shape what became known as country music later on. At the time, record companies called it "hillbilly" or "old time" music.




Here is a Biscuit sketch of M J Bonner from our Texas Songbook artist Randy Biscuit. We will use Biscuit sketches here in the blog from time to time to give the blog some class, but don't be alarmed on account of the name - we'll leave out the really randy Biscuit sketches.

One of Bonner's associates, Eck Robertson, also played fiddle on WBAP in the 20s. He's the unnamed fiddler from Amarillo mentioned in the last post for having made the first ever country record, "Sally Gooden" in 1922. He is given credit for being the first musician to plug his own record on the radio too. By the early 30s, radio had gotten how to work the business part - get money from sponsors for marketing stuff to the people who tune in. A string band named the Aladdin Laddies (for their sponsor who sold lights) became a hit on Fort Worth radio, then they changed sponsor and name to Light Crust Doughboys (for the flour they were selling) and birthed Milton Brown's Brownies and Bob Wills' Texas Playboys and the whole Western Swing movement, with radio programming playing the midwife.

Fast forward to the mid 70s. Willie Nelson had bridged the gulf between hippies and redneck by creating a musical genre known as "progressive country" or "cosmic cowboy" or several even sillier names, and had achieved a wildly enthusiastic regional following. Then a TV program called "Austin City Limits" was launched using Gary P Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" as its theme song and presenting a nicely balanced mix of Texas and national artists, and vastly extended the reach and influence of this brand of Texas music, artistically and geographically. Thirty five years later, ACL is going strong, the longest running music program in TV history. ACL continued as the music morphed from "progressive country" into the next trendy forms and helped Austin in its endeavor to proclaim itself the live music capital of the world. By the 70s, TV had already demonstrated its cultural power by producing the first generation of stay at home couch potatos, and had shown an ability to impact where music was going - as in the Ed Sullivan show acting as the armada carrying the Beatles and the first wave of the British invasion to our shores. But ACL has proved the deeper and more sustaining power of TV programming in the musical world and especially Texas music.

Now days, radio and TV seem passé, so what about the new kind of hayride? Well, just like radio in the hayride days and TV before ACL, there are these new technologies out there that constitute a new media platform. Most of them have been around for a decade or so, but no one has yet formulated the programming that will launch the next wave in Texas music. Is there any reason to doubt that history will repeat itself? Is there any reason to doubt that it will germinate in Texas as it always has, with creative Texas musical content? Well, okay then, we think we have a compelling case, so...

Texas Songbook predicts that a cyber hayride will be unveiled and it will be the big happening in this last decade of the Texas music century. It will propel a new creative musical outpouring of Texas music. Given the high tech credentials, media savy, and abundance of musical creative content in the Austin area, the cyber hayride is probably already underway and will emerge from there. We shall see...

Happy New Year and Welcome to Texas Songbook!

So here we are at the start of a brand new decade. Here is what is special about this one: it is the last decade in a century of recorded Texas music, a century that started with a fiddler from Amarillo making the first country record, an ex-cowboy from Jefferson turned New York light opera singer making the first big country hit, and a blind blues man from the streets of Deep Ellum becoming the best selling blues artist of the time. These recording milestones barely even hint at the amazing decade that was starting in Texas music 90 years ago, but let's talk about 20s music, or as the Texas Songbook and Musical Companion called it "songs to play before a great depression," another time. The important thing is that each of the past nine decades in Texas music has unveiled surprises, wonders, great stories, and most of all history making music. We need expect any less of the present one.

The Texas Songbook and Musical Companion celebrates the treasures of Texas music past and present in equal measure. "These are the good old days" of Texas music, Eddie Wilson blogs as he chronicles his own golden age of the Armadillo World Headquarters in the 1970s, and we agree, so they are. Never have the opportunities and potential been greater to produce and enjoy great music in greater variety than now. But without the rich legacy of the past nine decades, this would not be so.

But enough pontificating...

In Fort Worth, this decade was rung in on the "Eve before New Year's Eve" at Bass Hall by Robert Earl King, Jr. Keen delivered the expected crowd pleasing ballads and earned approving reviews in the Fort Worth Star Telegram and from Channel 8's art critic Gary Cogill, who said how great it was to hear some real, good, Texas music. Keen's music is a collection of stories from various Texas slices of life, stories that are better with each re-singing, and the audience knows them well enough to join in more often than not.

Also in Fort Worth, on January 2, 1936, Roger Miller was born. He was a member of the legendary Cherokee Cowboys backing up Ray Price. (They were Hank Williams band, the Drifting Cowboys, till his death, when Ray Price took them under his wing.) He wrote Price's hit "Invitation to the Blues" and became one of Nashville's most prized songwriters hitting his peak in the 1960s with his own hits such as "Kansas City Star" and "King of the Road." His most endearing songs were novelty items which ranged from quirky to wacky.

Also on January 2 in 1974, Tex Ritter died in Nashville. Ritter was a protege of the great music historian John Lomax and star of over sixty "B" westerns of the 30s and 40s. The unique thing about Ritter as a movie singing cowboy is that he always viewed his films as a vehicle to expose the authentic cowboy music rather than the manufactured Hollywood variety. Ritter provided Bob Wills his first movie opportunity in Take Me Back to Oklahoma in 1940. He became best known for his hits "Rye Whiskey," "Boll Weevel," and "High Noon."

Keen, Miller, and Ritter used widely diverse styles to make superb Texas music, but they do have a common link - to Willie Nelson. Miller and Nelson were part of Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys together, and they were also in Nashville together in the sixties as two of country music's elite songwriters. Ritter appeared in Nelson's Dripping Springs Reunion, the precursor to the Willie Nelson picnics, in 1972, along with country music legends Ernest Tubb and Roy Acuff and many others. Keen attended Willie Nelson's second Fourth of July Picnic in 1974, where he was able to meet Nelson as a result of his car being one of 40 burned up a in a grass fire in the parking lot. Nelson unfortunately had to cut the meeting short because he was "jamming with Leon Russell," as hilariously told by Keen on his Live No.2 Dinner CD on the "Road Goes On Forever Intro."

We will return to these three in future posts for a Keen-Miller-Ritter road trip and play list.

Here is the Robert Earl Keen site: http://www.robertearlkeen.com/

Roger Miller's site is: http://www.rogermiller.com/

Tex Ritter's museum site is: http://www.carthagetexas.com/HallofFame/museum.htm