Northern Swing?

In 1878, a Texas cattleman named Hank Campbell took a herd of longhorn cattle to Chicago and sold them for a handsome profit. He then returned to Texas to establish a ranch and bought 8,000 head of cattle. In 1882 his business partner, A B Britton, came to Scotland in pursuit of venture capital, and in Dundee he succeeded in arousing the interest of a group of businessmen who were eager to invest their funds in American mines, lumber, land or cattle. Led by several Dundee merchants, the Matador Land and Cattle Company Limited was set up.
In 1890 Murdo MacKenzie became the manager of the Matador. Later called by Theodore Roosevelt “the most influential of American cattlemen,” MacKenzie, originally from Tain, never wore a gun or allowed his cowboys to drink but found the time to play his fiddle for dances. Incidentally, other prominent Scots in those pioneering days included John Clay, from Berwickshire, who was a leading cattle baron, as was the half-Scot, half Cherokee trader Jesse Chisholm, whose name was given to the Chisholm Cattle Trail in Texas in 1867.
It seemed perfectly natural for those Scots drovers who had endured the hardships of taking their cattle or sheep from the Western Isles and through the Sma’ Glen to the trysts at Crieff or Falkirk to head for a new life in the sun, and it was also natural for them to take their songs. Examples of this are plentiful: General George Armstrong Custer’s mother was a Scot and his favourite songs were Annie Laurie and The Girl I Left Behind Me. That fine cowboy ballad The Railroad Corral was originally set to the tune of Bonnie Dundee then to the north-east whaling song Fareweel to Tarwathie and there’s a song called Mo Shoraidh Leis a Coigach or Farewell to Coigach, written in Montana in the early twentieth century by Murdo MacLean, one of many Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who came to the American West. If you add this musical invasion of cattle country by the Scots to similar invasions by the Irish, Welsh, English, Scandinavian, Spanish and other influences, it isn’t difficult to see how the music went into a huge melting pot.
Bob Wills hated the hillbilly image associated with country music and set out to establish a sound that reflected a dignified South, with flowing fiddles and classy arrangements. The Texas Playboys performed rags, breakdowns, Dixieland tunes and the blues and usually appeared in cowboy attire with Wills easily recognisable in his trademark cowboy hat, cigar, and playing fiddle or conducting the band with his bow.
The earliest incarnations of the group included trumpets and saxophones and occasionally there were female vocalists in the style of the Andrews Sisters. No matter how many players were onstage, it was a decidedly different sound from any other in country music, with electrified steel guitar, extra fiddles, electric mandolin and even drums. With a foundation like this, the emergence of rock and roll was only an inevitable matter of time.
Music that stands still is in permanent danger of extinction and the band wrote, learned and arranged new songs in the midst of their almost constant travelling and performing from the 1930s to the 1950s. Bob wrote quite a few himself including the classics Faded Love and San Antonio Rose, which would literally be heard all over the world by 1969 when the Apollo 12 astronauts sang it, looking back at the earth from a lunar orbit, and he always incorporated into his set pop tunes by the likes of Cole Porter, the jazz of W C Handy and traditional folk songs by such as Woody Guthrie.
It’s very much music of its era, conveying a sense of excitement, enjoyment and discovery but at the same time acknowledging its debt to all that went before. Here’s to the memory of Bob Wills (1905-1975).