[78-L] Western swing festival on WKCR

[Cary Ginell]

Precede this statement with a Jack Benny sigh and a "Well..." I can toot my own horn and modestly say, read my book, "Milton Brown & the Founding of Western Swing." It's based strictly on my own research, but I think you'll find it makes more sense than Townsend's rant about Bob Wills pulling western swing out of the ether and that he brought "frontier blues" to country music. Wills played in medicine shows when he was young and learned much of his early non-traditional material from Bessie Smith and Emmett Miller. The rest he got from Milton Brown, like nearly everyone else.

Cary Ginell

> Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:12:58 -0400
> From: jeffsultanof at gmail.com
> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
> Subject: Re: [78-L] Western swing festival on WKCR
> 
> Cary,
> 
> With that said, are there any books that you recommend that are more
> balanced with regard to this genre of music? I love it, but don't know as
> much as I'd like to know.
> 
> Jeff Sultanof
> 
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Cary Ginell <soundthink at live.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Uh, oh. I see that Charles R. Townsend, the chief rah-rah guy for Bob
> > Wills, will have an hour on the third day of the festival to tout his "Bob
> > Wills started it all" spiel. I wonder if his thoughts have changed in the 35
> > years since his Wills-aggrandizing book came out. It did as much harm to the
> > legacy of western swing as Ken Burns did to jazz with its revisionist,
> > single-sided history. It will be interesting listening.
> >
> > Cary Ginell
> >
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