![]() A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: ![]() You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we’ve already seen in the Western Swing genre - that’s still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith: And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something.īut as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. It’s music that combined country music instruments - guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily - with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. If you haven’t heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. Now, this is probably the correct balance - early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records - but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. And yet so far we’ve only looked at one country and western star - Bob Wills, back in episode three. While that’s very far from being the actual truth, we’ve also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. The cliche - which we’ve already established as being very wrong - is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value.Īnd I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. Williams’ recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott’s is generally considered the best. ![]() Everything should be back to normal by next episode.Īs always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. ![]() Of course, he didn’t write that one, just recorded a cover version of it.įirst, a brief apology - this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I list “Lovesick Blues” among the songs Williams wrote. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on January 7, 2019
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