Customer Reviews

Tiffany 1

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Incidentally, if you like the Hot Club of Cowtown, this is the period of Bob Wills music that most of their Western Swing tunes seek to replicate. Elana really has studied the great fiddling of Jim Joe Holly and Louis Tierny on these records, and Whit has really listened to the electric mandolin playing of Tiny Moore as well as the guitar playing of Junior Bernard and Eldon Shamblin.

The Tiffanies are extra special. I can remember in the 1970s, when a friend of a friend of a friend who had some of the original transcriptions made some copies for me, and I carried them around like precious family heirlooms when I moved, never packed but always in my coat pockets. The transcriptions were made to be played on radio stations, at a time when Radio Stations didn't normally play regular records. They were all done quickly whenever the band was in the Oakland-San Fransisco area over the years of the mid 1940s.

People I know who heard the Texas Playboys live in the 1940s and 1950s say these recordings come closer to what the band actually sounded like compared to their releases on Columbia and later MGM. For one thing, they weren't force to record mostly original songs, but could sample a broad repertoire. This record contains their totally swinging though somewhat weird rendition of the theme to the WWII movie snow job of Stalin "Mission to Moscow," Nat King Cole's Straighten Up and Fly Right, and Basie's Jumpin' at the Woodside. One of the good things about the Tiffanies, is that Will recorded all of his old recordings and you get to hear them with new personnel.

My favorite is a tune called "Blackout Blues" which Wills recorded around 1940 as "Honey What You Gonna Do." Check it out on one of Columbia's anthology. There is some nice twin guitar playing on that one by Eldon Shamblin and Leon MacAuliffe. On this postwar Tiffany cut, the blues are funkier, more lowdown and dirty. Tommy sings it dirtier than he did in 1940. He has the superb soloists of Tiny Moore on the Mandolin and Lester Barnard Junior on Guitar to make this a special recording.

On all of these cuts, even the Western Swing standards like Lone Star Rag or the Girl I Left Behind Me (which Wills had recorded just before the war as a red hot big band side with hot solos by Tubby Lewis on trumpet and Wayne Johnson on Tenor Sax) or 1910s and 1920s sentimental standards like Sweet Jennie Lee and Nobody's Sweetheart, Wills' Playboys stay hot and heavy. There is none of the sweet swing, "businessman's bounce" that the Hollywood based Western swing contingent of the 1940s typified by Spade Cooley and Hank Penny. This is all down and dirty, bluesy, jazzy, music played hard with the combined abandon of Dixieland Jazz, West Texas Ranch Dance, and swing blues.

This and all the other Tiffanies are so great, you need them all!

As a life-long Bob Wills fan, and the daughter of a Bob Wills super-fan, I've listened to almost every version of his recordings. The Tiffancy Transcriptions are excellent, and the sound quality cannot be better. This is a really enjoyable start to a great collection.

Years ago I read an article reviewing volume 1 of "The Tiffany Transcriptions" in which the author said: "I have yet to meet someone who, after hearing Wills' music, did not like it." Though this is an obvious hyperbole, you would have to be pretty downcast to not like this stuff. It's as uplifting as a shot of caffeine or a good kick in the pants.

This is not purely "country" music, though it has some elements of country music in it. The cover art with bucking broncos, cowboy hats and lasso font betrays the rich music inside. True, the band uses a lapsteel, a banjo, and fiddle is omnipresent. Nonetheless, the music is more a mixture of ska, jazz, blues, and swing than it is purely "country." The guitar solos sound more out of jazz than Willie Nelson, and there are trumpet, saxophone, and piano solos. In it's day this music would not have been called "country." In today's parlance "Country Swing" would probably be the most fitting description. Sometimes the sound resembles Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, other times it sounds right out of Django Reinhardt (whose band also used fiddle and banjo with great effect).

Since these recordings were made live in a radio studio in the mid 1940s there is an energy there that is absent on a lot of today's recordings that subscribe to the "let's compartmentalize all of the instruments and destroy their acoustic interaction" recording philosophy. The band members interact with one another, and there is undeniable acoustic interaction between the live instruments. One band member adds running commentary through whoops, hollers (which reminded my finacé of "Mr.Hanky" from South Park) and banter that sometimes cracks up the lead singer (who pleads on one track "You're killin' me!"). Energy is not lacking.

The lyrics are also clearly from another time. They sometimes show a heightened sense of absurdist or Dr. Seussian-type humor. Here are the first lines of "The Girl I Left Behind Me":

I wrote her a letter when I should've known better
And asked her to be my wife
Along come a feller and he hit me on the smeller
And it almost took my life

Truly, as is said, "they" don't write lyrics like this anymore.

Anyone interested in just plain good music played by incredible musicians in a fun atmosphere will love this CD. Let go and enjoy.

THERE ARE NINE VOLUMES OF CD'S OF BOB WILLS' AND THE TEXAS PLAYBOYS "TIFFANY TRANSCRIPTIONS" RECORDED IN THE LATE 40'S EARLY 50'S WHICH WERE NOT RELEASED AS BOB WILLS RECORDS AT THE TIME, I THINK THEY WERE RECORDED TO BE BROADCAST ON RADIO PROGRAMS. I HAVE ABOUT SIX OR SEVEN OF THESE, GET THEM ALL IF YOU CAN FIND THEM ANYMORE. THESE ARE MY FAVORITE BOB WILLS RECORDINGS, BETTER THAN ANYTHING THEY LAID DOWN ON WAX, THESE RECORDINGS SEEM TO SWING MORE THAN THOSE OLD 78'S. BOB WILLS AND THE TEXAS PALYBOYS WERE ONE OF THE FIRST BANDS TO EMPLOY THE USE OF ELECTRIC GUITAR (WITH A BIG BAND!) AND AMPLIFICATION, AND FREQUENTLY USED TWIN GUITARS PLAYING THE MELODY, THEY WERE LIGHT YEARS AHAEAD OF THEIR TIME. NOT QUITE JAZZ, NOT QUITE COUNTRY, A LITTLE BIT OF BOTH, BUT DIFFERENT FROM EACH OF THEM.