Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 2

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys | Format: MP3 Download

Product Details

• Original Release Date: April 19, 2005
• Label: Rhino
• Copyright: 2005 Warner Stategic Marketing
• Genres:
• ASIN: B00123NX1M
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #121,354 Paid in MP3 Albums (See Top 100 Paid in MP3 Albums)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this is the real deal made for anyone with ears., September 8, 2003

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 2 (Audio CD)

Without getting into the history: this is just good music suitable for anyone at any time with ears.
This is the real deal in regard to Western Swing. The Tiffany recordings were done for the Tiffany Furniture Company of Oakland in the period after WWII. They were sold to radio stations as music to play over the air along with or without commercials for the furniture company. This was done durign a time when playing normal commercial records on the radio was a rare or new thing.
If you look on the discography you will find there were more than a hundred of recordings done by Wills over the years for this operations. So even if Rounder has put out seven or eight volumes of this music, they are still just offering the best of the collection. These were rare treats among the collectors. I remember first hearing about them around 1977 when a friend of mine who lived in NYC mentioned he knew someone in Indiana who had taped copies of these records. I remember how I treated the tape he made me like a golden jewel, carrying it with myself personally when I moved.
People I know who actually heard the Texas Playboys play during the 1930s and 1940s say these recording say this is the way the Playboys sounded at their best live. This is the repertoire. Since it was officially a non-commercial recording, they recording all the songs they would play at live dates, and not just songs they recorded which were usually filtered by the Columbia, MGM, and MCA operation to make sure they recorded songs that had the right publishing andwere charting for others. This recording is atypical of the Tiffany recordings in that there are no non-Western Swing pop hits and I think almost every tune here was actually recorded on the Playboys' Columbia Records.
On other Tiffany recordings you can hear the Playboys make wonderful music on Nat King Cole's Straighten up and Fly Right, Basie's Swing Blues, Ellington's Take the A Train, Dinah Shore's Sentimental Journey, and even a gret instrumental on the theme from the movie Mission to Moscow!
The quality isn't always as good as the Columbia and MGM sides, but that is because they simply recorded all day whenever the tour schedule took the Playboys into San Fransisco, cutting tunes without rehearsals, on the first take, cutting five or six or seven sides in a day, as opposed to the standard recording studio concept of 4 sides in three hours, which was never met. However, on a number of these tunes they really cut lose in instrumentals they way they don't on the commercial disks. If you love the repartee between Bob and the Band, you get a lot more of that on these tunes.
What these records represent for the history of Western Swing is priceless. The guitar trio sound grew out of the duos that Eldon Shamblin and Leon MacAufliffe did with Wills before WWII. When Jimmy Wyble (who went on to be one of the key Jazz guitarists of the 1950s and 1960s) and Cameron Hill came in during the War and were joined by Noel Boggs, that sound was perfected. On these sides we hear it bluesier and hotter played by Junior Barnard or Eldon on guitar, Tiny Moore on Mandolin, and Boggs or Herbie Remington on steel guitar. You don't get as much of this on the contemporary Columbia sounds, although you did on the first MGM sides there was a revival.
It's interesting people are picking on Cherokee Maid claiming it's not contemporary. Merle Haggard cut an exact reproduction of it using members of the playboys around 1980 (of course Merle was using former playboy Tiny Moore as a regular member of his band and using Eldon and Johnny Gimble in his regular band alot then too). It went right to number one on the country Charts and stayed there about a month. Not contemporary?
This isn't history. Its laid back jazz bluesy music, played for fun.
Listen to it

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect Introduction to Western Swing, October 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 2 (Audio CD)

These discs were made to sell to radio stations in the 1940s and the playing is livelier, more fun, and jazzier than the studio versions of these Bob Wills classics. The Piano is awesome, the Steel Guitar is awesome, the fiddle is awesome. AWWWWWWWWW YEAHHH! In all reality this may be the best Western Swing disc in existance. Listen to this and catch yourself singing "Daddy's little Fatty" and "I'm too young to marry" as you walk around the rest of the day. Buy this and be happy!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now I know what Waylon meant when he sang "Bob Wills is King, April 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 2 (Audio CD)

I wasn't really familiar with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys before I heard this C.D. Oh, I had heard all about them, but never actually heard them. This is a fun album, and I guess that's the best way to describe Will's music in one word-- "fun". With Tommy Duncan's lead vocals, and Will's whooping like a wild-man in the foreground, it is absurd, and funny. "AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!!!!", Wills bellows like a musical W.C. Fields! I was familiar with a few of the songs on this collection, but not these renditions. "Right or Wrong" is on this C.D., and I know that one through George Strait, who had a hit with it in the early eighties. Same goes with "Cherokee Maiden", which Merle Haggard brought to number one on the charts in 1976, the widely recorded "Stay a Little Longer", which I was familiar with since I was in the kindergarten, and "Faded Love", which I've heard from Patsy Cline, Ray Price, and Willie Nelson, and others. "Take Me Back to Tulsa" is a song that I have heard before, as well. Buy the record. It'll expose you to real Western Swing, with the whoops, the ad-libbing, the muted trumpets, and the fiddles. Great stuff!!!!