Customer Reviews

Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 2

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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

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!

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!!!!

If you're not a Bob Wills fan now, you will be after listening to this CD. Wills and his Texas Playboys were one of the first country swing bands that I heard and I knew right away that this was the music I had been looking for all my life. From the Indian style drums of "Cherokee Maiden" to his blues style of "Right or wrong" Bob Wills proves why he has been called the "King of Western Swing." After listening to this CD, you'll know why the carefree "holler" of Bob Wills will go down in history.

I've never been much of a country music fan, and my musical upbringing was antithetical to it. Someone I knew used to refer to country music as "chunk and puke" music to the approbation of all. Of course there is bad music in every genre (there's some appalling rock/pop out there that is just as bad as the worst country music), but excusing an entire genre is almost always a sign of narrow-mindedness, and if you're uptight about country music you would likely pass right over Bob Wills, which would be a great misfortune for any music lover.

It should be said outright that the music on this CD is not pure "country", but today's musical labeling and categorizing systems would put it there (and you will find Bob Wills in the "Country" section of music stores), probably due to the cowboy hats, the steel guitar, and whooping of the band. The truth is that this is rich music combining country, jazz and swing. The musicianship and singing are top notch. "Country Swing" would probably be the most forgiving modern label.

This CD collects the "popular songs" that were played during the Tiffany sessions of the mid-forties. However, the CD booklet doesn't explain what methodology was used to determine what a "popular" a song is (are these "hits" or "most requested" or "most played" or "most bought"???). The CD is subtitled "Best of the Tiffanys" and it's unclear what this means. Nonetheless, the music is what's important here, even if the cover design scares you off (and there's nothing subtle about the cover of this CD).

There are amazing songs here, and it's easy to think that some of these songs were "hits" in their day. "Take Me Back To Tulsa", "Ida Red" and "San Antonio Rose" are obvious standouts. The music is upbeat, fun, and exhilarating. One track "Maiden's Prayer" is slow and melodically beautiful with it's harmonizing multiple fiddles. The guitar solos are searing jazz and there are trumpet solos that at first almost sound out of place (but when you realize that this is not just "country" music, you also realize that they're right in place).

There are of course anachronisms since this music was made over sixty years ago. "Cherokee Maiden" would not fly in today's market with it's "tribal" drumming, etc. Some of the lyrics are also right out of a different time (because, well... they are). "Take Me Back To Tulsa" includes these lines:

Little bee sucks the blossom
The big bee gets the honey
Little men raise the cotton
The beer joints get the money

There are not many lyrics like this still around, for better or worse depending on your point of view.

If you're looking to expand your musical horizons (on an enjoyment or a historical level), this CD and/or Volume 1 of the Tiffany Transcriptions are good places to start.

Bob Wills set the stage for Western Swing, there were others but Wills was the one who really seemed to stand out above all others, someone once told me that he had during his time over 500 different people in his bands, it was either his way or the high way, I was told that one day he just told Tommy Duncan he didn't need him anymore and that was it. I think him and Ernest had a lot in common, although Ernest usually would humble himself and ask his boys back. Others like them would hold grudges for years, like Bill Monroe (BUT) they each played a essential part in the music of their time. Wish there were some more like them TODAY, instead of the junk that's out there now!!!!

This CD contains 5 of the best country/western songs ever written: Take Me Back to Tulsa, Faded Love, Cherokee Maiden, Maiden's Prayer and San Antonio Rose. Unfortunately, they were recorded in 1946 and are somewhat lacking by today's standards.

The instrumentation is fine but the singing will send cold chills down your spine if you are not familiar with Bob Wills' style. Just when you think to yourself that this doesn't sound so bad, a noise like a tomcat just got his genitalia caught in a bicycle sprocket wheel will emanate from the song you are listening to. This probably sounded pretty hot in 1946 but it just don't do it today (for me at least)

I would stay away from these Tiffany Transcriptions and buy some newer versions of these songs by the Texas Playboys or some of the tribute CDs' by other artists.