[Dixielandjazz] Country & Western to Dixieland?

[JimDBB at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/22/03 12:38:58 PM Central Standard Time, 
barbonestreet at earthlink.net writes:


> Charlie Hooks wrote (that he could integrate Country Western, and
> Dixieland)
> 
> I could, and it wouldn't be hard at all.  Think: "San Antonio Rose" as a
> classic C&W that is easily dixiefyable (is that a word?  It should be.).
> All you need is the properly phrased lead line (think Wild Bill
> Davison--he
> could dixify damn near anything, easily SAR) PLUS a trombone player who
> knows his job.  Like Beebe, for instance.  Put Billy Kyle on piano and
> you wouldn't even need Arvell on bass, although he would certainly help.
> 
> Come to think of it, just imagine Louis' band playing ANY tune--Trummy
> and Louis, Barrett and Arvell and Billy, and take your choice of
> clarinet players--those guys could take "Pomp and Circumstance" and
> swing the hell of it--much less "Country Roads."  And any audience would
> love it, even the C&W audience, although (duh...) they wouldn't know
> why.
> 
> List mates:
> 
> I would think Charlie and Jim Beebe et al could do it easily also,
> though he is too modest to say so. ;-). Barbone Street crosses over all
> the time with songs like "Sioux City Sue" etc. And certainly a lot of
> "Western Swing" is Dixieland in disguise, no?

   Charlie Hooks has negleted to mention that he and I played some country 
music traveling about with Gary Miller's Celbration Road Show.
We did a lot of school shows and found that the only way we could do country 
songs for kids ( and for our night club audiences as well) was to do 
parodies.  So we did the 'Lyin' Time parody on 'Cryin' Time.'   Another tune 
we did was "She's only a barmaid in the Honky-tonk Downstairs."  We did this 
one as straight as we could because it parodied itself.  I played country 
piano on these tunes and I think that Charlie sang backup.  Or more likely he 
was at the bar, the appropriate setting for 'drinkin' and cheatin' music.

Country music in its way is a very creative field and there is a lot of music 
and artists within this genre that I've always liked.  I have found that a 
lot of country artists really like Dixieland jazz and some of them like Merle 
Haggard have recorded tunes more or less with a dixie line-up.

As Charlie points out Louis Armstrong and his bnd could could take any 
country tune and swing the bejesus out of it.  Louis did record many country 
tunes throughout his career.

Jim Beebe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ml.islandnet.com/pipermail/dixielandjazz/attachments/20030122/e23565ad/attachment.html