Western swing

Western swing is, first and foremost, a fusion of country music, several styles of jazz, pop music and blues aimed at dancers. Much of it is dance music with an up-tempo beat and a decidedly

Western swing is, first and foremost, a fusion of country music, several styles of jazz, pop music and blues aimed at dancers. Much of it is dance music with an up-tempo beat and a decidedly Southwestern United States regional flavor. It consists of an eclectic combination of country, cowboy, polka,Gypsy jazz, Mexican, and folk music, blended with a jazzy "swing", with a tip of the hat to New Orleans jazz and blues, and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.

It originated in the dance halls of small towns throughout the Lower Great Plains in the 1920's and 1930's.^[1], evolving from the old house parties and ranch dances where fiddlers and guitarists entertained dancers. Bob Wills and Milton Brown essentially created the stylistic blend in the early 1930s as co-founders of the stringband that became the Light Crust Doughboys, who played dancehalls and took advantage of the new medium of radio broadcasting. That helped the style gain a much wider following through the music of Wills and his Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Brown in Fort Worth (until his untimely death in 1936) and the Light Crust Doughboys, also in Fort Worth. It reached its "golden age" during the years preceding post-WWII and blossomed on the West Coast during the War. Its decline in the years following the War reflected the waxing and waning of the more mainstream big-band sound. Spade Cooley coined the term 'Western swing' in the early 1940's, a play on Benny Goodman's reputation as the "King of Swing."