Still Swingin: 100th Birthday Special Edition
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DVD details
Actor: Tracy ByrdBrand: Video Communications Inc.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 303 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Vci Video
DVD Reviews of Still Swingin: 100th Birthday Special Edition
DVD Review: Not what it is cracked up to be but OK for the hard core fan like me
Summary: 3 Stars
This DVD is pretty good, but it is not at all what the advertisements make it appear to be. Watch out!
The ads make it iseem like this is a large collection of videos of Bob Wills. Such things exist. There are lots of video from Bob Wills's TV performances in the 1950s and early 1960s and lots of film from his movies and musical short subjects. On this DVD, you don't get to see them except spliced clips without much explanation.
The DVD ad and introductions suggests that on it you will see video of the great 100th Anniversary of Bob Wills performance Asleep at the Wheel did in tribute to Bob Wills at Cains dance hall in Tulsa. However, you don't. You see some cuts from a sound check performance Asleep at the wheel did on KVOO the afternoon before that great performance with a few guest stars. And there is not much of that!
These DVD provide little real information about Bob Wills. There is just a small bit of general information that is sometimes inaccurate in the first DVD.
Tommy Duncan is named, but only in a way that people who already know who Tommy was could understand. Wills is presented as if he were the only person in the Western Swing arena. No mention is made of the vast array of other Western Swing bands.
As mentioned, Milton Brown, Wills's partner and close friend is not mentioned, so there is of course no mention of Brown's Band "The Musical Brownies" which many credit as being the first full scale Western Swing band. A knowledgeable person could have easily done this while this video was showing stills of the Light Crust Doughboys including Brown, Bobby Dunne, Durwood Brown, and other Brownies.
The first DVD has too much music by Red Steargall and Tracy Boyd who are country western Hat Act singers who do a few Wills influenced songs. Unfortunately, there is not enough music by Asleep at the Wheel.
This, the top Western Swing band in the last 30 years, does performi at the soung check at Cains with Wills' guitarist and arranger and band manager Eldon Shamblin and master fiddler Johnnie Gimble. There is some nice music with the great Leon Rausch bassist and singer joining in as well as Joe Frank Fergueson, also a bassist and singer (and I believe cousin) for Wills on and off in the 1930s and 1940s.
Two people who could have said a lot about Wills that is more than just fan praise are Gimble and Shamblin. On other videos, not this one, they do say interesting things about Wills. Even here among all the kind of useless praise, Eldon points out the problem of the early band was that the musicians were so bad. He's elsewhere commented about how he thought Wills was "nuts" selecting musicians based on their looks, i.e. Wills believed a guitarist looked one way and a fiddler looked one way etc. Shamblin who was a professional studio guitarist at a Tulsa CBS radio station became the musical master of the band and helped Wills hire better and better musicians, many out of the lower ranked white swing bands.
Eldon either played or managed Wills group from the 1930s until the band broke up in the mid 1960s with time off in the late 1940s and the mid 1950s to work with Leon McAuliffe's band in Tulsa. He is an acknowledged musical genius and received a lot of praise since the 1930s. The film inaccurately quotes Rolling Stone as claiming he was the greatest rhythm guitar player in the country, but it was actually Rolling Stone quoting Downbeat from the 1930s. Most who know rhythm guitar, including Eldon were he living, would probably put Freddie Green, Eddie Durham, and a few others ahead of him.
Likewise, Gimble is just very smart, very thoughtful and seems to have a very keen mind about the Wills legacy. He even plays Wills main fiddle in the clips shown here, though we aren't told this. He can tell you, for example, about one of the fundamental questions in Wills life, his alcoholism. Wills's problems with the bottle was involved in most of the big decisions of his life from quitting barbering and becoming a full time musician to the breakup of his classic band in 1949, to his going from Columbia to MGM in the mid 1940s. Unfortunately, Gimble is not asked any questions of this kind.
The second DVD is better. There are no Hat Act singers. It contains performances by true Western Swing peformers. The first band is a band led by Jody Nix, son of the great Hoyle Nix, a great Texas Fiddler and contemporary of Bob Wills, whose Band Wills used as his own in the mid 1960s. Nix who used to be a drummer but has really mastered the Texas ranch dance fiddle style that his father and Bob Wills played. He has a crack swing jazz musician on electric mandolin and fiddle in his band and creates a good but interesting sound.
However, the best thing in the whole DVD is a performance of a Texas Playboys and Johnny Lee Wills and his Boys survivors group including Bob Koefer on steel, Gleen Rhees on Tenor and Soprano Sax, Truit Cunningham vocals, leader and bass, fiddlers Curly Lewis and Bob Boatwright, Eldon Shamblin on guitar, Clarence Cagle on piano and Luke Wills on vocal. Of course, even in 1994 when this was filmed except for Eldon, all of the great stars of Wills Top bands in the late 1930s and 1940s like Leon McAuliffe, Louis Tierney, Jesse Ashelock, Jim Joe Holly, Herbie Remmington, Noel Boggs, Cameron Hill, Lester Barnard Junior, Millard Kelso, Tiny Moore, and Alex Brashear had died. Most of this group joined Wills in the late 1940s or 1950s. Curly Lewis and Clarence Cagle were actually more well known as members of Johnnie Lee and His Boys, which was like the farm team for the Texas Playboys.
While they are probably not as hot as they were 10 years before at the large scale Bob Wills 50th celebration in 1984, these guys are having fun playing some good Western Swing music, cutting up for the audience, and giving you a flavor of the breadth of real Western Swing. Pianist Clarence Cagle who continued working as a session pianist for rock, blues, and country recordings into the 1990s really outsmokes them all. Bob Boatright, who is probably the youngest of the bunch, does some great fiddling as does Curly Lewis.
However, this second CD is worth it if you buy this at remaindered prices.
However, you don't see much real Bob Wills here. You don't see any complete tune played by Wills and the Texas Playboys. You don't learn much about Western Swing if you buy this.
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