I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the one concession to his Midwestern roots. His own parents had probably gone out dancing to the Texas Playboys in South Dakota when they were young, so I assume my dad had the Tiffany Transcriptions CD out of nostalgia. My sister and I found it when we were going through his stuff after he died. We liked it a lot better than the opera CDs, so we ended up listening to it on endless repeat while we emptied drawers and closets.
Even though I got my introduction to Bob Wills under sad circumstances, his music has brought me a lot of joy. “Bring It On Down To My House” is one of my favorite of his tunes, and I jumped at the opportunity to bring it into pop aural skills class as an example of secondary dominants and circle of fifths root movement.
While this music sounds like it comes from the old dusty trail, the Texas Playboys were based in San Francisco in the late 1940s, and that’s where they recorded the Tiffany tracks. The band plays more like they would at a dance gig than at a formal recording session, with a looser and more casual feel. Also, the unusual 16″ disc recording format let them play each song longer than they could for a standard 78 rpm record.
You can see the Texas Playboys in action from this filmed performance of “Ida Red” from 1951.
Here’s the rest of that performance. The first song features “the yodelin’-est girl in the country.”
The Texas Playboys first recorded “Bring It On Down To My House” in 1936. That version is tighter and cleaner than the Tiffany version, but doesn’t have the same drive.
The song is an old and traditional one, recorded in endless variants under many different titles, without any single songwriter. Secondhand Songs attributes it to Blind Willie McTell, who was the first person to record it. However, McTell probably improvised the lyrics from a larger pool of thematic ideas, as was common for blues singers at the time.
The Texas Playboys may well have been improvising their lyrics too. I don’t know if we should even call this a “song” so much as just a container for saucy lyrics interspersed with instrumental solos. The lyrics are extraordinarily minimalist, with only one line varying between otherwise-identical verses for the song’s entire duration:
Bring it on down to my house, honey, there ain’t nobody home but me
Bring it on down to my house, honey, I need your company
[innuendo-filled couplet]
Bring it on down to my house, honey, there ain’t nobody home but me
The Texas Playboys’ version of the tune uses a standard country/blues/ragtime form and chord progression, four phrases of four bars each. The vocal melody is all on the D major pentatonic scale, give or take some blue notes. Here are the chords.
| D | D B7 | E7 A7 | D | | D | D B7 | E7 | A7 | | D | D7 | G7 | G#°7 | | D | D B7 | E7 A7 | D |
The first and last phrases are identical. They make the most sense if you start at the end and work backwards.
- The D chord is the tonic.
- The A7 chord is the V7 chord in the key of D major.
- The E7 chord is the V7 chord in the key of A major.
- The B7 chord is the V7 chord in the key of E minor.
The transition from that first D to B7 is jarring, because the third of B7 is D-sharp, which is wildly dissonant in the context of D major. The tension gets resolved when the D-sharp resolves up to the E in the E7 chord. However, the E7 chord has G-sharp, another dissonant note in the context of the key of D. This tension gets resolved when G-sharp resolves to the A in the A7 chord. Now we are back home in D major, and A7 resolves to D the way that it is supposed to. It’s a whole harmonic journey in just a few seconds.
The second phrase is the same as the first and last, but with different harmonic rhythm, and ending on A7 rather than D. The third phrase has new information in it, though. The D to D7 to G seems like a secondary dominant in the key of G major, but it isn’t, it’s really a move into the key of D blues. The last chord in the phrase is G#°7, the sharp four diminished that is strongly characteristic of the blues.
I want to particularly draw your attention to Alex Brashear’s trumpet solo at 1:21, because it’s an absolute banger. Measures nine through twelve are especially satisfying. Brashear plays enough chord tones to sound jazzy, but also plays enough pentatonicism to sound like country. Here’s my transcription.
It’s strange to have a trumpet player in a country band. Are the Texas Playboys actually jazz? I asked my students that question. Most of them initially thought, no, of course not. Then one said, well, actually, they do sound like Django Reinhardt. I tried to get them to articulate which features of the music are jazz-like and which aren’t. The music swings (it’s right there in the term “Western swing”), and they play instrumental solos that mix tonal harmony and blues. The Playboys’ repertoire includes Count Basie and Billy Strayhorn tunes. According to the 500 Songs podcast, Les Paul and Charlie Christian sat in with them one night in 1938. That’s jazz, right?
Some students thought, maybe this is technically jazz, but it’s square and corny; the phrases start and end on downbeats, and there isn’t as much syncopation as you would expect from jazz. These are all polite ways of saying that the Texas Playboys are white, though like all American popular musicians, they draw extensively on black musicians and styles. Bob Wills grew up on a cotton farm in West Texas where his neighbors were mostly black, and he learned blues and other dance styles from them in addition to the European-descended folk music his own parents played. I learned from the 500 Songs podcast that Wills worked as a blackface comedian before his music career took off, which sadly was not at all unusual for entertainers at the time. Matthew Morrison argues that blackface has been the cornerstone of United States popular culture since its inception.
To be clear: I don’t care whether anyone would categorize the Texas Playboys as jazz or country or some third thing. It’s worth having the conversation so that the kids can learn to verbalize the specific musical qualities that make something jazz-like or country-like, and to articulate the racial politics underlying those categories. I also want them to know that, historically, jazz and country share a common ancestor, and the divergence happened later in musical history than you might think. And anyway, people should get to feel the joy of Western swing.
The day we analyzed “Bring It On Down” in class, we also talked about “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones, another song by white guys modeling their sound on black music. I asked whether the students consider Mick Jagger to be cool, and they answered that they think Bob Wills is cooler. Mick is trying too hard, while Bob is just his goofy self. Just to bring this all full circle, here are the Rolling Stones doing “Bob Wills Is Still The King” by Waylon Jennings.
Anyway, whatever genre it belongs to, “Bring It On Down To My House” is a pretty silly song that barely functions as a song at all, so why is it so delightful? I think it works so well because it isn’t a song at all; it’s a groove, as Anne Danielsen would put it. A song is a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A groove is a repetitive rhythmic cell that exists as a substrate for dancing and improvisation. Current dance styles use smaller cells, two or four bars long. “Bring It On Down” is sixteen bars with a lot of chords, but those chords are so formulaic and familiar to the players that they function as part of one big unit. I’m sure the tune was fun to dance to, and I have experienced how much fun it is to play. A more complicated structure and lyrics with a linear narrative would just get in the way.
I do sometimes wonder if my dad would be disappointed that, for all my music credentials, I’m so much more interested in Bob Wills than, like, Puccini or Verdi or Mozart. He worked hard to escape the Midwest and come to New York to be a worldly intellectual. Do I really think that the Tiffany Transcriptions are more worthy of my attention than The Magic Flute? Isn’t this a failure of maturity or wisdom on my part? Maybe! I respect Mozart, there is plenty that I find beautiful and interesting about his music, but he just does not get to me emotionally. Blues-based music with a groove to it is the key to my particular aesthetic lock. If people were writing symphonies and operas that sounded like the Texas Playboys, would I be paying attention? Or is my attention span damaged beyond repair by TV and video games?
I like long-form grooves, but I don’t know that I need to hear a Bob Wills tune extended into a sonata form; I just like grooves to stretch out as they are. My inner cultural conservative is shaking his head in disgust, but the rest of me thinks, well, if Bob Wills is making good music, he’s making good music, who cares about Western European historical preconceptions about how art should work? Sorry to my dad, anyway.