Bob Wills - Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 7: Keep Knockin'

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Music reviews of Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 7: Keep Knockin'

Music Review: Not much better anywhere
Rating: 5 Stars

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 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 200 recordings done by Wills over the years for this operation. 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.

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

If you like the Hotclub of Cowtown, their music is really based on Bob Wills' tiffany recordings. Elana really bases a lot of her solos on Joe Holly's fiddling and Whit is a student of Tiny Moore's mandolin playing, and the great guitar work by Eldon Shamblin and Junior Barnard

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