Tune Wranglers – Tune Wranglers 19361938
If western swing bands generally developed along similar lines, the nearly forgotten, once very popular Tune Wranglers, out of San Antonio, failed to get the full set of instructions. Their mixed bag of musical tricks from across the American spectrum surely marks them as an early working model for later good time, genre-humping bands such as Austin’s Asylum Street Spankers — twang one moment, jazz the next, then blues, then the nasty swing.
The Tune Wranglers cut some 70 idiosyncratic and often frantic sides for RCA in the mid-’30s, sounding and looking like what they were — a jazzy, semi-crazed cowboy band. Founded by an actual cowboy (real cowslinging included), singer and songwriter Buster Coward, the Wranglers also featured classic Texas fiddler Tom Dickey, who came out of a background similar to Bob Wills’. (They were, in fact, the first San Antonio-area fiddle band to be recorded.) Well up-front in their rhythm and tone is Joe Barnes, known as “Red Brown, the Banjo Maniac” — a departure from typical late-’30s instrumental lineups.
The accent throughout is on playful, charming crowd-pleasing, and they surely did that — if not by means of instrumental virtuosity! As these sometimes ragged sides brought back from obscurity reveal, the Wranglers consistently mixed their ’30s swing (a down-home version of Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean A Thing” ) with lots of hotter 1920s “Tight Like That”/”Wild About That Thing”/”Hot Peanuts” style hokum/jug-band-style numbers — and with more cowboy songs than any more official western swing outfit. “I’ll Be Hanged If They’re Gonna Hang Me” is one memorable cut here, and they’re just as comfortable with “Rodeo Rose” or “Cowbys And Indians” or even “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”.
For those who like Paul Burch’s take on “Shifting Texas Sands”, this is the original source. One caveat: Beware the lettering on this disc’s cover, because it looks like it says “June Wranglers” and could lead to misfiling.