Milton Brown & the Musical Brownies – Western Swing Chronicles Vol. 1 / Bob Wills – Stay A Little Longer / Take Me Back To Tulsa
Grant Alden
Posted On January 1, 2002
Right around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning, April 13, 1936, Milton Brown fell asleep at the wheel or suffered a blown tire while driving home a 16-year-old girl who was either on her first date with the big star, or a damsel in distress. She died at the scene; he succumbed to pneumonia five days later.
That, more or less, is how his friend and rival Bob Wills came to be the unchallenged king of western swing, and Milton Brown came to be one of the most rewarding footnotes in 20th century music.
Western Swing Chronicles is a handy, 25-song abstract of Brown’s groundbreaking career, prepared (from the same source materials) by the same folks who assembled 1995’s towering five-CD box, The Complete Recordings Of…. Meanwhile, Stay A Little Longer and Take Me Back To Tulsa are 16-track summaries of Wills’ best work, from 1935-48.
Western Swing Chronicles makes a splendid introduction. Here is Brown’s warm, swinging voice, set amid extraordinary and inventive fiddlers, joyously tearing through a wide variety of material. Among his innovations was the hiring of Bob Dunn, whose steel guitar is thought to have been the first amplified instrument recorded.
On the Wills reissues, Dick Spottswood argues in his helpful liner notes (which repeat in both discs, an annoying trend) that Wills’ music hewed closer to the blues and to black dance band traditions (both in song choice and his vocal interjections) than Brown did. Brown stayed nearer to the string band tradition from which he emerged, while Wills added a horn section. It seems also true that Brown was a more gifted musician, though Wills proved a singularly adept bandleader.
The very qualities that evidently made Wills and his Texas Playboys such spectacular live performers do not necessarily serve them as well in the studio, and so they come across as slightly stilted. Brown seems to have better understood the difference; consequently, his Musical Brownies recorded as an exquisitely tight ensemble while simultaneously exuding an aura of great fun.
It is hardly necessary, of course, to pick sides. Asleep At The Wheel (and Merle Haggard) have done a fine job sustaining Bob Wills’ sound. Unhappily, Milton Brown’s astonishing work has attracted fewer acolytes. His music is not, incidentally, one of those touchstones that one is duty-bound to become familiar with. Oh, no. All of this was and is an absolute delight, utterly aside from its historical import.
