Various Artists – Woodchips & Heartbreakers: The Blue Roots Of Western Swing

And then there’s raunch.

No one’s claimed that the battle cry was ever “Sex, Drugs, and Western Swing!”, but this first in a new series of swing compilations from the U.K. reminds us that in a back-room, nearly-forgotten end of the country-plus-jazz corral, you might have heard it.

This 25-cut CD brings together hard-to-find, harder-to-forget examples of unrestrained 1930s good-time music from two artists: Texan Smokey Wood, in the Modern Mountaineers and as leader of Smokey Wood & the Woodchips; and the singular, rambunctious Hartman’s Heartbreakers, an underground, swing-influenced string band from North Carolina.

Before honky-tonk, before rockabilly, hardcore country music was hardly likely to focus much or often on pleasures of the flesh, but virtually all alternative country revolts have found someone to do it — usually someone under the influence of the blues. In the ’30s, it was true of double- and single-entendre-dropping hillbilly blues singers, and of a few special western swing bands.

John Boyce Wood was handed the name “Smokey” as the marijuana farming, reefer-smoking head of outfits generally known for near-perpetual boozing. The San Antonio-based Modern Mountaineers were (by no accident, apparently) one loose and laid-back outfit, and it’s this band that serves up the famous opening cut here, “Everybody’s Truckin'” — with that “truckin'” phrase strategically mispronounced the way they really mean it here and there.

Other 1937 Mountaineers offerings include “Dirty Dog Blues”, “Gettin’ That Low-Down Swing”, and “You Got To Know How To Truck And Swing” — apparently influenced both by recordings of Fats Waller and by that recent mother of all truckin’ recordings, a reasonable nominee for the ultimate American party record, “Let’s Get Drunk And Truck” by black Chicago’s Harlem Hamfats — which included the great Charlie and Joe McCoy, bluesmen in a jazz band, up from the Mississippi Delta. (And that’s an even deeper blue root of western swing!)

Musical quality was not dampened by the Mountaineers’ drive for novelty. J. R. Chatwell’s fiddle flies through these cuts, as does the steel of J.C. Way, and even the voice of Texas Playboys ace Tommy Duncan. There’s a strong jazz edge in these sides, with clarinet and sax from Hal Herbert. That jazz tinge continues in the Woodchips lineup cuts, such as “Riding To Glory”, “Keep On Truckin'”, and a telling swing take on Jimmie Rodgers “Wood’s Travelling Blues”. Here, Way’s steel finds a counterpunch in Clarence Clark’s trumpet.

But the real treasures on this disc, the ones that will make the curious desire it fondly, are the eight cuts by Hartman’s Heartbreakers, taken from 78s supposedly sold only in houses of ill repute. This swingin’ version of an old-timey string/jug band (banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, whistle, washboard) was fronted by the Tennessee Ramblers’ Dick Hartman and featured the come-hither hijinks of an irrepressible, mind-boggling lead singer, Miss Betty Lou DeMorrow.

How do you describe Miss Betty Lou to anyone who’s never heard her? Imagine, if you dare, the sound of a 14-year-old country girl who’s been palling around with Billie Holliday and, perhaps, the Crimson Tide backfield. Unique in country music history, this drawling sireen offers up healthy, audibly smiling, lust-filled pleas for manly cooperation in such classics as “My Southern Movements”, “It Feels So Good”, “Please Mr. Moon”, “Don’t Tell On Me”, and “Mama Don’t ‘Low No Bedspring-Shakin In Here”.

These titles may be sufficiently enlightening to paint you a picture. If you miss the point, male band members egg her on with catcalls and responses. Howzabouta verse from Miss Betty: “We’ll go up to room 304, start on the bed and finish on the floor/If you let you play with your little yo-yo, I’ll let you play with mine/I mean it!”

Now they shout, “Yeah, honey. Sounds good to me!”

You will not mistake any of this for Sunday morning with the Carter family.

This disc, readily available in the U.K. and Europe, has had minimal distribution in the U.S. so far. The second release in this “Early Western Swing Classics” series, Rhythm Is Our Business, features the hard-to-find sounds of Roy Newman (first father of “Everybody’s Tryin’ To Be My Baby”, “Honey Don’t” and a dance-rhythm “Matchbox Blues”, 20 years before Carl Perkins), as well as a generous supply of cuts by Oce Stockard and by the Lightcrust Doughboys. A best-of collection on seminal steel guitar master Bob Dunn is promised soon.