Five hillbilly songs every western swing fan should know

The word hillbilly started life as a put-down. Newspaper columnists in the 1920s used it for the old-time string bands cutting records in Bristol, Tennessee, and the nickname stuck to the music itself. Those sessions gave country its first recorded voice, and the fastest of those voices belonged to Jimmie Rodgers, whose yodel burst out of a Camden, New Jersey studio in 1929 and gave the style a sound you can still pick out in a crowded pub at two in the morning.

Western swing grew out of the same impulse with the fiddles turned up. Bob Wills, Pee Wee King, the Maddox Brothers and their peers played for a room full of dancers rather than a microphone, so the music swings hard, the bass walks, and the chords move on the beat. In Australia that lineage runs deep. Slim Dusty and his Stardust Cowboys mixed western swing with bush band material for four decades, the Bushwackers have kept the flame burning since the eighties, and country crowds still fill the halls at the Tamworth festival and the Gympie Muster in Queensland.

Five records open the door, and each one is worth chasing down on CD, 7-inch or a reissue sleeve. On the Hill Records, a Japan-based shop that runs its own label for new rockabilly and western swing releases, stocks the CDs, singles, DVDs, magazines, books, apparel and patches that feed this corner of the market. Everything posts from Tokyo, so allow international mail time on anything you cannot find at home.

Where the hillbilly and swing streams met

The Bristol discs were made by working musicians playing their own material: fiddle, mandolin, guitar, upright bass and, occasionally, a washboard or a jug. That instrumentation is where hillbilly and western swing share their DNA. Swing records swap the washboard for drums and an electric guitar, but the walking bass line and the modal, bent-chord phrasing come straight out of the same Appalachian and Texas traditions. A fiddler who learned a tune in a Tennessee string band could walk into a Texas dance hall a decade later and play it again for a paying floor.

A second current fed the mixture. Black jazz and blues musicians toured the oil camps and roadhouses of West Texas and the Southwest, and Texas bands absorbed their phrasing and their backbeat. That is why a western swing record sounds like country with the lid off, and why the jump and jive side of the rockabilly world sits so comfortably beside it.

Australians met this music first through the wireless and the small 10-inch shellacs, then through their own singers and bands copying what they heard on American radio. The catalogues that track it all are still worth exploring, and the shop's own link round-up is a good place to branch out towards other labels, archives and reissue programmes that keep the old catalogues alive.

Blue Yodel No. 9 and the voice that started it all

Jimmie Rodgers cut "Blue Yodel No. 9" in 1929, and the number in the title was a commercial one: he had already filled the lower slots with his earlier yodels. The record leans on everything that made him famous — a relaxed vocal, a fiddle-led instrumental passage, and a yodel thrown at the end of the chorus like a signal to somebody off-mic. Rodgers became the first country star with a national audience, and this remains the tune most people picture when they hear the word hillbilly.

There is a tragedy folded into the story. Rodgers was booked for a national barn-dance tour in late 1929 when the Bristol earthquake wrecked his road gear and the stock market crash cancelled the whole circuit. He came off the road and turned his attention to radio and records, which is partly why so much of his work survives as transfers rather than fresh performances.

Western swing players have always found the song useful, because a yodel is a call and response. You can holler back at it from the floor, the tempo sits neatly into a two-step, and the tune survives being played at half the tempo with a slap bass underneath. Australian audiences have always had an ear for the trick of it, picked up in Victorian dance halls and later carried by country singers who could let a yodel ring across an open paddock.

Tennessee Waltz and the sound of the dance floor

"Tennessee Waltz" was recorded in 1948 by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart, a Charlotte, North Carolina band who worked the southeastern circuit with a country-swing lineup. King wrote the song with Stewart, and the record went straight to the top of the country chart. What makes it a favourite with swing fans is the underneath: a slow, steady pulse built for couples who know how to move, with the bass walking a simple pattern that lets the fiddle and guitar fill in around it.

The song then ran away from country altogether. Patti Page took it into the pop charts in 1950, Tennessee Ernie Ford made it a standard of the new television era, and the original by King and Stewart survived as the version for dancers. Ask a country swing band for a slow waltz to close the night and this is still the first thing they reach for.

Down here it became part of the local slow-song vocabulary, the kind of number that closes the early hours of a bush dance hall and gets hummed by people who have no idea who Redd Stewart was. The Australian slow rock and the country ballad tradition both grew in that space, and the waltz feel sits right in the middle of it.

Chime Bells and the sound of a western swing band

"Chime Bells" is one of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys' defining records, cut in 1945. The Playboys swung harder than any other country band of their moment, layering fiddle, drums and electric guitar over a rhythm section that could hold a dance floor for hours. The tune itself is a fiddle showcase, bright and ringing, the sort of instrumental that a band would use to prove what it could do without a singer stepping into the way.

Western swing existed because its players argued with Nashville about what country music was for. Nashville made ballads, and then it made bluegrass; Texas bands wanted the two-step, the shuffle and the hot fiddle, and they wanted the chords to keep moving. Records like "Chime Bells" are the evidence of that argument, and they have never been entirely eclipsed. Japanese buyers in particular have kept western swing alive, and On the Hill's in-house label releases material in that tradition for a market where the swing side of country has an unusually loyal audience.

For a room rather than a record player, check The Shreya before you head out, and look for nights where a working band is booked rather than a DJ with a crate of records.

The bluesy end of the hillbilly catalogue

Charles "Cowboy" Copas, from Clay County, Kentucky, recorded "Hillbilly Blues" in 1929, and the title is an accurate description of what sits on the disc. A plain blues structure, twelve bars and a walking bass, played on fiddle and guitar with a voice that could cut glass. Hillbilly and early bluegrass were never far apart, and Copas worked in the space between them, along with other southern string players who treated the blues as something to be played at full tilt rather than apologised for.

"In the Jailhouse Now" came from Bradley Walker in the same year and became the better known of the pair. The prison song is all narrative and menace, with a chorus that a room will shout back at you. It also happens to be the hinge between hillbilly and rockabilly, since later pickers turned it into a barn-burning closer, and it still works as a fast two-step with a driving acoustic bass.

That jump is where the modern Australian rockabilly revival meets the older country catalogue. Sydney and Melbourne bands with a pedal steel and a slappin' upright bass pull material from both ends of the timeline, which is exactly the point of buying the historic pressings rather than a tidy modern compilation.

Digging the records out of Tokyo

Buying from Japan has its own arithmetic. Postage on a couple of LPs eats into the value of the bargain, prices are quoted in yen before you factor the exchange rate, and anything imported above the low-value threshold attracts GST, so those old concession rules that once made cheap overseas parcels attractive no longer apply the way they did. Allow a fortnight for international mail, longer when the shop is packing a festival order.

The second half of the hunt happens locally, and Australians are good at it. Car boot sales, the stalls at Paddy's Markets in Flemington, and the country town's op shop running on what locals call trash and treasure all turn up 78s, 7-inch singles and battered sleeves of country and western swing material for the price of a coffee. If your patience holds, the yellowed shellac in the bargain bin is often the copy nobody else bothered to keep.

The gear matters too, particularly the bass. Before you spend money, read the rockabilly bass amp history posted by the shop, because the difference between a solid-state combo and a valve bass rig is the difference between a sound you want to chase and one you merely tolerate. The same applies to the old deck in the cupboard, and to that dusty guitar nobody has touched since the shed was cleared out. Both country and rockabilly records reward a decent needle and a bass that can carry a walking line.