Culture of the Western United States: Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, POW-Wow, Western Music, Sonora's Death Row, Otto Gray and His Oklahoma Cowboys

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Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 29. Chapters: Honky-tonk, Western swing, Pow-wow, Western music, Sonora's Death Row, Otto Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Cowboy poetry, Hall of Great Western Performers, Frontier Texas!, Celebration, George F. Ellis, Rodeo Hall of Fame, Cuisine of the Southwestern United States, Owen Wister Award, Big Chief Henry's Indian String Band, Booth Western Art Museum, List of Wild West shows, Wally McRae, Sons of the San Joaquin, Hall of Great Westerners, Brand Book, Western Music Association Hall of Fame, American Indian Exposition, Baxter Black, Winter-Telling Stories, Spur Award, Western Writers of America, Chester A. Reynolds Memorial Award, The Western Way. Excerpt: Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 40s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 led to its decline. The movement was an outgrowth of jazz, and similarities with Gypsy jazz are often noted. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, folk, Dixieland jazz and blues blended with swing; and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. The electrically-amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop. Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally-popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands-even the fully orchestrated bands-vocals and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead. Additionally, although popular horn bands tend...