Western swing is a hallmark of American music culture. Ron Thompson explores the artists, songs, places, and stories of this living musical tradition, a cowboy libretto.
ABOUT COWBOY LIBRETTOWestern swing is American dance music that took shape in Texas and Oklahoma in the early 1930s. It combines fiddle tunes with blues, jazz, ragtime, Mexican songs, and the polkas and waltzes of German and Czech communities. Musicians have room to improvise, supported by a rhythm built for dancing.
Radio and records carried the music beyond the Southwest. As people moved west during the Depression and World War II, Western swing found a devoted audience in California.
Its combination of jazz improvisation, amplified instruments, and dance rhythms helped shape honky-tonk, rockabilly, the Bakersfield sound, and early rock and roll. Over the decades, Western swing has taken different forms, from large dance orchestras to small string bands. New songs and arrangements have expanded its repertoire, while its swinging rhythms and emphasis on improvisation have remained central to the sound.
“Cowboy Libretto is dedicated to my grandmother, who gave me a love of her ‘cowboy singers’ and the stories we shared while listening to them.”
— RON THOMPSONABOUT MEI’ve spent my entire life around the arts, as an advocate, writer, collector, occasional maker, and believer that culture makes places more interesting. I’ve written about arts policy and public investment, served as the founding chair of the Duncanville Arts Commission, and later founded the Duncanville Arts Foundation in my hometown of Duncanville, Texas.
I’m a native Texan, and Western swing has always felt close to home. I grew up with this music, and some of my strongest memories of it are tied to the time and stories I shared with my late grandmother. That connection is personal, and it is part of what keeps drawing me back to the music.
I divide my time between my hometown, a 1962 midcentury modern townhouse in the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas, and a Southwest modern home near Taos, New Mexico, tucked into a mountain meadow along the Arroyo Seco. Somewhere between the three, I research music, art, architecture, folk traditions, and the culture of the American Southwest. Cowboy Libretto grew from that curiosity and from the familiar place Western swing culture has influenced my life.