“Do you know who Johnny Gimble is?” came the question to Steve Briggs.
Which is a lot like asking Bob Dylan, “Do you know who Woody Guthrie is?”
Yes, Steve Briggs, guitarist, songwriter, background singer, producer and chief bottle washer for Toronto’s fast-rising Bebop Cowboys knows exactly who Johnny Gimble is.
A promoter from B.C. was asking Briggs if the Cowboys, purveyors of the western swing music made popular by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in the 1930s an '40s, would be interested in playing on the same bill as Gimble.
Younger than the rest of the Texas Playboys, Gimble is the last vestige of the band that is synonymous with western swing. He was just 23-years-old when he joined the Playboys to play fiddle.
Gimble was also the star of Merle Haggard’s '70s album tribute to the Wills’ band, The Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, which was titled in Gimble’s honour.
As it turned out, Briggs and the Bebops never did make it on the same bill with senior citizen Gimble because things just didn’t work out. But you can hear in Briggs’ voice that just the possibility of working with Gamble animated the whole band.
The Bebops were just at the Port Credit Legion a couple of weeks ago and Briggs was talking before the event about how so many Canadians were enthralled decades ago with the music that drifted across the border from WWVA in Wheeling West Virginia, WLS in Chicago and WSM in Nashville.
Western swing is a hard thing to define, but Briggs has lots of practice. There’s some folk, some country, some jazz, some pop and lots of dance music. That variety is part of what distinguishes the genre, or genres.
In the liner notes of the Bebop Cowboys’ terrific new CD, Canadian Dance Hall, Briggs explains that western swing was a popular “intersection” of musics that found a ready home in Canadian community halls and ballrooms.
Canadian Dance Hall is a popular intersection of not only genres, but performers. Sarah Harmer, Russell deCarle of the Prairie Oysters, vocalist Terra Hazelton, and musical Everyman Chris Whiteley lend their hand to the punchy songs and arrangements.
Port Credit’s Chuck Jackson sings the Briggs’ original That’s Why I Ain’t Been Home in Years, a revisiting-the-old-hometown song that includes the classic line, “the church is now a billiard hall/ nothing sacred’s left at all.”
Erindale’s Alex Pangman, who just earned a rave review for her new album in Canada’s jazz bible, Coda Magazine, sings the Wills’ classic I Laugh When I Think How I Cried Over You in her intriguing throwback style, which always keeps you guessing as to which vocal path she’ll take next.
There are lots of stars in this outing but chief among them, appropriately enough, is a fiddler who’s a lot younger than the rest of the band. Drew Jurecka is also a regular member of Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards. Check him out as he backs Harmer on Stardust, the Hoagy Carmichael classic.
Trying to figure out why western swing is so appealing is difficult, but it’s probably the same thing that makes jazz so appealing. In a word, swing.
Even most of the ballads have a bop in their step that will inevitably work its way down to your dancing shoes.