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Dave Stogner, "Hard Top Race":
- I've eat all of my popcorn and most of the sack,
- Watching these drivers burn up the track.
Red Murrell, "Ernest Tubb's Talking Guitar Blues":
- Cost me four ninty-five. Ever cent of money I had. Cotton picking money, too.
Johnny Hicks, "Hamburger Hop":
- Put an onion in the middle and a pickle on top.
Leon McAuliffe, "Take It Away, Leon":
- Out in Oklahoma, the Pride of the West,
- There's a Western band that kicks the boogie beat best.
Asleep At The Wheel, "Dance With Who Brung You":
- You've got to dance with who brung you,
- Swing with who swung you.
What Western Swing bands remember and those Nashville "Country Swing" and Austin "Texas Swing" promoters seem to forget:
- It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.
TOMMY ALLSUP ...Gotta Keep Moving On—Interview with My Best Years.
My Best Years: Who else besides your Dad and Bob Wills? Were you influenced by the sounds coming out of WSM in Nashville or more the people around you in Oklahoma and Texas?
Allsup: Mostly Bob Wills and the Oklahoma swing music. There wasn’t a lot of country music around there at the time. If you didn’t play Bob Wills’ music, you didn’t work. People wanted to come to the dances to dance, so you had better play “Ida Red” and “Take Me Back to Tulsa” for them to dance to or you were fixing to have a problem.
Rolling Stone
Aug 11, 1999
Asleep at the Wheel Proves Bob Wills Is Still the King
An all-star stable of guests lets Bob Wills take the wheel
"To me, rock & roll is just a limb on the country music tree," [Ray] Benson says. "And western swing is more important to rock and roll than any of the other genres. Bill Haley and the Comets were originally Bill Haley and the Westernaires. They were a western swing band. They had a steel guitar player, Tommy Allsup, who played all over [Ride with Bob]. He was also Buddy Holly's lead guitar player. And he joined Buddy Holly from Billy Gray's Western Swing Band, which was a big band down here in the early Fifties. So I asked him, 'Well, what did you do different?' And he said, 'I just turned my treble up. That's it.' This rock and roll PR that came out in the Sixties claiming that rock and roll was a combination of bluegrass, country and R&B is just bullshit. Western swing was all of those things already. The only difference was that music went from the big band era to the combo era. In 1950 and 1951, they started stripping off the horn players and the steel guitar player and pretty soon you had it down to a trio."
ANDREW DANSBY
Oklahoma Today
Fall 1959
"Daddy of the Cowboy Bands
Big name bands in the field are still making pretty good money, but instead of sawing out truly western tunes, they are "pickin' on Charlie Brown" and "hangin' Tom Dooley", because our youth want rock 'n' roll.
A new word has been inserted—rockabilly—music that is a combination of hillbilly and rock 'n' roll.
"Most western band leaders want to fight if you accuse them of playing 'rockabilly'," say Otto Gray, of Stillwater, Oklahoma. "'Rockabilly' is just another word the kids have dreamed up."
GLENN SHIRLEY.