Document text
Western swing group revives lost art Photo by Jim Craven Ken Reeves, also known as Mr. Shorty, plays his bass guitar on the porch of his Jacksonville home. Reeves has formed a new association dedicated to the preservation of Western swing music in the Rogue Valley. Musicians plan concert next month By BILL VARBLE The way Mr. Shorty sees it, Western swing music is an American art form, like patchwork quilts or the blues. It's also an endangered species. That's why, with a little help from his friends, Mr. Shorty, aka Ken Reeves of Jacksonville, started the Oregon Western Swing Association, a group dedicated to perpetuating the music in the Rogue Valley. Swing concert WHO : Rogue Valley Express, Billy Champion and the Champs, Second Time Around, Marty Davis WHEN : 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 6 WHERE : The Reston Hotel, Medford TICKETS : $5 in advance, $6 at the door. Call 899-7941 or 608-6104. Memberships: $12 a year couples, $10 singles A month later the Association, 60-plus members strong, has slated its first event, a concert with four bands set for Feb. 6 in Medford. "People had been asking me why I didn't try to start something for Western swing like they have in Sacramento and Seattle," Reeves says. "I thought, well, if I can find a place. I called some people, and we just decided to go for it." Reeves says Western swing groups have popped up in cities from Dallas-Fort Worth to Seattle to Sacramento, Calif. The new group has members from as far away as Oklahoma. "It's starting to get hold of people again," says guitarist Barney Paul, a 30-year Western swing veteran in Reeves' band who's played with the likes of Merle Haggard. Mr. Shorty's Rogue Valley Express is a big band: three guitars, a pedal steel, bass, keyboard, three horns, two fiddles and drums. Reeves figures playing his Fender electric bass helps keep him going as he battles congestive heart failure, diabetes and cancer. Now 60, he got the "Shorty" moniker at 13 in the fields of a Missouri farmer who told him he'd drop the name when the boy could do a man's work. "It took a year and a half," Reeves says. But the name stuck. Later, when he took up music after years of truck driving, it seemed to fit even better. Now he's giving something back to the music. "It's becoming a lost art," he says. "We're trying to keep it alive. Very few radio stations play it, you know?" Western swing is about as far as you can get from the mainstreamed, cookie-cutter, pop country of today's Nashville hit machine. "You know, it's a good, big sound infiltrated with a lot of kinds of music," Barney Paul says. The model for combining country and swing was Texas musician Bob Wills. With his band, the Texas Playboys, he enjoyed a huge vogue in Texas and the Southwest in the 1930s and '40s, their fame spreading via the radio as the Pillsbury Light Crust Doughboys. Their signature song was "San Antonio Rose." Another band that popularized the music was that of Spade Cooley, an Oklahoma musician who also happens to be a second cousin of Reeves' wife, Darlene. More recently, Asleep at the Wheel and Ray Benson have kept the music in front of new generations of fans. Western swing typically features guitars and fiddles and a bouncy, two-step beat that owes as much to Glen Miller or Tommy Dorsey as it does to Jimmy Rogers or Hank Snow. A major part of the appeal is the danceable rhythms. Dancers twirl in a Lindy hop-like style with the man swinging the woman in elaborate steps. "It's what I call a show, but it's also a dance," Reeves says. "All the twirling. That's what it's all about. People come to dance." Little wonder, what with musicians like Reeves, guitarist Earl Finley of Grants Pass, banjo player Billy Champion of Grants Pass, Ray Jensen of Redding on pedal steel, and Marty Davis, who lives in Medford but has headlined in Reno, Nev., for many years. Champion and his brother founded the Gold Coast Playboys, the first Western swing band in Northern California, and played with a young Rose Maddox. Finley played guitar with Wills. Jensen, now in Reeves' band, played with Tom T. Hall, Ferlin Huskey and Roger Miller. Guitarist and singer Buddy Wilson, who's played with Lee Roy Parnell and John Prine, is about the youngest of the bunch at 44. But most of the players are no spring chickens. "Once it gets in your blood, it gets in your soul," Reeves says. "It's just a thing you love." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA