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Got My Dancin' Boots On
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Recording
Somebody’s Been Using That Thing (Miller)Listen to a sample of this song.
Originally recorded by Chicago mandolinist Al Miller and his Market Street Boys in 1929 and later by the Hokum Boys, this version is closer to a recording made by Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies for Decca in 1936. Brown learned it from a recording made in 1930 by the Famous Hokum Boys, consisting of Big Bill Broonzy, Georgia Tom Dorsey and Frank Brasswell. Milton Brown was one of the very earliest pioneers of Western Swing, one of the first musicians to mix white Country music with black Jazz and Blues, and the first to use an amplified steel guitar and piano on a Country recording. After leaving the Light Crust Doughboys in 1932, he formed his own band consisting of musicians capable of playing Jazz, such as Jesse Ashlock (fiddle), Cecil Brower (fiddle) and Bob Dunn (lap steel guitar).
Milton Brown is responsible for establishing the Western Swing instrumentation as well as its repertoire, drawing from African-American Jazz and Blues material he heard on radio and records. Although he once briefly employed a clarinet player as a substitute for fiddle, Milton Brown was committed to western Jazz but never abandoned the string band format. One of the strengths of the Musical Brownies was in Brown’s singing. “Milton Brown’s singing was greatly admired and widely copied...” (Malone, p. 163). Until his death of complications from an auto accident in 1936, Milton Brown’s band was the most popular band in Texas. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Milton Brown in the development of Western Swing.
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