Hillbilly Bop, Boogie & The Honky Tonk Blues Vol. Two, 1951-1953

By the early 1950s Western swing and its related country subgenres had lost much of their hold on the rural dancehall and were beginning to morph into a style that would come to be called rockabilly. On this collection of early-1950s tracks, listen to how close Louie Innis and the String Dusters sound to Bill Haley and His Comets (a former Western swing combo that would soon have the first big rock’n’roll radio hit with their faintly but unmistakably swing-inflected “Rock Around the Clock”). Note also how the massed fiddles of Jack Rowe and His Wichita Mountain Boys fail to disguise the fact that “Bomb Bosh Boogie” is straight-up hillbilly R&B, and how the electric guitars on “I’ve Lived a Lot in My Time” by Jack Rhodes & His Lone Star Buddies evoke Bob Wills and Hank Williams in equal measure. This collection is a very fine window on a lost moment in American pop music history.