"Take Me Back to Tulsa" | ||||
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Single by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys | ||||
B-side | "New Worried Mind" | |||
Released | March 1941 | |||
Recorded | February 26, 1941 [1] | |||
Studio | WBAP Studio, Blackstone Hotel, Fort Worth, Texas [2] | |||
Genre | Western swing | |||
Label | Okeh 06101 | |||
Songwriter(s) | Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan | |||
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys singles chronology | ||||
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"Take Me Back to Tulsa" is a Western swing standard song. Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan added words and music to the melody of the traditional fiddle tune "Walkin' Georgia Rose" in 1940. [3] The song is one of eight country music performances selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll". [4]
"Take me Back to Tulsa" features one of Western Swing's greatest bands in full flight. [4] It originated as a Bob Wills fiddle tune and was so popular at shows that Wills and singer Tommy Duncan added words and recorded it in early 1941. [4]
Musically, the song has been described as a "jubilant Western Swing romp", [4] with Wills urging fiddler Louis Tireney to "turn it on boy, turn it on" half way through the song.
Wills's organization was based in Tulsa from 1934 to 1942, and the song takes its name from the chorus: "Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry".
Lyrically, the song is a series of unrelated, mostly nonsense, rhyming couplets. One was:
Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey.
Darkie raise the cotton, white man gets the money.
The last quoted line was changed by 1946 by Wills to: "Little man raise the cotton, beer joints get the money." [5] (Modern covers of the song have tended to use the line: "Poor boy picks the cotton, Rich man gets the money").
When Wills was asked about the lines, he said they were just nonsense lyrics that he learned as a youth. [6] Though Wills did not know its origin, the couplet actually derives from a 19th century song of enslaved African Americans, a version of which also appeared in print in the 1880 novel My Southern Home by William Wells Brown. [7]
When played at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa and other venues, it often included the lines:
Would I like to go to Tulsa? Boy I sure would.
Well, let me off at Archer, and I'll walk down to Greenwood.
Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys recorded "Take Me Back to Tulsa" on February 26, 1941 at the Blackstone Hotel, Fort Worth, Texas [8] (OKeh 6101) and it became one of their larger hits. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys previously performed the song in his 1940 movie Take Me Back to Oklahoma. Spade Cooley's Western Dance Gang also performed it in their 1944 short movie titled for the song, Take Me Back to Tulsa.
The song has been recorded by many other artists over the years.
Al Dexter is sometimes erroneously credited with writing "Take Me Back to Tulsa", perhaps due to his musically similar hit song "Pistol Packin' Mama". [9] [10]
Merle Haggard recorded a cover of the song for his 1970 album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills).
The country music group Asleep at the Wheel covered the song on their 1973 album Comin' Right at Ya .
George Strait did a cover of the song on his 2003 live album For the Last Time: Live from the Astrodome .
Red dirt (music) band Cross Canadian Ragweed performed a backstage cover of the song, released on their 2006 live album Back to Tulsa – Live and Loud at Cain's Ballroom.
James Robert Wills was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing. He was also noted for punctuating his music with his trademark "ah-haa" calls.
"A Maiden's Prayer" is a composition of Polish composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska (1834–1861), which was published in 1856 in Warsaw, and then as a supplement to the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris in 1859. It is a short piano piece of medium difficulty for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody; others have described it as "sentimental salon tosh." The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as "this dowdy product of ineptitude."
Clarence Albert Poindexter, known as Al Dexter, was an American country musician and songwriter. He is best known for "Pistol Packin' Mama," a 1943 hit that was one of the most popular recordings of the World War II years and later became a hit again with a cover by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters.
Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.
Asleep at the Wheel is an American Western swing group that was formed in Paw Paw, West Virginia, and is based in Austin, Texas. The band has won nine Grammy Awards since their 1970 inception, released over twenty albums, and has charted more than 21 singles on the Billboard country charts. Their highest-charting single, "The Letter That Johnny Walker Read", peaked at No. 10 in 1975.
While the music of Oklahoma is relatively young, Oklahoma has been a state for just over 100 years, and it has a rich history and many fine and influential musicians.
A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World is the eleventh studio album by Merle Haggard backed by The Strangers, released in 1970.
Thomas Elmer Duncan, was an American Western swing vocalist and songwriter who gained fame in the 1930s as a founding member of The Texas Playboys. He recorded and toured with bandleader Bob Wills on and off into the early 1960s.
"Faded Love" is a Western swing song written by Bob Wills, his father John Wills, and his brother, Billy Jack Wills. The tune is considered to be an exemplar of the Western swing fiddle component of American fiddle.
Lester Robert Barnard, known as Junior Barnard, was an American Western swing guitarist who was a member of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. He was among the first electric guitarists to create a guitar effect that anticipated fuzz tone, which is usually associated with later guitarists.
George Jones Sings Bob Wills is an album by American country music artist George Jones. It was released in 1962 on the United Artists Records.
Eldon Shamblin was an American guitarist and arranger, particularly important to the development of Western swing music as one of the first electric guitarists in a popular dance band. He was a member of the Strangers during the 1970s and 1980s and was the last surviving member of Bob Wills' band the Texas Playboys.
John Paul Gimble was an American country musician associated with Western swing. Gimble was considered one of the most important fiddlers in the genre. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 in the early influences category as a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
"San Antonio Rose" is a swing instrumental introduced in late 1938 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Quickly becoming the band's most popular number, Wills and band members devised lyrics, which were recorded on April 16, 1940, and released on Okeh 5694 in August as "New San Antonio Rose". Despite having completed a lengthy Hillbilly/Folk chart run in 1939, which culminated at #1, it quickly rose to the top again, in early 1941. It went on to become the band's theme song for the next forty years, reverting to its original title.
"Cherokee Maiden" is a Western swing love song written by Cindy Walker. "Cherokee Maiden" was one of Walker's first hits when it was recorded by Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys in 1941.
Johnnie Lee Wills was an American Western swing fiddler popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
"Pistol Packin' Mama" was a "Hillbilly"-Honky Tonk record released at the height of World War II that became a nationwide sensation, and the first "Country" song to top the Billboard popular music chart. It was written by Al Dexter of Troup, Texas, who recorded it in Los Angeles, California on March 20, 1942, with top session musicians Dick Roberts, Johnny Bond and Dick Reinhart, who all normally worked for Gene Autry).
"So Long Pal" is a 1944 song by Al Dexter and His Troopers. The song was the follow-up to Al Dexter's two-sided hit, "Pistol Packin' Mama"/"Rosalita". It was recorded on March 18, 1942, along with "Rosalita" and the b-side "Too Late to Worry, Too Blue to Cry". "So Long Pal" stayed at the number one position on the Folk Juke Box chart for thirteen weeks in 1944. The B-side would also hit number one on the same chart.
Westerns swing originated in the 1920s and 1930s; small towns in the US Southwest. Although sometimes subject to the term "Texas swing" it is widely associated with Tulsa, others contend that "Western Swing music finds deep roots in the dust bowl of Oklahoma", and its influences include jazz from the major urban centers of the United States. Its stylistic origins lie in Old Time, Western, blues, folk, swing, Dixieland and jazz. Writing in Rolling Stone, Dan Hicks described it as Texas-bred music grafted to jazz, or as "white country blues with a syncopated beat.".
Don't Fence Me In is a compilation album of phonograph records by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters released in 1946 featuring Country and Western songs. This album contained the enormously popular record "Pistol Packin' Mama", which sold over a million copies and became the first number one hit on the then-new Juke Box Folk Song Records Chart that was later renamed the Hot Country Songs Chart.