Tommy AllsupW
Tommy Allsup

Thomas Douglas Allsup was an American rockabilly and swing musician.

The Belleville OutfitW
The Belleville Outfit

The Belleville Outfit was a cross-genre American folk band based out of Austin, Texas. Their sound has been described as "a mix of gypsy swing, big band jazz and cross-genre Americana music". In April 2007, after three days of practice, they performed their first gig at MerleFest in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Members Rob Teter and Marshall Hood are from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Additional band members were recruited through connections Rob had made while studying music business at Loyola University New Orleans of New Orleans, Louisiana. Fellow students Jonathan Konya and Connor Forsyth left New Orleans for Austin to join the band that was to become The Belleville Outfit. Marshall Hood invited Austin’s darling Phoebe Hunt, who had been playing with the folk band The Hudsons out of Austin for four years. When the original bassist Jeff Brown retired from the Belleville Outfit to pursue a career riding sharks in the pacific, Forsyth brought in Nigel Frye, a talented bassist he knew from Tulsa, Oklahoma who had previously quit music all together, and was living out his life as a meat inspector.

Bill Boyd (musician)W
Bill Boyd (musician)

William Lemuel Boyd was an American Western style singer and guitarist.

Cecil BrowerW
Cecil Brower

Cecil Lee Brower was a classically trained American jazz violinist who became an architect of Western swing in the 1930s. Perhaps the greatest swing fiddler, he could improvise as well as double shuffle and created his own style which became the benchmark for his contemporaries.

Milton BrownW
Milton Brown

Milton Brown was an American band leader and vocalist who co-founded the genre of Western swing. His band was the first to fuse hillbilly hokum, jazz, and pop together into a unique, distinctly American hybrid, thus giving him the nickname, "Father of Western Swing". The birthplace of Brown's upbeat "hot-jazz hillbilly" string band sound was developed at the Crystal Springs Dance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas from 1931 to 1936.

Spade CooleyW
Spade Cooley

Donnell Clyde Cooley, better known as Spade Cooley, was an American Western swing musician, big band leader, actor, television personality, and convicted murderer. Cooley's career ended in 1961 when he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his second wife, Ella Mae Evans.

Tommy DuncanW
Tommy Duncan

Thomas Elmer Duncan, better known as Tommy Duncan, was a pioneering 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.

Fred LaBourW
Fred LaBour

Frederick LaBour, better known by his stage name Too Slim, is a Grammy award-winning American musician, best known for his work with the Western swing musical and comedy group Riders in the Sky.

Merl LindsayW
Merl Lindsay

Merle Lindsay Salathiel, better known as Merl Lindsay, was one of the premier American Western swing musicians from the 1930s to the mid-1960s and founder of Merl Lindsay and His Oklahoma Night Riders.

Joe MaphisW
Joe Maphis

Joe Maphis, born Otis Wilson Maphis, was an American country music guitarist. He married singer Rose Lee Maphis in 1953.

Noel BoggsW
Noel Boggs

Noel Edwin Boggs (1917–1974) was an American musician who was a virtuoso on the lap steel guitar. He was one of the pioneers in electric steel guitar who helped popularize the instrument beyond its native Hawaiian music into other genres of American popular music, specifically Western Swing. Boggs played and recorded with almost every major artist in the genre including Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (1944-1945) and Spade Cooley's Dance Band. Bob Wills' band helped define the guitar's role in western swing; the innovations of his his guitarists deeply influenced country, rock and jazz music. Boggs appeared on some 2000 recordings as a soloist and his playing was prominent on several of Wills’ hits that became Western swing standards, including "Roly Poly", "Texas Playboy Rag" and "Stay a Little Longer".

Riders in the Sky (band)W
Riders in the Sky (band)

Riders in the Sky is an American Western music and comedy group which began performing in 1977, having made more than 8,000 live appearances through 2019. The band has released more than 40 full length albums, starred in a self-titled television series on CBS lasting two seasons, wrote and starred in an NPR syndicated radio drama Riders Radio Theater, and appeared in television series and films including as featured contributors to Ken Burns' Country Music. Their family-friendly style also appeals to children, exemplified in their recordings for Disney and Pixar. They have won two Grammy Awards and have written and performed music for major motion pictures, including "Woody's Roundup" from Toy Story 2 and Pixar's short film, For the Birds. The band also recorded full length companion albums for Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.

Dave StognerW
Dave Stogner

David Stout Stogner was an American musician, who was one of the premier Western swing musicians playing on the West Coast. Known as the "West Coast King of Western Swing", Stogner moved to California to pursue a musical career with the encouragement from fellow Texan, Milton Brown.

Hank Thompson (musician)W
Hank Thompson (musician)

Henry William Thompson was an American country music singer-songwriter and musician whose career spanned seven decades.

Tex WilliamsW
Tex Williams

Sollie Paul "Tex" Williams was an American Western swing musician from Ramsey, Illinois. He is best known for his talking blues style; his biggest hit was the novelty song, "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! ", which held the number one position on the Billboard charts for sixteen weeks in 1947. "Smoke" was the No. 5 song on Billboard's Top 100 list for 1947, and was No. 1 on the country chart that year. It can be heard during the opening credits of the 2006 movie Thank You for Smoking.