Albums That Deserve Another Listen

Patsy Montana & The Prairie Ramblers - Columbia Historic Edition

Tracks:

01. Deep Elem Blues

02. A Rip Rip-Snortin' Two-Gun Gal

03. Monkeys Is The Cwaziest People

04. Gonna Have A Feast Here Tonight

05. Hi-Falutin' Newton

06. I Haven't Got A Pot To Cook In

07. I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart

08. With A Banjo On My Knee

09. Goodbye To Old Mexico

10. Cowboy Rhythm

11. There's A Man That Comes To Out House

12. Beaver Creek

This 1984 collection, part of CBS's "Columbia Historic Edition" series, compiles twelve sides cut during 1935-1940. Although its cover would make it appear to focus on Patsy Montana, the album actually includes many of the Prairie Ramblers' solo sides, including some they cut as the Sweet Violet Boys, as well as those on which they accompany Montana. This is the sound of the mountains meeting the sound of the city. It's country music taking its first steps out of babyhood toward adulthood. And it's mighty, mighty pleasing, for there's something still thrilling about a wild and reckless jazz fiddle break, a stinging and sizzling mandolin lick, and a head-to-the-sky, wide-open-spaces yodel.

Patsy Montana is justly celebrated in country music history as the first woman to have a million-seller record, 1935's “I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart.” But there are more reasons than that for listening to her today. She pioneered the cowgirl/buddy image in country music establishing a new female entertainment personality. She was a successful country composer during the era when commercial songwriting in that genre was in its infancy. And she recorded with The Prairie Ramblers, arguably the greatest string band of country music's “Golden Age.”

She was from rural Arkansas. They were from rural Kentucky. Yet the music created by Patsy Montana & The Prairie Ramblers was a fusion of hillbilly instrumentation and jazzy urban rhythms, with perhaps a dash at ethnic polka and schottische styles thrown in for spice. It was hybrid music. It had bright, clear yodel bursts, immense good humor, dazzling instrumental passages and tremendous popular appeal. That is why Prairie Ramblers music still sounds fresh today.

 

When Montana and the Ramblers teamed up in 1933 both had recognized careers. Born Ruby Blevins, the then 21 year old singer/fiddler/yodeler/songwriter was already established in California and over KWKH radio in Shreveport, Louisiana. And the string band then known as The Kentucky Ramblers had already secured a regular cast spot on the WLS National Barn Dance radio show in Chicago.

They teamed up on WLS, a not inconsiderable factor in their subsequent rise to prominence. The Chicago station was the most powerful popularizer of country music in the world at the time. The same year that Montana joined the show, WLS went nationwide over the NBC radio network. WLS Artists Bureau pioneered roadshows for its acts, thus beginning the country booking agency business. And the mighty station reached millions of Northern urban listeners, thus bringing a regional style to national attention. At least part of WLS' overwhelming success was due to the distinctive sound it featured. There was a warm, homey, fireside, reassuring tone about it. Its stars had dulcet honeyed styles that gave them a friendly, neighborly quality. It was at once immensely folksy and incredibly professional. Patsy Montana & The Prairie Ramblers epitomized this sound.

 

Montana's performances were feminine in the then-dominant mother/sweetheart/comedienne modes for country music women but her introduction and popularization of the cowgirl/buddy/lover musical personality provided a new role model for female country acts. The singing cowgirl came along at a time when huge numbers of working-class women had to enter the work force alongside their husbands. Patsy's western fantasies of male female equality coincided with women's emergence from the kitchen. The exuberant singing cowgirl was a respectable way to swing.

 

To accommodate their new member's western image and repertoire, the four WLS string band members who had been performing together since 1931 - Floyd “Salty” Holmes (guitar, tenor vocals), Jack Taylor (bass), Charles “Chick” Hurt (mandola) and Shelby “Tex” Atchison (fiddle) - renamed themselves the Prairie Ramblers. Montana's main contribution to the act was her sense of showmanship and image, which was enough to distinguish the group from being just another National Barn Dance act, to being a headline attraction.

 

As separate acts and together, Montana and the Ramblers had recorded for Victor, but it was not until their discovery by the American Record Company's Uncle Art Satherley in 1935 that disc stardom arrived. By then the market for records was quite low. Few new artists were being recorded, and female country acts in particular were not considered good prospects. Nevertheless, Satherley believed in the band and its lead vocalist enough to take them to his company's New York studio in August 1935. He emerged with the biggest records that both Patsy and the band were ever to make. On August 15th, The Prairie Ramblers recorded their biggest hit, “Nobody's Darling But Mine,” and the following day came Montana's self composed classic “I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart.”

Over the next five years they embellished Montana's cowgirl/yodeler image and continued to mine the country jazz idiom as an acoustic swing band. A delightful addition to these twin toe tapping types of releases were those by “The Sweet Violet Boys.” This was a recording pseudonym adopted by The Prairie Ramblers to record slightly off-color material. Patsy wasn't allowed in the studios for these, but often Sweet Violet Boys sessions included guest appearances by Will Thawl (clarinet), Bob Miller (piano), George Barnes (guitar), John Brown (piano) and other country-jazz aficionados. The merry results were often in a vaudevillian jug band style, with Holmes switching from guitar playing to jug blowing for the occasions. Sometimes 78s were released with The Prairie Ramblers billing on one side and The Sweet Violet Boys name on the other.

 

The classic Prairie Ramblers, Patsy Montana, and Sweet Violet Boys recording sessions were from 1935 to the dawn of World War II, the period from which all the selections on this reissue come. The team broke up in 1940 when Montana went to Decca Records. The band eventually added drums and electric guitar and became a jazz ensemble, while Montana continued with her western songs and yodeling. 

Patsy Montana was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas in 1987 and in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee in 1996. She died on May 3, 1996 at her home in San Jacinto, California, and is buried at the Riverside National Cemetery in California.

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