Lone Star Swing

by Duncan McLean

Book Overview

Using the prize money from his Somerset Maugham Award, Duncan McLean traveled from Orkney, Scotland, to Texas in search of the extraordinary mix of jazz, blues, country, and mariachi that is Western Swing.

This account of his travels takes in barbed-wire museums, onion festivals, hoe-downs, ghost-towns, dead dogs, and ten thousand miles of driving through the Lone Star State. A constant soundtrack of vintage music from bands like the Texas...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393317560
• ISBN13: 9780393317565
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Quite a ride

One of the funnest books I've read in a long time, and educational too. I was drawn to this book because of the Bob Wills kick I've been on because of a boxed CD set and biography of him, but this book let me know how much more this is to Western Swing music than Bob Wills, so now I'm encouraged to further pursue this music thanks to the author. I'm also amazed at how these people who write great travel books seem to have such great travel experiences along the way, when I'm usually bored to tears when I hit the road. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough and don't have the proper attitude, but I think another thing you can take out of this book is how enriching the travel experience can be if you're in the proper frame of mind.

Laugh-out-loud travelogue . . .

This is a five-star book for readers who enjoy fish-out-of-water accounts of travel, where the writer's eye (ear, nose and throat, for that matter) seems to encounter only the completely incongruous and absurd. The jokes go both ways, of course - on the inhabitants of the place traveled through as well as the credulous author, whose expectations are wildly different. Paul Theroux does this in (to me) a cranky and irritating way ("Kingdom by the Sea"), but Duncan McLean, a Scotsman from little Orkney, plays it for belly laughs, and there's a lot of fun to be had along the way. A caveat or two. Texans may find his jaundiced view of Texas grating, and lovers of Bob Wills and western swing may find the book something of a hodgepodge on those two subjects. Onion festivals, scary encounters with border patrol, and his opinion of Rush Limbaugh will seem beside the point. Likewise, readers not into western swing will find his enthusiasms, knowledge of music trivia, and references to musicians and songs a bit of a yawn. But if you've read Charles Townsend's biography of Bob Wills and love the music, this slaphappy mix of travel writing and musicology can put a big smile on your face. Also, McLean's difficulties in finding and interviewing the old-timers who once played with Wills will give you an appreciation for the monumental effort of research that went into the writing of the biography. Best advice: Read Townsend first, then pick up McLean and be prepared to laugh.

Texas! Music!

McLean, a Scottish writer, discovered an old, scratchy LP of Bob Wills and was instantly became a fanatic for western swing, a music that dominated popular radio in the '30s and '40s and is now close to forgotten. After winning the Somerset Maugham Prize for his book of short stories, he decides to spend the money on a tour of Texas tracking down the surviving musicians who played western swing. On his journeys, he finds the Texas Wills and his associates sang about (in small towns) and a Texas overwhelmed by newer Trends (Austin, Fort Worth, etc.). An interesting tale of another guy obsessed with music.

A pleasure

Some people, judging from their reviews, just didn't "get" the book. That's okay, I can understand it. It's probably best for people like myself, folks too young to have heard Wills' music any normal way, but who somehow stumbled across it and fell in love. If you're a long-term fan of the music, or have never heard it at all, well, I can imagine the book may seem lacking - though personally, I liked the tales of McLean's efforts not to seem too alien to his surroundings, and his disappointment in finding that mid-1990's Texas is not quite the wonderland of Western Swing he'd hoped. That reviewers point out the book seems to be too much about McLean is rather the point - it's a lonely journey and he only catches a few faint echoes of the subject of his search.The part where McLean attempts a phone interview with an absolutely befuddled Floyd Tillman is fabulous. Tillman's importance to country music is huge, but the peak of his career is several decades past. Tillman can't seem to wrap his head around the idea that some guy from Scotland would even want to interview him - told the title of the book, Tillman thinks it's "Lone Star Swig", which he assumes will be a book about beer! The question isn't asked too directly, but the book really does make one wonder about how much we appreciate the heroes of our past and the innovators and originators of our cultural history. That the book is written by a Scottish guy looking for the answers to questions most of the "native" people in his book seem to care not a whit about really drives the concept home.It's a well-written book with a lot of cool tales and McLean comes across as the sort of guy you wouldn't mind joining on a road trip. On that basis, this book works for me.