I’m a ding-dong daddy from Dumas, babe
You ought to see me do my stuff
What do I need to keep saying about the Tiffany Transcriptions and the fact, the stone-cold fact, that they establish Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys as one of the greatest purveyors of pure fun in musical form? I’m not sure that sentence even made sense, but that just reflects how deeply I love this series of archival releases. I suppose I should say that all three volumes of this series have had fourteen tracks; so when this one wraps up, we’re forty-two songs deep into the Tiffany vault and, guess what, I’ve finally found one that I don’t like. It’s a very weird track called Frankie Jean and it sounds nothing like the rest of the tracks in this series; it’s only singer Tommy Duncan and an acoustic guitar (with, of course, a couple of asides from Wills) and it’s a kind of spoken-word piece about a horse named Frankie Jean and the particular way Duncan had to whistle for the horse to come. It’s built around Duncan whistling and the guitar mimicking the whistling pattern. It’s . . . not good and actually kind of annoying; luckily, it isn’t even two minutes long and the other thirteen tracks here are all as brilliant as I was expecting.
The album opens with an affectionate reading of Basin Street Blues with a very good, laid-back vocal performance from Tommy Duncan and then it closes with a cover of Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train where the Playboys absolutely kill the central riff of the song and then take turns trotting out great solos. Crazy Rhythm and Barnard Blues are fantastic instrumentals; the latter features a great performance by guitarist Lester Barnard who doesn’t ever quite get into distortion, but he does play some of what Tommy Duncan calls “coal miner chords,” down and dirty. Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone and Milk Cow Blues are great, witty numbers. And if you’re looking for the absurdity of something like Bring It On Down to My House, Honey, from Vol. 2 of this series, I’ve got two choice picks for you here. One of them is I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas, a jazz standard covered by just about everybody including Louis Armstrong; the Playboys do the song up right, taking it at a manic pace with Wills and Duncan trading increasingly absurdist verses until you can’t help but laugh: “You can shake it, you can break it, you can hang it on the wall/if you throw it out the window, I’ll catch it ‘fore it falls.” Even less explicable are the lyrics to the incredibly catchy, call-and-response tune Four or Five Times: “Maybe I’ll try/And maybe I’ll cry/But if I die/I’m gonna try/Four or five times.” If anyone has the slightest notion what that means, fill me in. But, you know, whatever, because this album is more of the same for this series, with that one brief exception of Frankie Jean. This is, once again, just a jolt of pure joy and energy in up-tempo western swing style. 4 stars.
tl;dr – third volume of archival releases from Western Swing pioneer has one dud track, but the rest of the album is as phenomenally entertaining as usual; pure joy, energy and brilliance. 4 stars.