Smith Ballew

One of the best as well as one of the only real cowboy jazz singers, Smith Ballew is sometimes said to be the fellow who started the Glenn Miller band, only to have it hijacked away from him. The native Texan was much more interested in art than music all the way until his university days. Hanging out in the evenings at the University of Texas, he and his brother Charles Robert Ballew became part of the cultish society known as jazz fans. Smith Ballew decided to learn guitar and banjo, and while he did study music formally at the college, an important part of his musical upbringing seems to be the informal knowledge he picked up hanging out with black musicians on the outskirts of town. The brothers became good enough players to join Jimmy's Joys, a combo led by Jimmy Maloney. The band can be said to have gotten the career of either Ballew off to a good start, as by 1923 the group already had the opportunity to head to California and record for the illustrious-sounding Golden record label. Golden turned out to be at the very least silver, the records selling quite well. These sides, however, do not feature Smith Ballew's vocal talents--at this point, he was still just an instrumentalist, sticking mostly to the banjo or "five-banger." He started up his own band, the Texajazzers, which in the solid tradition of territory bands gigged in its home state and those in immediate vicinity. In 1927 Smith Ballew dissolved the band and began collaborating with pianist Dick Voynow in the Wolverines Orchestra, attracting the attention of bandleader and talent hunter Ben Pollack at a Chicago show. Pollack came up with a job offer, and it was in this band that Ballew began singing as balancing a banjo on his knee. In the late '20s he headed to New York City with bandleader Ted...