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Bakersfield Sound duo swingin' on a star

BY SUSAN SCAFFIFI, Contributing writer | Wednesday, Sep 29 2010 05:08 PM

Last Updated Wednesday, Sep 29 2010 05:08 PM

Bakersfield Sound veterans Tommy Hays and Jimmy Phillips will find themselves in great company this weekend. The two musicians are being inducted into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame.

"I'm just dumfounded," said drummer Phillips, 68. "To me it's something you never know that this is going to happen to you."

"I was surprised when they first approached me," said guitarist Hays, who will turn 81 during the four-day celebration.

Hays and Phillips will be honored along with eight other musicians from around the United States and formally inducted on Sunday at the Machinists' Hall in Rancho Cordova in the Greater Sacramento area. A nonprofit organization, the Western Swing Society was started in 1981 by musicians Loyd and Perry Jones. After Sunday's ceremony, the Hall of Fame will grow to 607 musicians; Hays' and Phillips' names will be added to a list that includes past inductees Bob Wills, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Merle Haggard, Don, Fred and Rose Maddox, Billy Mize and Jimmy Thomason.

Phillips said the Hall of Fame is an honor from his peers.

"They nominate you and vote on it," Phillips said. "You just don't realize they're even talking about you."

Hays, an Oklahoma native, said he got his first guitar when he was 10 and began playing for church services. His concept of the guitar changed while working as a projectionist in a movie theater in 1946, when he heard strange music from the film he was running.

"I heard this solo guitar," Hays said. "I didn't even know a guitar could sound like that."

"It was Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers," Hays said.

By the time Hays was 22, he was living in Bakersfield, a regular performer on Billy Mize's television show at night, holding down a day job and teaching 22 guitar students. Hays had started his own group, the Western Swingsters, and along with Buck Owens, the Maddox family members, Red Simpson, Billy Mize, Fuzzy Owen and the rest, helped create the brand of western music known as the Bakersfield Sound.

"Back then, they weren't calling it 'The Bakersfield Sound,'" said Phillips, who explained the term was first used by Los Angeles-area record producers who hired Bakersfield musicians to record with major label country artists. Phillips' career included several years with those major labels, including Capitol Records, RCA Victor and others in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"When they started calling, they said, 'We want that Bakersfield Sound,' and it just caught on," Phillips said.

Phillips has performed regularly with Hays' Western Swingsters since the 1960s. He is featured on a the band's 2006 CD release, "60 Years of Western Swing."

Western Swing, also known as Texas Swing, can be traced back to the lower Great Plains states in the 1920s and 1930s. Pioneering musicians such as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies and Leonard Slye (better known as Roy Rogers) and the Sons of the Pioneers were small bands that adapted the early forms of jazz, such as Dixieland, to the experience of the still-Wild West.

"If you were to draw a line right down the Mississippi, you'd have Eastern Swing on one side, and Western Swing on the other," Phillips said. "The difference is you play a lot of the same songs but you use different instruments."

Phillips said Western Swing bands were typically smaller than their Eastern counterparts and included fiddles, acoustic and steel guitars along with more traditional swing band instruments. Band leader Donnell Clyde "Spade" Cooley is credited with coining the term "Western Swing," putting an end to labels such as "cowboy" and "hillbilly" music.

After the festivities in Sacramento, Hays, Phillips and the Western Swingsters will host a Hall of Fame party at the Crystal Palace at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Hays noted some special guests will join the band, including fiddler Tim Johnson, guitarists Larry Petree and Monte Mills and other musicians.

"I feel like my life's come full circle," Hays said. "I'm retired, I still play music."

"You get kind of down and draggy, you pick up a guitar and it all goes away," Hays said.