This Week in Texas Music History, we lost a Western swing founding father almost as soon as the genre began.
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By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On April 13, 1936, the emerging genre of Western swing lost one of its true innovators, Milton Brown. Brown, along with Bob Wills, helped establish Western swing, a mixture of jazz, country, blues, and popular standards that emerged in North Texas and Oklahoma dance halls during the Great Depression and migrated with working-class Texans and Okies to the West Coast during WWII.
Milton Brown was born just west of Fort Worth in Stephenville in 1903. By 1927 Milton and his brother Derwood performed with a band called the Rock Island Rockets, and in 1930 the Brown brothers met Bob Wills and joined his Wills Fiddle Band. The following year the group found a sponsor in Burrus Mills and performed under the name The Light Crust Doughboys. They recorded two sides for Victor Records, “Sun Bonnet Sue” and “Nancy Jane,” at the Jefferson Hotel in Dallas. This was both Wills’ and Brown’s first recording session and is often recognized as the first Western swing record.
Feuding with the Doughboys’ salesman boss Pappy O’Daniel, Brown left the band in 1932 and started his own ensemble, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies. They recorded a slew of classic Western swing sides, including “Where You Been So Long, Corinne?”, “Fan It,” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
The Brownies broadcast on Fort Worth’s KTAT and were popular performers at the city’s Crystal Springs Pavillion between 1932 and 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. It was after an April night at Crystal Springs, on Fort Worth’s infamous Jacksboro Highway, that Brown lost his life in a car accident. Other artists carried the Western swing torch aloft, but one of its founding fathers was gone too soon. Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, “Fan It” Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, “Keep a Knockin’ But You Can’t Come In”
Sources:
Jean Boyd. The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Milton Brown, Discogs, accessed March 21, 2025, https://www.discogs.com/artist/1381055-Milton-Brown-5.
Ruth K. Sullivan in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/milton-brown-and-his-musical-brownies
