The Light Crust Doughboys Are on the Air: Celebrating Seventy Years of Texas Music.

The Light Crust Doughboys Are on the Air: Celebrating Seventy Years of Texas Music. By John Mark Dempsey. Foreword by Art Greenhaw. Evelyn Oppenheimer Series, no. 2. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, c. 2002. Pp. x, 294. $29.95, ISBN 1-57441-151-9.)

Anyone who wonders about the tradition of sponsorship by flour and bread companies found so often in vernacular music need look to few other sources than the legendary Light Crust Doughboys. Begun as a publicity and goodwill vehicle for the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, millers of Light Crust Flour, the Doughboys launched the careers of several famed figures in the history of western swing--Bob Wills, Milton Brown, and Leon McAuliffe, to name but a few. The band also helped set the standards for much of the music of the South, the Southwest, and the nation as a whole in the twentieth century. Many key country and western swing artists of the first half of the century got their start working for commercial sponsors, before their own personal appearances and record sales took off and made them stars. They performed under the aegis of patent medicine shows, tobacco companies, and the ever-present flour and bread concerns. Some groups and individual performers made it big; some had their moment and faded from popularity. The Light Crust Doughboys started as a company band and never reached the level of superstardom. Yet they were modestly successful for more than seventy years because they stayed true to their origins in the swing movement, remained content to perform mainly in Texas and largely in humble venues, and maintained a family-friendly performance style and a collegial atmosphere for their band-mates.

John Mark Dempsey offers a loving tribute to the band's tradition and legacy, a tribute based mostly on secondary sources and interviews with Doughboys. He treats with thoroughness and delight their steady musicianship, marketing prowess, ambivalent relationships with the musicians' union, good-natured rivalries with the more famous Texas Playboys, and remarkable staying power. He finds that the Doughboys' uncomplicated music and unpretentious manners turned them from a goodwill instrument for Burrus Mill into a band that enjoyed considerable goodwill for itself. Recurring throughout the book are biographical sections on Marvin "Smokey" Montgomery, who safeguarded the Doughboy image and style for over sixty years and whose banjo playing helped enable the band to do without a drummer, a tradition of string bands and western vocal groups that Bob Wills and others broke. This was just one of the ways the Doughboys charted their own course in the history of western swing.

The book's title might suggest that it is a history of the Doughboys' use of radio. In fact, the title comes from the opening announcement the band used on their broadcasts. This opening can be heard on the compact disc that accompanies the book and also contains a representative sample of Doughboy recordings. What one hears on the CD is what gave the Doughboys their longevity and success: unadorned, good-time tunes expertly performed by people you might enjoy having over to your house to play some music in the front room.

Lyon College

DAVID STRICKLIN