78 RPM - Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys - Dusty Skies / It's All Your Fault - OKeh - USA

78 RPM Record

Artist:	Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys
Label:	OKeh
Country:	USA
Catalogue:	06598
Date:	27 Feb 1942
Format:	10"
Collection:	I Own It I Want It
Community:	1 Owns
Price Guide:	Valuation Page
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Track	Artist	Title	Composer	Rating
A	Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys	Dusty Skies	Walker	Rate
B	Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys	It's All Your Fault	Walker	Rate

Notes

A: Vocal By Tommy Duncan With Orch. Acc.
B: Vocal By Leon McAuliffe With Orch. Acc.
Recorded July 24, 1941, CBS Studio (Radio Station KNX), 6121 Gower & Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, CA, mx: H 382 (A), H 380 (B).
Reissued on Columbia 37420 (May 1947) and Columbia 20147 (spring 1948).

BB Feb 28, 1942, p. 61 (News Notes)

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Comments and Reviews


fixbutte 2nd Apr 2015		And here's the Asleep At The Wheel version:



fixbutte 2nd Apr 2015		The "Dusty Skies" video that was blocked for a while is back in Germany and possibly in your country too. It is debatable if "this is the best video on youtube" as someone commented it, but anyway it is a fascinating combination of sound and vision. I may add some trivia about the song: ¤ Apparently this was the first song Cindy Walker had ever written. As said before, she was 23 when Bob Wills recorded it, but by her own account she was just 12 when she wrote it, see here: Walker wrote the song after finding newspaper clippings about the Dust Bowl in her grandmother's musty attic. "It broke my heart," Walker told Daniel Cooper - the writer of Willie's Cindy tribute disc liner notes. "And I had to write it to get over it and I did." (Willie's Cindy tribute, by the way, is Willie Nelson's album You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker, released in March 2006, which includes a version of "Dusty Skies".) ¤ "Dusty Skies" is definitely one of the most emotional and passionate performances in Tommy Duncan's long vocal career, obviously evoked by the somber cowboy realism of the song. Although he sings, "This ain't tears in my eyes / Just sand from these dusty skies" at the end, Cindy Walker recalls, as quoted in the above source, when Tommy Duncan sang "Dusty Skies, he cried. It would always be a song associated with Duncan, and consequently it was recorded again in 1960 when Wills and Duncan reunited. ¤ Some people don't seem to understand who is meant at the beginning of the song, "Dusty skies I can't see nothing in sight / Good old Dan you'll have to guide me right". As said before, this is a cowboy song, and Dan is apparently the cowboy's horse that can find the right trail without seeing anything in the dust. As noticed on a C&W forum, this horse's name was also used in another famous C&W song, "Cool Water": In the song, the rider/singer's horse is named "Dan" ... This makes me recall a song recorded by Marty Robbins, and possibly others, titled "Cool Water". The style of the song is very similar to "Dusty Skies" and in this tune as well, the horse is again named "Dan" (i.e. "keep a movin' Dan, don't ya listen to him Dan"). "Cool Water" was actually written by Bob Nolan of The Sons Of The Pioneers, who recorded it several times, first in 1941 for Decca (and that Dan may have been a mule, as Wikipedia says). ¤ It also seems that many people, even English native speakers, don't know either what a "dogie" is, and it is also wrongly spelled in the song lyrics on the YouTube video, "So get along doggies we're moving off of this range". As said here, it is a stray or motherless calf: In the language of the American West, a stray or motherless calf is known as a dogie. The origin of this word remains uncertain, but Ramon F. Adams, the author of numerous works on western Americana and a cowboy himself, offered one possible etymology for dogie in his book Western Words. During the 1880s, when a series of harsh winters left large numbers of orphaned calves, the little calves, weaned too early, were unable to digest coarse range grass, and their swollen bellies "very much resembled a batch of sourdough carried in a sack." Such a calf was referred to as dough-guts. The term, altered to dogie according to Adams, "has been used ever since throughout cattleland to refer to a pot-gutted orphan calf." Another possibility is that dogie is an alteration of Spanish dogal, "lariat." Still another is that it is simply a variant pronunciation of doggie. ¤ "Dusty Skies" is also the last song in the Tribute To The Music Of Bob Wills And The Texas Playboys album of Asleep At The Wheel, released in October 1993. This version, featuring Ray Benson and Riders In the Sky, underlines the exceptional standing of the song in the Texas Playboys' repertoire, as commented on the C&W forum above: The style of the song is unique, as it is a western song as compared to the western-swing style of the others.



fixbutte 10th Feb 2015		Unfortunately, a few days after posting it, the "Dusty Skies" video has been blocked in Germany, Canada and probably in most European countries because "This video contains content from SME, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." As I've been told, it is still available in the USA though. For those who are able to watch the video, I have to correct my statement that it depicts an actual sandstorm. The video is actually a slow motion, played in reverse, film of a rocket launch, with very interesting effects anyway.



fixbutte 9th Jan 2015		Both sides were written by well-known C&W songwriter Cindy Walker who was just 23 years old when these sides were recorded. (For those who are interested, here is a worthwhile blog article about Cindy Walker). "Dusty Skies", written some years before and inspired by the dust storms on the American prairies in the mid-1930s, is the more popular song, subsequently also sung by Spade Cooley, Johnny Bond and The Sons of the Pioneers. The Texas Playboys, featuring Tommy Duncan's sonorous vocal, offer a surprisingly pure Western recording, see the YouTube video with an actual sand storm: "It's All Your Fault", sung by Leon McAuliffe, is presented in the Texas Playboys' familiar Western Swing way:

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Linked Releases

USA - Columbia - 1947