The Steel Guitar Forum

OK Forumites Here is some musical history for you.

Several years ago I was visiting an older Western Swing gent . He offered me to look through some of his tapes that he acquired from another collector. He said, any tape you want give me a few bucks for. While glancing through I found 3 tapes that read "Live Billy Jack Wills, Wills Point 7-30-54" This would have been two months after Vance had two pedals added to his 51 Bigsby.
The band is having a blast playing and Vance, Tiny and Kenny Lowrey are just killing it.
I had a hard time concentrating on the other recordings in the box as I was a bit overwhelmed by my discovery.

The tapes were in rough quality and I did not want to play them with out getting them put CD first. I found a local service to transfer them to CD , and track them out for me. The music was outstanding, but the quality was lacking.
I sent these tapes off to a studio and had the levels equaled out a bit. We found a "one size fits all" fix to get some of the over bassy and muffled mix a bit more friendly to the ear. I did not want to sink a bunch of money into these, but putting some in was worth the preservation of this rare find. It still is not the greatest of quality recording , but the quality of the musicianship pushes through.

Recently Mikiya Matsuda put these on a drop box file, and I am putting these up to share. If you like what you hear I will accept a paypal donation to pay off some of my costs of getting these recordings audible. This is optional. If you like what you hear. I am at toddclinesmith@yahoo.com
Enjoy
https://www.dropbox.com/s/57r6dux3ll2p3 ... t.zip?dl=0

When I try and look at this, I get a ".Zip files can't be previewed from an archive file" message.
What am I doing wrong?

I couldn't get it to work either.
Erv

Do you guys have drop box ? You probably have to sign up, which is free.

I have got word from others who have accessed it.

It worked fine from dropbox

I do have Dropbox. I managed to download the files, but my computer tells me that it can't play them. Thanks for doing this anyway, Todd.

After clicking on the link, the download link is on the top right corner, do not click on the files themselves.

Todd Clinesmith wrote:Do you guys have drop box ? You probably have to sign up, which is free.

I have got word from others who have accessed it.

You don't need to have Dropbox.

It's a little fussy, but I got it to work with no account or sign up.

Choose "Direct download" if you see that, rather than "Save to my Dropbox".

Haven't listened yet. It is 41 mp3s, either FHG or QDesign, including "Slowly". Hmmmm..........wonder what Vatcat does on that? Not to mention "Good Rockin' Tonight" (a few weeks before Elvis did it and 6 months or so before Billy Jack did it in a studio) and two takes on the immortal "Rag Mop".

Todd,
These are great. In listen closely to them it appears that the recording quality is not bad,they are just noisy. Most of the noise is something that can be removed. I have work with tapes like this before.If you want I would work on them for you at no charge to preserve what are important recordings. Just need better files ( MP3's just don't respond well to noise reduction).....Chris

I was able to download without an account. Had to play with the Download button to get it to work. Thanks for the music.

Thanks, Todd! Great music!!

Glad everyone is enjoying these. One of the best Western Swing bands, and probably the rarest recordings to luck into. The rumor is these came off of reel to reel. Chris, i will email or PM you here shortly.

Thanks,
Todd

Wow Todd, that is awesome, thanks! A historic goldmine.

I tried directly downloading the files and they would not play, but they did play when downloaded to my dropbox folder. The difference is the direct download directory structure is:

Temp1_Live at Wills Point.zip\Live at Wills Point\Cassette Side A.zip\__MACOSX\Cassette Side A

But in dropbox there are two directories, one is the _MACOSX like above, and the other is:

Temp1_Live at Wills Point.zip\Live at Wills Point\Cassette Side A.zip\Cassette Side A

The songs will play from the second directory above; the songs don't play from the dropbox _MACOSX directory either.

Thanks for preserving this great music!
Donation sent.

I have that recording on a CD (I'm not at the location where my CDs are right now)....I can't remember where or from who I bought it, but it was available and I learned about it on this forum - about 12 or 15 years ago.....it is a killer recording in terms of the playing.....Vance & Tiny, just wow!.....

Howard,
Did you listen to the recording I put up? I've been a Vance / Billy Jack Wills geek for many years and have never seen or heard of this. I sent out some CD copies to friends about 10 years ago when I came across the tapes.
There was a live on the air "Standard Furniture Co." from OTR that is available, and I have seen that being sold. Of course there's the live KFBK recordings Western and Joaquin label's put out.

Thanks for this amazing post, Todd, and the work that goes behind sorting out old tapes too. You can spend hours of the day listening to the Tiffany CDs or whatever other Western Swing live material is out there (I'm looking at you, Chris Clem!) but "new" recordings of Vance Terry and this band are a whole special gift of their own. At a glance, I can't get enough of the versions of Goodman's "A Smoo-o-oth One," and Thompson's "Little Red Wagon". Can't wait to lay into the rest!

Todd,

Thank you so much for this important contribution to our community. The quality is really quite impressive considering the age of the tapes.

I've been bumping these in the shop for a few days now, loving it. Vance and the guitar player have such a special magic and playful attitude throughout the whole thing.

Muleskinner blues had me cracking up. Must have been a real party!

Todd Clinesmith wrote:Howard,
I sent out some CD copies to friends about 10 years ago

That might have been it.....I don't recall any company selling them and it's a cd with magic marker hand writing......

Thanks for those, Todd. I love the sound. It fires the imagination, like looking at a historic photograph.

Todd.......better late than never.

I just found the zip file on my hard drive, that I'd forgotten about, but kinda sorta remembered came from the forum, so I did a search, saw it was this and.....

WOW!! What an amazing document. Thanks so much for providing it!

PS.....the Dropbox link is still good, for people who haven't downloaded, yet.

On it!
Glad this post re-surfaced! I missed it originally. Thanks to Todd for posting it and Jim for bumping the thread. I can’t wait to listen to it.

Great stuff Todd! Thank you!