In the late '30s, during the classic era of
Western swing,
Cliff Bruner was one of the fiddlers who helped to create and develop that music by fusing
country and
jazz sounds. As the bandleader of his own
Texas Wanderers,
Bruner carved out a place in
country music history by focusing on a new kind of song -- not the smooth, heavily
jazz-influenced arrangements to which other Texas bands of the day aspired, but simpler vocal pieces with lyrics that spoke of disillusionment and hard luck.
Bruner is particularly noted for his recording of
Ted Daffan's composition "Truck Driver's Blues" -- the first trucker song ever committed to disc.
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In the late '30s, during the classic era of
Western swing,
Cliff Bruner was one of the fiddlers who helped to create and develop that music by fusing
country and
jazz sounds. As the bandleader of his own
Texas Wanderers,
Bruner carved out a place in
country music history by focusing on a new kind of song -- not the smooth, heavily
jazz-influenced arrangements to which other Texas bands of the day aspired, but simpler vocal pieces with lyrics that spoke of disillusionment and hard luck.
Bruner is particularly noted for his recording of
Ted Daffan's composition "Truck Driver's Blues" -- the first trucker song ever committed to disc.
Born in Houston, TX, in 1915,
Bruner was performing professionally and wandering around Texas in search of gigs by the late 1920s.
The medicine show provided him with early employment, as it did for many other early
country stars; he had signed on with Dr. Scott's Medicine Show, a traveling caravan hawking a cure-all called Liquidine Tonic. In 1934,
Bruner joined the pathbreaking
Western swing band
Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies, an act which billed itself as "The Greatest String Band on Earth." He cut close to 50 songs with the group before
Brown was killed in an auto accident in April 1936; the twin fiddles often heard in
the Brownies' music (setting a pattern that lasted for decades in
country music) are those of
Bruner and the classically trained violinist Cecil Brower.
After
Brown's death,
Bruner returned to Houston and formed a group called
the Texas Wanderers (sometimes called
Cliff Bruner & His Boys). The band settled into a slot on Beaumont radio station KDFM, whose listenership crossed the state line into heavily
Cajun Southwestern Louisiana. As did other
Western swing bands, this one fused
traditional fiddle-led
country music with elements of 1920s and '30s pop and
jazz. But
Bruner, from the start, favored a strikingly contemporary sound. He brought the wildly experimental electric steel guitarist
Bob Dunn on board from
the Brownies and featured an electric mandolinist, Leo Raley, and an energetic barrelhouse pianist,
Moon Mullican.
The Texas Wanderers' recordings on the Decca label crowded jukeboxes along the oil-rich, heavily industrialized Texas Gulf Coast. Among the many songs featuring vocalist
Dickie McBride were several that were recognized in retrospect as early classics of the
honky tonk genre: the band had perhaps its biggest hit in 1938 with a recording of the
Floyd Tillman composition "It Makes No Difference Now" and "Truck Driver's Blues" followed in 1939.
In the early '40s,
Bruner dissolved
the Texas Wanderers, but he continued to work with
Mullican and with other musicians who were forging modern
country music out of the forms of
Western swing: he performed with former Texas governor
W. Lee O'Daniel and with Louisiana governor-to-be
Jimmie Davis.
Bruner and
Mullican headed a band called the Showboys, and he made some recordings for Mercury and for small Texas labels after World War II.
Bruner largely dropped out of music in the early '50s in favor of an insurance-sales career. When the
Western swing revival flowered in the 1970s, however, he gained proper recognition as an enormously influential figure. He appeared on
Johnny Gimble's 1980 LP Texas Swing Pioneers and remained active as a performer well into his ninth decade. On August 25, 2000,
Bruner's long lifetime of making music came to an end when he died of cancer at the age of 85. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide
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