"Dixie Ramblers Waltz" - Dixie Ramblers

In 1928, the first Cajun recording has emerged on the market and area bands were quick to popularize the genre.  Hector Duhon and his long-time music partner Octa Clark began playing traditional Cajun music that year but their career would go through many changes and the band had to evolve with those changes.  According to Duhon,

When we first started playing, a girl wouldn't go to a dance by herself.  She had to have her mother along. So all along the wall you'd see the mothers sitting, along with their smaller children, who had to come along too.1  

In 1930, Duhon and Clark changed their style form Cajun to country, calling themselves the Dixie Ramblers. There were other notable differences in those days. For instance, many of the country dance halls didn't have electricity. 

Cajun music kind of went out of style for a while and country music was the big thing.  We used to rent a car for the night and put a 110-volt generator in it to run power to our equipment.  We'd have to take breaks just to go check on our car.1  

Dixie Ramblers, 1933
Jessie Duhon, Hector Duhon,
Hector Stutes, Willie Vincent

Duhon reformed his group and added Hector Stutes on fiddle, Jesse Duhon on guitar and Willie Vincent on guitar.  When KVOL became the first radio station in Lafayette, with studio in the old Evangeline Hotel, Duhon and his band were billed to play the first broadcast.   About that time, they were also in high demand for live radio programs in Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas.1  Soon, they were discovered by RCA Bluebird's Eli Oberstein and were invited to travel to New Orleans in 1936 to record the "Dixie Rambler Waltz" (#6352).   Radio show host and record collector Brody Hunt explains:

I for one think it is a stunningly beautiful side. Regarding the tuning, I think the fiddle is in fine pitch, and the bass, as a fret-less instrument, is being played with a brilliant dissonance rarely heard in American Music!3  

When the recording made it's way to Bluebird's factory, Eli had decided to reuse the song in a marketing ploy down in south Texas. To appeal to his Spanish Mexican market, Oberstein re-titled the instrumental as "Vas Dixie" (#2500) and co-pressed it under the pseudonym El Violinista Campestre as well as the Dixie Ramblers.2   He neither understood nor cared about how the music would be received in ethnic communities.    He would do this with Mexican artists as well.   If there was a way to sell more records during the Depression Era, Eli and his Bluebird team found a way.

1. The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, Louisiana) 21 Dec 1983
2. http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/recordings/vals-dixie
3. Discussions with Brody H.  

Release Info:
BS-99224-1 Dixie Ramblers Waltz | Bluebird B-6352-A
BS-99223-1 The Waltz You Saved For Me | Bluebird B-6352-B