Remember those Pace Picante Sauce television commercials that ran throughout the 1980s. “This stuff is made in New York City,” a comical cowboy would say with horror after picking up a jar of salsa. A chorus of outraged cowboys would always follow that quip, screaming “New York City!” Before moving to New York City, I basically envisioned that same mindset coming from the trendy Manhattan social scene when the thought of country music came up. “This song is made way down south,” a twenty-something would say as a toe-tapping tune came over the club speakers. “Way down south,” the whole dancing mob would shudder in unison. Country western music just didn’t seem like a likely fit for the Big Apple.
All of that changed when Lincoln Center’s annual Midsummer Night Swing imported The Time Jumpers, a group of well-respected western musicians from Nashville that are nearly the only ones left keeping Western Swing music alive. To see this old fashioned bunch of artists take the outdoor stage at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park was quite a unique experience. New Yorkers gathered around the stage, decked out in cowboy boots and hats, ready to do some two stepping on the specially designed dance floor.
“The Time Jumpers only play a couple road dates a year,” Ranger Doug Green told me while we chatted backstage before the performance. When not playing with this group, Green keeps busy as the lead singer of an equally impressive western band, Riders in the Sky. The fact that Green and his band-mates agreed to play New York City put a smile on his face. “It’s the most exciting town on Earth and we have a great turn out.”
Green, a self-professed music historian, reminisced about the seeming lost art of Western Swing, pinning the original style to musician Bob Willis. “Back in the 1930s, [Willis] took the fiddle music he grew up with and mixed it with Benny Goodman which he was hearing on the radio and mixed the two together.” While that sound dropped off the pop culture radar when rock music swept the scene in the 1950s, Green beams with pride, asserting that the Time Jumpers are keeping it alive. Continue reading Bringing Country Music to Lincoln Center
