Western Swing is centered around the FIDDLE! 

Just NOW found the PERFECT reason to start this thread! 

Paul Anastasio's offering FREE short Fiddle tutorials & even back-up guitar tutorials, with support material available to download! 

I felt privileged to take some of his Fiddle workshops at Fiddle Hell last year.  Paul's extremely generous with his knowledge and a GREAT teacher!  He studied under "the father of Jazz Violin" - Joe Venuti.

Paul Anastasio Western Swing Video Tutorials

Here's a few examples of the INVALUABLE INFO to learn & DON'T FORGET there's guitar tracks, too!

Excerpt for Wikipedia:

Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline. 

The movement was an outgrowth of jazz.  The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing; and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.

Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands, even fully orchestrated bands, vocals, and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead. Additionally, although popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively. 

...I probably wasn't thinking there could be a connection between 'Western Swing' and the music I like to play, back when I took his other workshops, but I can see I WAS WRONG - EVERYONE can benefit from the music knowledge of this style! 

...jumped at the chance to subscribe to his channel! 🤗

- Emily