Monthly Archives: October 2018

Victor V-40311 – Stuart Hamblen – 1930

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Texas-born singer, songwriter, and storyteller Stuart Hamblen made his greatest hit with gospel songs in the 1950s, but many years earlier he got his start as pioneering singing cowboy, and helped push along the birth of “country and western” music in the days when the genre was narily yet zygotic.

Stuart Hamblen, pictured on a 1930 Victor flyer.

Carl Stuart Hamblen was born on October 20, 1908 in Kellyville, Texas, four miles west of Jefferson, the son of itinerant Methodist preacher Dr. J.H. Hamblen.  As a boy, he spent much of his time traveling with his father on his evangelical pursuits, eventually taking the young Stuart to Hamlin, Texas, out Abilene way.  There he encountered the lore of the western cowboy, and his songs, as well as that of black field hands.  He attended McMurry College with intentions to become a teacher, but instead was drawn to music.  In 1926, Stuart Hamblen began singing on KFYO in Abilene, by some accounts making him radio’s first singing cowboy.  Three years later, he won a talent contest in Dallas, and used the cash prize to secure passage northward to Camden, New Jersey, home of the Victor Talking Machine Company, where he aimed to make some records, following much in the footsteps of his antecedent Carl T. Sprague.

On June 6, 1929, Hamblen made his recording debut with four sides for Victor, singing and strumming his guitar to “The Boy in Blue”, “Drifting Back to Dixie”, “When the Moon Shines Down Upon the Mountain”, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountains, No. 2”.  Thereafter, the young man went west, to California, where he became “Cowboy Joe” on Los Angeles’ KFI.  Meanwhile, he made a further ten sides for Victor through 1931, culminating with his own popular compositions “My Brown-Eyed Texas Rose” and “My Mary”, both later popularly covered by the likes of the Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown, and others.  By the middle of the 1930s, Hamblen had formed a western band called his “Covered Wagon Jubilee” (or simply his “Gang”), which at one point included guitarist Wesley Tuttle, and with whom he recorded again, first making a pair of unreleased sides for the American Record Corporation in 1934, before signing with Decca for another nine that year and the next, of which all but one were released.  Those proved to be his last records for nearly a decade, none of which ever seemed to sell very well, and he focused primarily on his radio work.  From the late 1930s through the ’40s, Hamblen also appeared in several motion pictures, several of which starred Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne.  In 1938, he ran for Congress in California, as a Democrat.  During World War II, he wrote and sang some patriotic songs, and recorded again for Russian spy Boris Morros’ American Recording Artists (ARA) label in 1944.

At the height of his singing cowboy fame, Stuart Hamblen built up quite a reputation as a hard drinker, gambler, and all-around hellraiser.  He’d get drunk, shoot out streetlights, and get sent to jail, only to have his sponsors bail him out so he could be on the radio the next day.  But that changed when Billy Graham came to Los Angeles on his first Crusade in 1949.  Hamblen’s wife persuaded him to attend the revival, and the reverend turned his life around.  Hamblen experienced a religious awakening, and announced the very next day on his radio program that he was “hitting the sawdust trail.”  From then on out, he dedicated his work to sacred music, composing “It is No Secret (What God Can Do)” and “This Ole House”, and recording far more prolifically—and successfully—than ever before, with sessions for Columbia, RCA Victor, and Coral.  He also prominently supported the temperance movement, and, after his radio show was canceled because he refused to do advertise beer, he renewed his political ambitions in 1952 with a presidential run on the Prohibition Party ticket, garnering 72,949 votes.  He also remained associated with Billy Graham, who credited much of his success to Hamblen’s timely conversion.  Hamblen was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and was honored with “Stuart Hamblen Day” Los Angeles on February 13, 1976 and later with “Stuart Hamblen Days” in Jefferson, Texas.  Following a battle with brain cancer, Stuart Hamblen died at the age of eighty on March 8, 1989.

Victor V-40311 was recorded in Hollywood, California on August 21, 1930.  It was released on October 17th of that year, and sold a total of 1,826 copies.  Hamblen is accompanied by his own guitar, as well as unidentified players on steel guitar and fiddle.

Hamblen sounds rather like Ernest Tubb (who would not make a record for another six years) as he sings and yodels his own composition “Sailor’s Farewell”.

Sailor’s Farewell, recorded August 21, 1930 by Stuart Hamblen.

On the reverse, he sings a cowboy’s tale of heartache on another original composition: “By the Sleepy Rio Grande”.

By the Sleepy Rio Grande, recorded August 21, 1930 by Stuart Hamblen.

Okeh 8794 – Little Hat Jones – 1929

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Decades before the latter day country music hero, the state of Texas produced another music maker called George Jones: the outstanding early blues guitarist and singer who went by the name “Little Hat”.

One of about three known photographs of Little Hat Jones. Published in The Naples Monitor, November 22, 1962. Courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History. Copyrighted image used under fair use doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 107).

George Jones, Jr., (misidentified by many outdated sources as “Dennis”) was born on his formerly enslaved grandfather’s farm in Bowie County, Texas—in the farthest northeastern corner of the state bordering Arkansas—on October 5, 1899, the only child of George Sr. and Lela (Holloway) Jones.  He dropped out of school after the sixth grade to help his ailing father on the farm after a loss of the season’s crop of cotton.  Jones claimed to have started out playing piano at church, but switched instruments after his mother “done gone and found an old guitar for [him] to pick.”  Influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson, he learned to play in a peculiar fast, melodic, and uniquely rural style rather reminiscent of fellow Texas bluesmen such as Mance Lipscomb, albeit rougher and more formulaic, often employing monotonic (or “dead thumb”) bass, and marked by occasional injections of a boogie-woogie beat.  His habit of starting out a song at a breakneck tempo and slowing down before beginning to sing, intentional or not, added a certain sense of tension to his recordings.  Probably around the age of seventeen, after his father and the farm recovered, Jones started making money with his music, but continued to make his living by means of various employment as a laborer throughout all of his life.  A tall and thin man standing about six-foot-three, Jones was nicknamed “Little Hat” by his boss (who reportedly even made out Jones’ paychecks to that name) while working a construction job in Garland, Texas, because of the cut-down brim on his work hat.  For at least a period from the late 1920s to early 1930s, Jones took up residence in San Antonio, where he worked on a road building crew.  When the Okeh record company made a field trip down to the Alamo City in 1929, Little Hat Jones cut his first recordings as an accompanist to fellow Texas bluesman Alger “Texas” Alexander, who had been recording with Okeh since ’27.  On the fifteenth of June of that year, Jones recorded eight sides backing Alexander and a further two solo.  He was behind the microphone again six days later to cut four more solo sides, and again four more when Okeh returned to San Antonio the following year, netting a total of five records issued under his own name.  Some of his songs provide glimpses into his personal life; “Cherry St. Blues” takes its name and subject from the San Antonio street on which Jones lived while in San Antonio, and includes the line “I want Eddie Duncan to be my brother-in-law,” referring to the family with whom he lodged at the time.  Though he never again recorded commercially after 1930, Little Hat Jones continued to play at juke joints and booger roogers in and out of the state of Texas alongside the likes of J.T. “Funny Paper” Smith and, reputedly, Jimmie Rodgers and T. Texas Tyler, and he may also have spent some time working as Texas Alexander’s accompanist off the record.  Jones claimed that Okeh invited him to record further in New York, but, perhaps as a result of the worsening Depression, those plans evidently fell through.  On March 13, 1936, he married Miss Janie Traylor and settled down in Naples, Texas, where he remained for the rest of his life, working odd jobs for various employers.  In 1964, Jones was interviewed by local newspaper man Morris G. Craig of the Naples Monitor and recorded—still in fine form if a little rusty on the guitar—playing several more songs, including a re-recording of his 1929 “New Two Sixteen Blues” and a rendition of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waiting for a Train”.  By the end of his life, Jones was living in Hughes Springs, Texas, where he found work the nearby Red River Army Depot.  Little Hat Jones died of complications resulting from bowel cancer on March 7, 1981, in the Municipal Hospital in Linden, Texas, and is buried in the Morning Star Cemetery in Naples alongside his wife Janie, who had predeceased him by six years.  His grave marker was placed by the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music.  Some twenty years posthumously, Jones’s music gained fame outside of record collecting and blues circles from the inclusion of his “Bye Bye Baby Blues” on the soundtrack of Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 motion picture Ghost World.  For many years, Little Hat Jones was misidentified by blues researchers as Dennis Jones of Caldwell County, Texas.  Evidently, there was a real musician by that name, albeit not the same one as our Jones.

Little Hat Jones recorded Okeh 8794 on June 21, 1929 in San Antonio, Texas, his second record date, a week after his first recordings accompanying Texas Alexander.  It was released in 1930.

First up, Jones plays and sings the outstanding “Rolled From Side to Side Blues”, borrowing its name from a stanza within his debut recording “New Two Sixteen Blues”, which he reused in this song.  It’s a wonder that guitar didn’t catch fire—just listen to those descending runs!

Rolled From Side to Side Blues, recorded June 21, 1929 by Little Hat Jones.

On the reverse, he combines the classic railroad song with the blues for lost love on his eponymous “Little Hat Blues”, most certainly my favorite of Jones’ recordings, and in my opinion one of the great masterworks of country blues (though that “Bye Bye Baby” is a dilly, no doubt).

Little Hat Blues, recorded June 21, 1929 by Little Hat Jones.

Updated on November 25, 2025, and with improved audio on June 15, 2024.