When Oh When

Honest Jess
And His Western Cavaliers


When Oh When

Honest Jess Records
both sides

1959

 

Out of Amarillo, Texas. The vocalist is uncredited. But is not Honest Jess. I do believe the vocalist was Jerrell Messer who wrote the lyrics, while Virgil Hume composed the music of the flip side titled Suzanne, Quit Rocking To The Can-Can.  Jerrell Winfred Messer (1924-1975) was born in Memphis (Hall County, Texas). A WW II veteran, he died in California of a massive heart attack. 

 

Honest Jess Williams was a Western Swing guitarist in the 40s and 50s, with “Billy Briggs and the XIT Boys” and “The Sons of The West”.

 

Williams was lastingly grateful to be back home in Amarillo after his wartime-combat experiences. His European Theatre service had left the genial extrovert with a chronic-to-acute case of shell-shock anxiety that could be triggered by something as commonplace as an automobile’s backfire. In becoming ever more the local celebrity, Williams branched into television, beyond the X.I.T. Boys’ radio-and-teevee appearances, as an after-school kid-show host. He furthered his “Honest Jess” moniker as a Chevrolet salesman and a horse-trainer and riding coach. And he raised musically inclined offspring, including guitarist Ron Williams and drummer Lynn Williams, who would become prominent sidemen on the rock-band scene around and beyond Texas’ Panhandle region.

The 1950s found their ensemble sound essentially unchanged from the progressive fusion of idioms they had developed during the 1940s. Neither Briggs, with his taste for coaxing bizarre, stinging chords and a jazz-rooted shuffle-boogie pattern from his long-leggéd and homemade nine-string steel, nor Williams, with his blues-based heartbeat strumming, could be pegged as a typical hillbilly artist.

But Briggs and, especially, Williams found rhythm-and-blues and prototypical rock ’n’ roll appealing enough to explore, even within the resolutely anti-rock confines of their principal showplace, a diehard honky-tonk nightclub called the Avalon Ballroom, out on the wild-side-of-life northeastern fringes of Amarillo, Texas. The X.I.T. Boys’ 1947 independent-label recording of “X.I.T. Song,” combining a romantic complaint with a salute to an annual reunion of cowhands from the historic X.I.T. Ranch, proves downright subversive in retrospect: A review in the show-business tradepaper Billboard characterized “X.I.T. Song” as “very close to playing race swing.” It helps to know that Briggs and Williams were frequent after-hours sit-in players at the La Joya Hotel, a black nightclub and gambling den at the northwestern edge of Amarillo.

Jess Williams demonstrated a willingness to rock out with such local-label 45-r.p.m. releases of his own as “Suzanne (Stop Rockin’ to the Can-Can)” and a variant thereof called “Suzanne (Quit Twistin’ to the Can-Can).” These oddities surfaced while Jess was still holding forth at the Avalon Ballroom with a post-Briggs band called the Western Cavaliers, descended from the X.I.T. Boys.

Acknowledgment : Michael H. Price