I am not a singer. No false modesty, I don’t have a good voice and I find it a very frustrating instrument. I sing along to the radio in the car, but the music is so loud I can’t hear how bad I am, so it’s okay. When I don’t have something to drown me out, put it to you this way: my cat howls at me. But, this week I realized that the small shower here at home has these awesome acoustics that are just too good to waste. Since the piano won’t fit in the shower and it’s not good to get a wood oboe soaking wet, my only way to exercise the sounds of the space is with those pesky vocal chords. After many attempts to reproduce any number of songs, I have found exactly one song that I can sing even moderately well without the assistance of a radio to drown out my weak points:
“New San Antonio Rose”
This signature song of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys ought to be familiar to serious country music fans. If you are interested in rounding out your musical education with the high-points of all the major genres and sub-genres, this song ought to be somewhere on your to-listen list as a grand example of Western swing. If you are from Texas I suspect that you might be like me where one day you hear this tune playing and you begin singing along, never realizing until that moment that you knew the words…
It was called “New” San Antonio Rose because the “old” version Bob Wills originally put together didn’t have lyrics. With the addition of words, they called it “New San Antonio Rose.” Allegedly, the tune was, at least in part, developed when Wills decided to play the tune “The Spanish Two-Step” backwards. FTW? For shits and giggles I sat down and tried to play something backwards on the piano. Um. Fail. So points to Bob for being some kind of crazy genius with his fiddle.
It’s been covered more times than I can count (I can name at least 5 renditions off the top of my head) by a plethora of artists and in multiple languages. It helped rocket Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys into the national spotlight back in the day.
In the grand tradition of country-western music (and plenty of other musical genres, but this one gets the most shit for it) it’s about a lost love. In the grand tradition of Texas, it’s dance-able. And it’s about Texas. All these elements have made it a favorite of mine for years. The shocker was the part about how sing-able it is. Maybe I should have suspected it with the number of artists who’ve performed the song, but I didn’t. And I sure didn’t expect it to be the one song that I can maintain in tune start to finish. Maybe it’s that the spread of the range is just right. Maybe the tempo makes it easier to control the changes. I don’t know. All I know is that I usually sing it through 3 times in the shower–and the cat’s okay with it.
