01/04/2026
SWING ON THIS! Starting now. Publicradiotulsa.org
Here’s the reason I’m doing something Saturday that I almost never do, which is to feature the same song two weeks in a row on SWING ON THIS:
Last Saturday, I played a cut off that great Johnnie Lee Wills album REUNION. That in itself is certainly not unusual. I play tunes from it often, because I honestly believe it’s one of the best Western-swing LPs ever done. Executive-produced by Jim Halsey, produced and engineered by Steve Ripley (his first effort as a producer) , and released on the Flying Fish label in 1978, REUNION brought together a ton of great sidemen from the Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills bands, along with Johnnie Lee himself. (Bob had passed three years earlier, at age 70.)
The back cover of the album credits one of those stellar sidemen, fiddler and vocalist Joe Holley, with doing the vocals on the song I played last week. It’s “Rosetta,” the Earl “Fatha" Hines jazz standard that Bob loved and recorded (and named a child after). Because I didn’t have the actual album in the studio, but a disc made from it with only the titles credited, I didn’t know who the vocalist was, and I speculated out loud on whom it might have been.
Once I got home and pulled the LP from my record collection, I saw that the singing was credited to Holley, who also vocalizes on some of the album’s other cuts. So I was ready to announce that on this week’s show.
And then, a half-hour or so after last week’s SWING ON THIS hit its final note for the evening, the phone rang at my house. When I said hello, the voice on the other end said, “Alex Brashear,” loudly and authoritatively.
“What?” I asked.
“Alex Brashear. He’s the one doing the vocal on `Rosetta.’”
Then I identified the voice. It was Jim Halsey himself, the Tulsa-based impressario who’d overseen the production nearly a half-century ago.
“Well Jim,” I told him, “I thought it was Joe Holley. That’s what it says on the liner notes.”
“Nope.”
“You’re sure.”
“I was there. It was Alex Brasher, who played trumpet on the record. He was an old Dixieland guy, and he loved that song.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“If I’m wrong, I’ll give you $100,000.”
Most of the folks involved in those sessions are gone now, but even if they weren’t, I’d take Jim Halsey’s word for it. Indeed, he was there.
So that’s the story behind why there’ll be an encore presentation of “Rosetta” Saturday on SWING ON THIS. It’s so I can set the record, no pun intended, straight.
You can catch that tune and 14 more Saturday at 7 p.m. Tulsa time over NPR affiliate KWGS, 89.5 FM, and live-streaming everywhere via publicradiotulsa.org. Happy new year!
