This week in Texas music history: Cliff Bruner is born

On April 25, 1915, western swing fiddler Cliff Bruner was born in Texas City.

Bruner went to high school in Tomball, where he started playing in the twin fiddle style with Jasper Heaton. The two developed a reputation around East Texas, supplementing their farm work with dance gigs in Houston.

When Bruner was eighteen, he received an invitation from Milton Brown, a founding father of western swing with the Light Crust Doughboys and Musical Brownies. Brown wanted his band to bring in twin fiddlers, pairing Bruner with Cecil Brower.

Bruner jumped at the chance. Riding high despite the Great Depression, Bruner recorded four dozen sides with Brown over two years before the bandleader’s untimely death in 1936. Bruner, now 20, moved to Houston and launched his own group, Cliff Bruner and the Texas Wanderers.

Bruner’s Wanderers had a few claims to fame: a hit version of the standard “It Makes No Difference Now,” one of the earliest truck songs with Ted Daffan’s “Truck Driver’s Blues,” and Leo Raley, among the first to perform with electrically-amplified mandolin.

Bruner moved the Wanderers from Houston to Beaumont and settled in as one of the Golden Triangle’s premier dance bands. He also rosined up his bow in the political arena, supporting the campaign bands of Texas Governor Pappy O’Daniel and Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis.

Bruner told historian Jean Boyd that “I never tried to copy anybody’s style, never in my life. I created my own and I had to live with it, good or bad,” but his playing also echoed western swing’s jazz influences.

Bruner named both Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith as role models. And he paid those influences forward. As Jean Boyd wrote, “Bruner was a powerful jazz violinist whose earthy, grassroots musical language identified him with Texas and made his style easy for younger violinists to understand and emulate.”

Sources

Jean Boyd. Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012.

Jean Boyd. The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Ruth K. Sullivan in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.

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