Andy Schroder And His Western Band

Western Swing Band Members: Fiddle: Tommy Camfield Steel Guitar: Don Lawrence Guitar: Clint Badgwell Bass, Steel Guitar: Andy Schroder Andy Schroder was a reluctant bandleader when he took over the remnants of Cecil Brower's Kilocycle Cowboys around 1950, when Brower, who had been leading the Cowboys in Odessa, Texas since 1946 departed. Steel guitarist and sometime bassist Schroder, from Corsicana, Texas, had been playing professionally since he was a teenager, performing in a Hawaiian duo with his brother as early as 1934. In the late 1930's, he joined the reformed Hi-Flyers, relocating from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City with the group and recording with them from 1939-1941 (as well as with Dick Reinhart in 1940, and possibly with Lew Preston's Men Of The Range.) He rejoined a short-lived reincarnation of the band in the mid-1940's and recorded with Bill Boyd before joining Brower in Odessa. Brower's fine band also included Hi-Flyer vocalist Buster Ferguson and former Lightcrust Doughboy pianist Frank Reneau; it didn't record commercially, but several KECK radio shows survive. A major oil center that saw considerable growth during this period, Odessa attracted a lot of bands from other areas and Moon Mullican, Cotton Thompson and Tiny Colbert all led bands in the city during this period. Schroder replaced Brower with one of Brower's biggest fans, the young north Texas fiddler Tommy Camfield and put himself on bass, bringing in steel guitarist Dan Lawrence and rhythm guitarist -vocalist Clint Badgwell. Best known today for his work with Hank Thompson and others, and for co-writing the classic "Miles And Miles Of Texas," Camfield had not recorded at this point; his style was an amalgam of Brower, Joe Venuti and J.R. Chatwell. Camfield's fiddling is the highlight of the rather subdued "Prairie Dog Ramble," a Schroder-penned instrumental originally recorded as "Juke Box Jump," with the Hi-Flyers on Okeh in 1941, with Lawrence replacing Schroder on steel. Andy Schroder, who also wrote the steel guitar standard "Roadside Rag," eventually wound up back in Dallas-Fort Worth and played with a 1970's incarnation of the Lightcrust Doughboys until shortly before his death in the mid-1970's. In the early 1980's, a few years before his death, Tommy Camfield recorded a fine instrumental album for Fort Worth's Blum label.