John Makeig
Zeke Campbell
Members of his household addressed him as Muryel — pronounced like Merle — but for three-quarters of his lifetime, W.M. Campbell went for the most part by the made-up name of Zeke.
“Pappy Lee O’Daniel liked to have his players go by countrified-sounding rube names,” Campbell explained during a visit in 1981 at his homestead in Hurst. “For one reason or another, I got tagged with ‘Zeke.’
“It was kind of a burden, what with my wanting to be recognized as a hip and with-it jazz musician but finding myself typecast as some kind of hillbilly — but a fellow takes his opportunities where he finds ’em. And I am country folks by origin.
“But this music we call Western swing, now, it has always been subversive, anyhow,” Campbell continued. “There’s always been a certain satisfaction from insinuating jazz and the blues into what most people consider country music.”
By 1981, of course, many enthusiasts had accepted the basis in jazz of that Texas-styled idiom, and Campbell’s performing name had outgrown its hokier connotation to become synonymous with an energetic and boundlessly inventive manner of single-note runs and leaps upon the guitar.
Campbell (1914-1997) contributed mightily to the development of Western swing during eight crucial years — the middle 1930s into wartime — as a member of the Light Crust Doughboys, the Burrus Mill & Elevator Company’s promotional band, which also had yielded such bandleaders as Bob Wills and Milton Brown.
The motivating figure behind the Doughboys was W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, the flour-mill executive who rode an image of populist folksiness into a hitch as governor of Texas, largely on the strength of entertainment value. (O’Daniel’s most memorable slogan — “Pass the biscuits, Pappy!” — was puredee down-home salesmanship, an illusion of working-class folksiness.)
“It was one of those strange things that change the course of your life,” Campbell said. “And if it hadn’t been for that opportunity to join the Doughboys, I’d probably just have spent all these years pickin’ in the parlor.”
And by extension, if not for that opportunity, a rural West Texas youngster named Frankie Kinman likely would not have heard Campbell’s spring-loaded guitar solos over WBAP-Radio and might not have been inspired to model his own guitar-playing ambitions after the Campbell style.
Kinman, who became a respected teacher-performer, was quick to acknowledge a mentor: “Zeke, man! That’s where it all begins for a whole bunch of us Texas jazz-billies!”
Campbell, a native of Marietta, Oklahoma, began playing during the Depression, he said, “when there wasn’t much of anything else to do for fun.” He learned guitar via a give-and-take process with fellow musicians. Campbell first played professionally on radio broadcasts in East Texas.
“Muryel has a fantastic single-string technique,” fellow Doughboy Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery told me in 1984 during a reunion of players at Dallas. “We had this habit of going down to the Black folks’ clubs — in Dallas’ Deep Ellum district, at Fort Worth’s Jim Hotel, places like that — after hours to sit in, and that’s where Zeke, I mean Muryel, learned all that single-note business.”
But Campbell also had absorbed an ability to anchor country-style fiddlers with a rock-steady guitar rhythm. “Once I got grown up, more or less, various musically inclined friends and I would travel out into the backcountry and play for these old-time country dances.
“It was called string-band music, back then. They’d call it country and western music today, although today’s C & W doesn’t have much in common with what we were doing. We’d play the old hymns, hoedowns and breakdowns, popular tunes — but strangely enough, our playing was strongly influenced by the jazz players and the blues players.”
John Makeig
Although his direct influences were few — he pointed to the Continental European Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose work sounds modernistic even today — Campbell spoke of his role as a matter of his reinforcing innovations made by artists such as Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson.
Campbell’s early work, including a pioneering use of the electrified guitar, was unlike any other style heard at the time on the Southwestern front. Jim Boyd, working with Roy Newman’s Dallas band in 1935, had arrived earlier as an amplified guitarist, but Campbell was more adventurous. Campbell’s stinging approach helped to force a new direction for the Light Crust Doughboys.
Burrus Mill & Elevator invited Campbell to join the Doughboys after Bob Wills had split from Burrus on hostile terms to run his own shows. Bandleader Milton Brown had departed Burrus yet earlier and by 1935 was registering an international scale though still headquartered in Fort Worth.
“If any one artist embodied an essence of Western swing,” Campbell said, “it was Milton. Milton set the pace and made it easy for the rest of us to introduce whatever new sounds we were capable of. If Milton had not died [in 1936], then Bob Wills would not have made it so big. Wills was able to step in and fill the gap...”
As they intensified a jazz orientation while maintaining the required popular image of rusticity, the Light Crust Doughboys remained a force. Hollywood-based Republic Pictures used the Doughboys in two of Gene Autry’s starring pictures, “Oh, Susanna!” and “The Big Show” (both from 1936). One scene in “Oh, Susanna!” features an astonishing solo break by Campbell, as astringent as grain alcohol.
The band’s phonograph records bear out the jazz basis. Burrus Mills supplied a library of musical scores, with which the players felt free to improvise.
Recalled Smokey Montgomery: “We had to be in the studio at 9 o’clock of a morning, but we didn’t go on the air till ’leven o’clock. We’d just hang out and jam. Zeke and [pianist] Knocky [Parker] and I, we’d pick out a song, start tinkering with it — change the key, change the modalities, through everwhich many ways there were to play the thing.
“Knocky and Muryel got to be so tight that they were adapting each other’s approaches — Knocky was doing guitar parts on the piano, and Muryel was playing piano parts on the guitar,” Montgomery continued. “Muryel would take a saxophone part or a brass-horn part and adapt it to the guitar.”
Montgomery also invoked the name of a more widely known jazzman: “I kind of like to think of Muryel as the Charlie Christian before Charlie Christian.” Of course, Christian never found it needful to pose as a country player in order to collect a paycheck.
