Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

The music called Western Swing was born in the desert southwest.

The people did not come together peacefully, but their music did.

Spanish guitars and German accordions and African drums.

The song styles of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood Cowboy movies, New Orleans Jazz, Memphis Blues, ancient folk songs from the British Isles and romantic ballads from the wide open desert to Mexico and the ranchos of Alta, California.

The music was made for dancing, first at ranch dances and Texas and New Mexico and across the old southwest.

People would come from miles around for parties that could last for many nights musicians crowded into a corner of the living room

partners swinging through the kitchen and swinging through the hallways kids gathered in the doorways

barbecues smoking outside wagons and, and maybe even a few automobiles

circled around the ranch house. The musicians would travel a circuit of hundreds of miles if they

were good, traveling with guitars and violins and whole families of performers, playing festivals

and wedding parties, and matching suits or rodeo-style uniforms when they can afford it.

There's a musical style that grew up from house parties in the sparsely populated American

Southwest.

Music for celebration. The fiddling guitar, the more the merrier, etc. The violin had come to the new world with the conquistadors, as it later came to Virginia with the English and to Nova Scotia with the French.

And in Spanish America, it was joined with the Spanish guitar, Renaissance era, four-stringed instrument with a fretboard and tuning pegs.

Well, it's not a Spanish word.

It's a hybrid word.

It's from Persian and Sanskrit.

With Tar being the Sanskrit for string and Git being our modern American pronunciation of the old Persian version of the Sanskrit word for the number four, as in four strings.

An update of the stringed instrument beloved by the Moors and the French troubadours,

brought to Spain and the Arab conquest.

...