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You are here: Home / Fiddling / Fiddle Tune a Day / Take Me Back to Tulsa – Fiddle Tune a Day – Day 280

October 16, 2012

Take Me Back to Tulsa – Fiddle Tune a Day – Day 280

Take Me Back to Tulsa is a great Bob Wills tune I always enjoy playing a little bit of Oklahoma Swing music. 😉

 

 

Take Me Back to Tulsa according to Wikipedia

“Take Me Back To Tulsa” is a Western swing standard song. Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan added words to one of Bob Wills old fiddle tunes in 1940. The song takes its name from the chorus:

Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry.
Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry.

The song is a series of unrelated, mostly nonsense, rhyming couplets, i.e.:

Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey.
Darkie picks the cotton, white man gets the money.

Modern covers of the song, in order to avoid racial offense, tend to replace above line with:

Poor boy picks the cotton, Rich man gets the money.

When Wills was asked about the lines, he said they were just nonsense lyrics that he learned as a youth.[1]

Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys recorded “Take Me Back To Tulsa” in 1941 (OKeh 6101) and it became one of their larger hits. When played at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, it often included the lines:

Would I like to go to Tulsa? Boy I sure would.
Well, let me off at Archer, and I’ll walk down to Greenwood.

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys performed the song in his 1940 movie Take Me Back to Oklahoma. Spade Cooley’s Western Dance Gang also performed it in their 1944 short movie titled for the song, Take Me Back to Tulsa.

The song has been recorded by many other artists over the years.

Article by Vi Wickam / Fiddle Tune a Day, Fiddling, Videos / 1940, 1941, rich man, swing music, western swing, wikipedia 6 Comments

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Comments

  1. Gopher says

    November 10, 2013 at 7:12 pm

    Good job, I’m a huge Bob Wills fan. I appreciate your mastery of the doublestop, I’m still trying to learn how to control the bow well enough

    Reply
    • Vi Wickam says

      November 18, 2013 at 9:27 am

      Thanks, Gopher! I’m a huge Bob Wills fan as well. Mastering the double stop is a challenge, and mastering the bow might even be a bigger challenge. We have some great bowing exercises on http://www.myTalentForge.com. 🙂
      Keep Fiddling!
      Vi

      Reply
  2. Howard Lee Harkness says

    May 11, 2014 at 1:45 pm

    #279B? Somebody lost count, I'll bet…

    Reply
  3. Vi Wickam says

    May 13, 2014 at 3:56 pm

    It's true, I lost track of what day it was. Recording a different fiddle tune a day for a full year was quite an undertaking. 🙂

    Reply
  4. Michael Friedman says

    September 19, 2014 at 11:11 am

    Excellent musical performance !

    Reply
  5. Vi Wickam says

    September 24, 2014 at 3:53 pm

    Woohoo! Take me back to Tulsa. 🙂

    Reply

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