The Abraham Camp Creek ranchhouse overlooks a draw named for the small creek below. From the front porch Frankie McWhorter points to where Comanches, buffalo hunters and pioneer wagon teams once camped along the banks of the stream. For ages this site was a place of repose for travelers across the rolling hills of the northern Texas Panhandle. Today that landscape is a modern cattle ranch with fenced pastures, steel pens, and oil tanks. Prairie sounds have been masked by the clatter of a pumpjack nearby, but music from an earlier day still tumbles raw and rollicking from that old house and scatters across the Plains on the steady Western wind. /

It is music once common at common at cowboy and ranch dances in the Panhandle and across the Llano Estacado. Pioneer musicians honed this Texas brand from Celtic reels, clogs, and jigs and popular songs of the times. Tinged with blues and subtle African syncopation, it is music that speaks of a journey from the British Isles through Appalachia and the American South to a new home in the West. Cowfolk danced to these tunes–in barns and bunkhouses, on tarps stretched out on the prairie, on platforms of wooden planks, and in country homes cleared of their furnishings to make way for dancing. /

For generations, this kind of music had been a big part of Frankie’s family. His grandfather I. J. Tucker was a prominent composer who penned “Wait for the Wagon.” I. J. played the pump organ, Frankie’s uncle Floyd Tucker won several Alabama fiddle championships, and his mother sang and played French harmonica. Frankie grew up singing at his mother’s side. /

“We had a radio,” Frankie says, “but we only played it for the news to keep from running down the batteries. Most of the time we just sang and played for each other.” /

As a young cowhand, Frankie with his natural musical ability came to the attention of legendary horse trainer Boyd Rogers. Rogers knew music as well as horses, and when he heard Frankie singing and playing harmonica, he took a special interest in the talented youngster. It was Rogers who urged Frankie to take up the fiddle. /

Frankie found a fiddle and another mentor while cowboying on the JA Ranch. Wagon boss Bud Long knew the old breakdowns and whistled the tunes while Frankie learned to play. The breakdowns were staples of home dances and “kitchen sweats” where a fiddler and a guitarist would stand in the doorway of a country home, playing simple tunes for dancers in two adjoining rooms. /

In the 1950s as Frankie learned those tunes, dancing had all but disappeared from private homes and moved into crowded dance halls. Blues and Dixieland jazz had transformed the traditional sound. The simple, three-chord, ringing accompaniment of the home-dance guitar had evolved into a chop rhythm with bass runs woven through chord inversions and incorporated into the driving beat of a jazz rhythm section. In Texas and Oklahoma, full bands were playing arrangements featuring vocalists and hot-lick soloists on horns, fiddles, and amplified steel and electric guitars—all accompanied by piano, bass and drums. From the traditional cowboy and ranch dances, Western Swing had emerged. /

Still, unique to this new style was the prominence and appeal of the raw sound of the frontier fiddle, especially, in the music of Bob Wills. Frankie McWhorter heard something of the past in tunes like “Faded Love,” and he dropped dimes in the slot of a cafe jukebox until he knew every nuance of those songs. Eventually he would perform with Western Swing legends the Miller Brothers and then with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But even in glitzy Las Vegas, Frankie would pull Wills aside backstage and ask the “Old Man” to teach him tunes that Bob had learned from his father John and maternal uncle Tom Foley. /

Seeking out tunes from his elders had become a pattern since Boyd Rogers had first steered Frankie in the direction of the fiddle. “You got the same feel for music as Bob Wills,” Rogers said. Knowledgeable of the old songs, especially cowboy versions, Boyd Rogers taught Frankie fiddle tunes such as “Forsaken Lover,” a variant of the tune to Bob Wills’s classic “Faded Love.” Rogers knew it from old-time trapper rendezvous. Recognizing Frankie’s feel for the old sounds, he even brought Eck Robertson, grandfather of the Texas fiddle, to the ranch on weekends to teach Frankie. /

All the while, Frankie McWhorter worked as a cowhand. Today he is foreman of the seventeen-section Abraham Ranch and still spends most of his time tending livestock, mending fences, breaking ice from frozen troughs, and helping neighbors do the same. Still, even with a lifetime of ranch chores, he has managed also to tend the old tunes, as caretaker, if you will–one of the last living links to this rich heritage of the Texas Plains. His knowledge, wisdom and style encompass the memories of his forebears, connecting with a musical source dating back more than one hundred years. /

Nobody sees more clearly than Frankie how a collection of old songs is a gift from the past. He has spent a lifetime gathering tunes that speak to him and giving them voice. As ranch people say, Frankie plays from the heart. If there is a rightful heir to the frontier fiddle legacy, it is this gentleman who fiddles late into the night in that Panhandle ranchhouse above the draw.
Lanny Fiel / Susan Miller January 1997