Wild West Music of Buffalo Bill’s Cowboy Band – The Americus Brass Band

Cowboy Band music and the Wild West show were a perfect fit.  According to Wild West programs, the Wild West show acts visually celebrated the frontier taming process that “smoothed the way for millions to follow.”  In their musical support of the show, the Cowboy Band, with their ordered marches, patriotic songs, popular selections, classic overtures, and other exciting band arrangements, aurally smoothed the often rough and rugged edges of folk, ragtime, Indian, and other music to make them culturally acceptable and even thrilling to the American and European audiences (that also numbered in the millions).  This recording features versatile selections that are energetic, dramatic, virtuosic, relentlessly cheerful, occasionally pompous, and sometimes culturally inconsiderate.  As played by the Americus Brass Band, however, the music is always engaging, revealing in its performance many attitudes of the Wild West era.  Wild West artifacts, posters, films, histories, programs, and other memorabilia have been studied and observed by interested people for decades, but with this recording of Cowboy Band music, more than a hundred years after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West folded its tents, modern civilization in the twenty-first century can better understand the total sensory impact of that famous nineteenth century cultural spectacle— Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.