Bill Briggs & the X.I.T. Boys, Amarillo

BILLY BRIGGS and THE X.I.T. Boys - The Yodeling Song (Time 110)

There are few things finer than Billy Briggs. Damned incredible voice. Genius tunesmith. Amazing steel. One of the best backing outfits in all of the west. Always dressed to the 9's.

Bill came to Amarillo from Fort Worth in the late 30s and was one of the founding members of the great Sons of the West (Stomped HERE) . The Sons lasted, mostly, up until just after the mid-point of the 40s when Billy grabbed a local ranch name and christened his new group the X.I.T. Boys and hooking up with label man / poltico Dan Allender's TIME Records out of Dalhart, where he released a string of 78s.

"I'd Rather Be Anything Than What I Am" b/w "Yodelling Song" would be one of his last releases for time and shows Briggs hitting on his two strengths... being his own worst critic ("I'd Rather Be...") and his word twistin' humor ("Yodelling Song").

As for the X.I.T.... the X.I.T. Ranch got it's start in the 1880s when a fire left Texas government with no home. A deal was struck with two brothers named Farwell out of Chicago. The brothers would back the budget on a $3,000,000 capitol building and in exchange they'd be granted 3,000,000 acres of grazing ground on the Texas Panhandle frontier. It was a weird stretch of land that jigged and jagged in a roughly 30 mile swath from from the Texas/O.K. border, south along the Texas/N.M. border, down to a spot south of Lubbock. The X.I.T. was the largest fenced ranch of it's time and also one of the most forwarding thinking outfits of the period. It was broken up in the 1920s. More info can be had at the X.I.T. Rodeo website HERE.