Shorty Warren and His Western Rangers

If you were looking for something to do in the early 1950s in northern New Jersey and were a country music fan, you may well have ended up in the Copa Club in Secaucus, a short distance across the Hudson from Manhattan. There you would have encountered Shorty Warren and his brother Smokey, veteran country entertainers and entrepreneurs who both owned the club and led the house band.

If you liked what you heard, you may well have invested in this 10-inch record as a souvenir of your visit. To us today, it is a souvenir of a time when western bands also played polkas for dancing, when novelty tunes were a staple of most every act, and when sentimental fare like "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" was expected as part of the complete entertainment package.

The Warren brothers, born in Arizona in the mid-teens, never became big stars and there is nothing here to suggest that was an injustice. But they did operate a succession of clubs, appear on radio and television in Newark, and made records for a number of labels. This is the only LP that I have found under their own name (they did back Rosalie Allen on a Waldorf records budget album), and as I suggested above, it appears to have been a private pressing. If so, I do hope that Smokey and Shorty got their money back because it is one of the worst produced records I have ever heard - poorly recorded, cut at far too low a level, and on the noisiest vinyl imaginable. I have done my best to uncover whatever music was in the grooves, and the results are listenable if not lovely.

The Warren brothers had long lives, dying only a few years ago