The Hot Club of Cowtown has revived the lost art of cowboy jazz for enthusiastic roots music audiences worldwide, although mainstream audiences might find their style difficult to fathom. "If we could've seen into the future we might've chosen a slightly different route," quipped Hot Club guitarist Whit Smith in a Country Standard Time interview. "It's not a good idea to pick a style of music that you have to explain to people. It's like 'What do you play?' Western Swing. 'What's that?' It's like Django Rheinhart and Bob Wills. Then their eyes, they look just like a dog that just heard a funny sound."

The name of the Austin-based Hot Club Of Cowtown is a clever allusion to both their Western swing influences and the Quintette of the Hot Club of France, in which jazz innovators Django Reinhart and Stephane Grappelli played during the 1930s. The group has traveled a lot of hard miles since forming in 1997, and any regrets they might air concerning the course of their career actually represent triumphant modesty on the part of a band that has taken a hard-to-sell genre and made it pay steadily in a niche market.

The members of the Hot Club followed various musical paths before they came together. Elana Fremerman had played the violin since she was five years old. As she grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas, her parents' divorce exposed her to two distinct cultures--that of her father's country house, where she could ride horses, and that of her professional violinist mother's home, where classical music was always playing. Although the young fiddle-and-violin phenomenon studied music in New York and in India, Fremerman played classical music only occasionally after the Hot Club of Cowtown took off. The Western half of her musical personality became dominant.

Eventually Fremerman's travels took her to Colorado, where she worked as a horse wrangler on a high-toned dude ranch by day and played fiddle with the boss's house band, Cowboy Ken and the Ranch Hand Band, by night. An internship with Harper's Magazine necessitated a move to New York, and it was there that she placed an ad in the Village Voice, hoping to join up with other musicians. She met guitarist Whit Smith, who was starting up the 11-piece Western Caravan, a Bob Wills-styled aggregation that continued to play weekly at New York's Rodeo Bar even after Fremerman and Smith departed.

Although Whit Smith had played guitar since he was a "real little kid," it took him quite a while to settle on a musical style. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the glib Connecticut native played in a series of soon-to-be-forgotten New York area rock bands such as The Thieves of Eden and Pavlov's Dogs. After an ill-advised attempt at becoming a rock star in Japan, Smith moved to Boston for a brief stint with punk rock band the Blackjacks, and then plunged into a series of small-time musical projects.

Smith's association with musician Tom Clark led to some recording gigs with punk-poet icons Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith, but it was a day job at a New York Tower Records store that changed his life. "I was working on the jazz floor upstairs, that's where they kept the country records," recalled Smith. "The person who ran the country section took a vacation for a week or two, so they put me in charge. As it turned out, Marshall Crenshaw's compilation Thank God It's Hillbilly Music had just come out, and we were playing it all the time." Intrigued, Smith picked the brain of a record company representative about old-time music and promptly received gratis copies of Western swing giant Bob Wills's Tiffany Transcriptions, Volume One, Speedy West's Steel Guitar, and Hank Williams's 40 Greatest Hits.

Enthralled, the drifting musician found his musical anchor in "all those country guys who made those jazzy little instrumental records," and started his first Western swing band, the Dixie Riddle Cups, quickly followed by the aforementioned Western Caravan (the band's name was borrowed from that of Western swing bandleader Tex Williams). A big band with extra fiddles, steel guitars, and cornet arrangements satisfied one aspect of Smith's musical vision but didn't fulfill his long-range goal of actually earning a living playing music. Towards that end, he sought out Fremerman, who already left Western Caravan six months earlier.

Initially a duo, and later joining with bassist T.C. Cyran, Fremerman and Smith practiced hard and began playing for tips in San Diego's Balboa Park. Fremerman, who had occasionally played as a street musician since her teen years, considered sidewalk performing a "very honest transaction."

Encouraged by members of established swing bands Asleep At The Wheel and High Noon, the Hot Club moved to Austin after a year in California and quickly found themselves set up with a booking agent, a contract with Hightone Records, and a new member, Billy Horton on upright bass. Horton's love of vintage equipment dictated the sound of the band's first two albums, Swingin' Stampede and Tall Tales. But Horton, a renowned roots-music performer and producer in his own right, found that the Hot Club's nonstop touring limited his ability to take on a myriad of side projects, including a highly regarded band he performed in with his brother Bobby. His departure paved the way for Jake Erwin's arrival.

Best known as one of Hightone-label rockabilly artist Kim Lenz's original Jaguars, the Oklahoma-born Erwin has slapped bass with legendary rockabilly figure Ronnie Dawson, the Asylum Street Spankers, Wayne Hancock, and Dave Stuckey's Rhythm Gang, where he first met Whit Smith. According to Smith, Erwin helped Hot Club achieve its renowned fat sound, the secrets of which he gladly revealed. "We get a pretty big sound for a three-piece band. For one [thing], Jake plays with gut strings, which has sort of a boomp, boomp, boomp--that gives us a big attack right away. Then he slaps the bass, so he's getting a percussive sound as well. Then, I'm playing four-to-the-bar rhythm, but I'm changing the chord shaping, the voicing, sometimes every beat, sometimes every other beat. ... Then Elana is chunking on her fiddle along with the singing. ... So, everyone's doing almost twice the work, just as if we were a larger band."

Fremerman and Smith agreed that Erwin pumped new life into the Hot Club, with the former declaring that "Whit, Jake, and I are now focused on making records that sound good and will get played rather than something that fetishizes a certain era's acoustics." Their first step in this new sonic direction came with their 2000 release Dev'lish Mary. It took the Hot Club two more years to conjure up material for 2002's Ghost Train, a project that cemented the creative methods of the trio's two vocalists.

Since the release of 2002’s Ghost Train the band has released a further three albums, 2003’s live album Continental Stomp and 2008’s The Best of the Hot Club of Cowtown and Breakfast of Champions.

The band’s latest album, 2009’s Wishful Thinking, is an enthusiastic and varied affair. James has returned from a stint in Bob Dylans band sounding more confident than ever, adding classical and even Indian influences.