07/13/2026
Monday Musical Memory: On this day (7/11) 1929 Billie Maxwell was in El Paso, TX., recording 4 songs ("A Cowboy's Wife." "Where Your Sweetheart Waits Yor You, Jack," "Haunted Hunter," and "The Arizona Girl I Left Behind") for Victor Records and Ralph Peer. Born in 1906, she was raised in Nutrioso, AZ., near Springerville. Her father, E. Curtis Maxwell, was locally renowned as a fiddler who'd amassed a massive repertoire of songs learnt from his father, William Beatty Maxwell, an Illinoisan who’d moved first to Nevada and then Arizona in the 1800s. Curtis Maxwell formed a string band called the White Mountain Orchestra who toured (on horseback) the ranches in the area, playing dances. In her teenage years, Billie joined her father’s band, where she played guitar alongside her brother, Marion (1913-1985), who played mandolin. Eventually she occasionally struck out on her own, performing solo shows in the back country.
In 1929, at the age of 23, she married a local schoolteacher, Alvin Chester Warner, and settled down to raise a family. A few months later, in June, her uncle Frank Maxwell (a lawman over in Silver City, NM.) noticed a classified in the local paper advertising an upcoming field recording session for Victor over in El Paso. At an audition, the White Mountain Orchestra were deemed worthy and two weeks later Chester Warner drove his wife, father in law Curtis, Marion and Frank to a recording session where they met Ralph Peer. They were living in Silver City, N.M. at the time.
Peer listened to the White Mountain Orchestra cut four numbers, “Escudilla Waltz,” “Gooson Quadrille,” “Leather Britches” and “Maxwell’s Old Rye Waltz.” After they finished, Peer singled out Maxwell and asked if she could sing. She sang (and recorded) “Billy Venero” and, suitably impressed, he asked her to record solo. She obliged (nine days later) with the four songs listed above. Although she may not have realized it, in doing so, she was the first woman to record western music.
After the session, Billie continued playing with her dad’s band and they all moved over to New Mexico, where they primarily played in a joint called The Smokehouse. After the birth of her first of ultimately two children, Billie Maxwell retired from music. Although she never received much recognition nor money for her role as western’s first female to record, her five songs are now part of history. Hopefully, someday she'll be recognized as the pioneer she was. She died on 2/18/54 and was buried in Kirtland, N.M.
An interesting book about Billie and the Maxwell family is available on Ebay now.
