Western swing music is a subgenre of American
country music that originated in the late 1920s in the
West and
South among the region's
Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in
Texas,
Oklahoma and
California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 led to its decline.