Guitarist Cloet Hamman's name is a clear indication of the heavy Germanic presence in East Texas in the early 1900s, and his music was even more diverse. His longtime playing partner -- the two never recorded in another band besides the East Texas Serenaders -- was the fiddler Daniel Huggins Williams, and both hailed from the miniscule town of Linsdale, near Tyler, TX. Although their band went on to cut some two dozen sides released on Columbia, Brunswick, and Decca, neither man ever considered himself a full-time professional musician. Nonetheless, music was an extremely important part of Hamman's family. His father Will Hamman was a breakdown fiddler who placed in contests all around the States, and the son's professional career started off by him backing his dad at many a social event or country dance. Backing up a fiddler requires severely accurate time, an encyclopedic knowledge of tunes, and the ear required to connect the dots in case something in the memory gives out. Hamman had all these talents, and later displayed a penchant for intriguing single-string lead runs, his tone often as sharp as if a raven was plucking the note with his beak. Whenever the fiddler took a break, the guitarist had plenty of room to play, since the group's tenor banjoists -- beginning with John Munnerlyn, later Shorty Lester -- each stayed in a timekeeping role, except for a single recorded number in which the banjo got the melodic lead.

Rags, numbers that sound like rags, and waltzes made up most of the group's repertoire, with the waltzes becoming a particularly requested items among dancers. There were many string bands of this era that played a much more staid repertoire, in fact sticking almost entirely to square dance numbers played in only two or three different keys. Other groups that performed many rags and waltzes included the Texas Nighthawks, featuring the fine steel guitarist Roy Rodgers and the Humphries Brothers, while the fiddler Eck Robertson, one of the state's very first recording artists, had a huge influence on Williams and thus on the direction a group in which the fiddler was pretty much the captain of the ship.

Texas music writers point out the relationship between groups such as these and Western swing, in which the concept of an eclectic repertoire was carried to great extremes. The guitar style of Hamman was not something that carried forward into much Western swing music. Although the old-time single-line picking style of Hamman or players such as the great Riley Puckett was a basis for a great deal of country western guitar, it was the jazz styles of bebop and swing that most strongly pointed the direction for Western swing guitarists such as Eldon Shamblin and Tiny Moore. The blues influence could be dealt with just as handily with jazz as with old-time, and there was a lack of a really strong tradition of guitar in the latter music, at least to the extent of the fiddle repertoire. Guitar had always been used mostly for backup in the old-time music, whereas Western swing was a place where guitarists could supposedly let go a bit, well beyond the slight loosening of the reins represented by the work of Hamman. The only really valuable recorded document of this group is the Complete Recorded Works issued by Document; but most listeners come into contact with this group via a fleeting glimpse offered on any number of compilations, ranging from the narrow focus of old-time Texas string bands, in which the group certainly has historic presence, to massive multi-disc overviews of the entire history of American pop music, in which the East Texas Serenaders occupy a valuable niche as well. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi