Bob Wills

He was born on a cotton farm in Kosse, Texas,[8] to Emma Lee Foley and John Tompkins Wills.[9] His parents were both of primarily English ancestry but had distant Irish ancestry as well.[10][11] The entire Wills family was musically inclined. His father was a statewide champion fiddle player, and several of his siblings played musical instruments.[12] The family frequently held country dances in their home, and while living in Hall County, Texas, they also played at "ranch dances", which were popular throughout west Texas. In this environment, Wills learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin early.[13]

Wills not only learned traditional music from his family, but he also learned some blues songs directly from African American families who worked in the cotton fields near Lakeview, Texas. As a child, he mainly interacted with African American children, learning their musical styles and dances such as jigs. Aside from his own family, he knew few other white children until he was seven or eight years old.[14][15]

The family moved to Hall County in the Texas Panhandle in 1913,[16] and in 1919 they bought a farm between the towns of Lakeview, Texas, and Turkey, Texas.[17] At the age of 16, Wills left the family and hopped a freight train, travelling under the name Jim Rob. He drifted from town to town trying to earn a living for several years, once nearly falling from a moving train.[18][19]

In his 20s, he attended barber school, married his first wife Edna,[20] and moved first to Roy, New Mexico, then returned to Turkey in Hall County (now considered his home town) to work as a barber at Hamm's Barber Shop. He alternated barbering and fiddling even when he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, after leaving Hall County in 1929. There he played in minstrel and medicine shows, and, as with other Texas musicians such as Ocie Stockard, continued to earn money as a barber. He wore blackface makeup to appear in comedy routines, something that was common at the time. Wills played the violin and sang, and had two guitarists and a banjo player with him. "Bob was in blackface and was the comic; he cracked jokes, sang, and did an amazing jig dance."[21]

Since there was already a Jim on the show, the manager began calling him Bob.[21] However, it was as Jim Rob Wills, paired with Herman Arnspiger, that he made his first commercial (though unissued) recordings in November 1929 for Brunswick/Vocalion.[22] Wills quickly became known for being talkative on the bandstand, a tendency he picked up from family, local cowboys, and the style of Black musicians he had heard growing up.[23][24]

While in Fort Worth, Wills added the "rowdy city blues" of Bessie Smith and Emmett Miller, whom he idolized, to a repertoire of mainly waltzes and breakdowns he had learned from his father, and patterned his vocal style after that of Miller and other performers such as Al Bernard.[25] His 1935 version of "St. Louis Blues" replicates Al Bernard's patter from the 1928 version of the song.[26] He described his love of Bessie Smith's music with an anecdote: "I rode horseback from the place between the rivers to Childress to see Bessie Smith... She was about the greatest thing I had ever heard. In fact, there was no doubt about it. She was the greatest thing I ever heard."[27]

In Fort Worth, Wills met Herman Arnspiger and formed The Wills Fiddle Band. In 1930 Milton Brown joined the group as lead vocalist and brought a sense of innovation and experimentation to the band, which became known as the Aladdin Laddies and then soon renamed itself the Light Crust Doughboys because of radio sponsorship by the makers of Light Crust Flour. Brown left the band in 1932 to form the Musical Brownies, the first true Western swing band. Brown added twin fiddles, tenor banjo and slap bass, pointing the music in the direction of swing, which they played on local radio and at dancehalls.[28]

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys

After forming a new band, The Playboys, and relocating to Waco, Texas, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market. They left Waco in January 1934 for Oklahoma City. Wills soon settled the renamed Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noon shows over the 50,000-watt KVOO radio station, from the stage of Cain's Ballroom. They also played dances in the evenings. Wills largely sang blues and sentimental ballads. "One Star Rag", "Rat Cheese Under the Hill", "Take Me Back to Tulsa", "Basin Street Blues", "Steel Guitar Rag", and "Trouble in Mind" were some of the songs in the extensive repertory played by Wills and the Playboys.[29][30]

Wills added a trumpet to the band inadvertently when he hired Everet Stover as an announcer, not knowing that he had played with the New Orleans symphony and had directed the governor's band in Austin. Stover, thinking he had been hired as a trumpeter, began playing with the band, and Wills never stopped him. Although Wills initially disapproved of it, young saxophonist Zeb McNally was eventually hired. Wills hired the young, "modern-style musician" Smoky Dacus as a drummer to balance out the horns.[18]

He continued to expand the lineup through the mid to late 1930s. The addition of steel guitar whiz Leon McAuliffe in March 1935 added not only a formidable instrumentalist, but also a second engaging vocalist. Wills and the Texas Playboys did their first recordings on September 23–25, 1935, in Dallas. Session rosters from 1938 show both lead guitar and electric guitar in addition to guitar and steel guitar in the Texas Playboys recordings.[31] About this time, Wills purchased and performed with an antique Guadagnini violin. The instrument, worth an estimated $7,600 at the time, was purchased for only $1,600.[18] In 1940, "New San Antonio Rose" sold a million records and became the signature song of The Texas Playboys. The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.[32]

In 1940, Wills, along with the Texas Playboys, co-starred with Tex Ritter in Take Me Back to Oklahoma.[33] Altogether, Wills appeared in nineteen films, including The Lone Prairie (1942), Riders of the Northwest Mounted (1943), Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), The Vigilantes Ride (1943), The Last Horseman (1944), Rhythm Round-Up (1945), Blazing the Western Trail (1945), and Lawless Empire (1945).[28]

In December 1942, after several band members had left the group, and as World War II raged, Wills joined the Army at the age of 37,[34][35] but received a medical discharge in 1943.[36][37] After leaving the Army in 1943, Wills moved to Hollywood and began to reorganize the Texas Playboys.[38] He became an enormous draw in Los Angeles, where many of his fans had relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs. Monday through Friday, the band played the noon hour timeslot over KMTR-AM (now KLAC) in Los Angeles. They also played regularly at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego.[39]

He commanded enormous fees playing dances there, and began to make more creative use of electric guitars to replace the big horn sections the Tulsa band had boasted. For a very brief period in 1944, the Wills band included 23 members,[36] and around mid-year he toured Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with 21 pieces in the orchestra.[40] Billboard reported that Wills out-grossed Harry James, Benny Goodman, "both Dorsey brothers bands, et al." at Civic Auditorium in Oakland, California, in January 1944.[41]

Wills and His Texas Playboys began their first cross-country tour in November 1944, and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry on December 30, 1944. According to Opry policy, drums and horns were considered pop instruments, inappropriate to country music. The Opry had two western swing bands on its roster, led by Pee Wee King and Paul Howard. Neither were allowed to use their drummers at the Opry. Wills' band at the time consisted of two fiddlers, two bass fiddles, two electric guitars, electric steel guitar, and a trumpet. Wills's then-drummer was Monte Mountjoy, who played in the Dixieland style. Wills battled Opry officials and refused to perform without his drummer. An attempt to compromise by keeping Mountjoy behind a curtain collapsed when Wills had his drums placed front and center onstage at the last minute.[42]

In 1945, Wills' dances were drawing larger crowds than dances put on by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. That year, he lived in both Santa Monica and Fresno, California.[36] In 1947, he opened the Wills Point nightclub in Sacramento, California, and continued touring the Southwest and Pacific Northwest from Texas to Washington State. In Sacramento, he broadcast shows over KFBK, a station whose reach encompassed much of the American West.[43] Wills was in such high demand that venues would book him even on weeknights, because they knew the show would still be a draw.[39]

During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys show recorded at the Fairmont Hotel. Many of these recordings survive today as the Tiffany Transcriptions and are available on CD.[1] They show off the band's strengths significantly, in part because the group was not confined to the three-minute limits of 78 RPM discs. On April 3, 1948, Wills and the Texas Playboys appeared for the inaugural broadcast of the Louisiana Hayride on KWKH, broadcasting from the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Wills and the Texas Playboys played dances throughout the West to more than 10,000 people every week. They held dance attendance records at Jantzen Beach in Portland, Oregon; Santa Monica, California; Klamath Falls, Oregon; and at California's Oakland Auditorium, where they drew 19,000 people over two nights.[44] Wills recalled the early days of what became known as Western swing music in a 1949 interview: "Here's the way I figure it. We sure not tryin' to take credit for swingin' it."[45]

Still a binge drinker, Wills became increasingly unreliable in the late 1940s, causing a rift with Tommy Duncan (who bore the brunt of audience anger when Wills's binges prevented him from appearing). It ended when he fired Duncan in the fall of 1948.

Having lived a lavish lifestyle in California, Wills moved back to Oklahoma City in 1949, then went back on the road to maintain his payroll and Wills Point. He opened a second club, the Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas, Texas. Turning the club over to managers, later revealed to be dishonest, left Wills in desperate financial straits with heavy debts to the IRS for back taxes. This caused him to sell many assets, including the rights to "New San Antonio Rose".[46] It wrecked him financially.

In 1950, Wills had two top 10 hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love". After 1950, radio stations began to increasingly specialize in one form or another of commercially popular music. Although usually labelled "country and western", Wills did not fit into the style played on popular country and western stations, which typically played music in the Nashville sound. Neither did he fit into the conventional sound of pop stations, although he played a good deal of pop music.[47]

Wills continued to appear at the Bostonia Ballroom in San Diego throughout the 1950s.[48] He continued to tour and record through the 1950s into the early 1960s despite the fact that Western Swing's popularity, even in the Southwest, had greatly diminished. Charles R. Townsend described his drop in popularity: Bob could draw "a thousand people on Monday night between 1950 and 1952, but he could not do that by 1956. Entertainment habits had changed."[49]

On Wills' return to Tulsa late in 1957, Jim Downing of the Tulsa Tribune wrote an article headlined "Wills Brothers Together Again: Bob Back with Heavy Beat". The article quotes Wills as saying "Rock and roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928! ... We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."[50] The use of amplified guitars accentuates Wills's claim; some Bob Wills recordings from the 1930s and 1940s sound similar to rock and roll records of the 1950s.[51]

Even a 1958 return to KVOO, where his younger brother Johnnie Lee Wills had maintained the family's presence, did not produce the success he hoped. He appeared twice on ABC-TV's Jubilee USA and kept the band on the road into the 1960s. After two heart attacks, in 1965 he dissolved the Texas Playboys (who briefly continued as an independent unit) to perform solo with house bands. While he did well in Las Vegas and other areas, and made records for the Kapp Records label, he was largely a forgotten figure—even though inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968. A 1969 stroke left his right side paralyzed, ending his active career. He did, however, recover sufficiently to appear in a wheelchair at various Wills tributes held in the early 1970s. A revival of interest in his music, spurred by Merle Haggard's 1970 album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, led to a 1973 reunion album, teaming Wills, who spoke with difficulty, with key members of the early band, as well as Haggard.

Wills died in Fort Worth of pneumonia on May 13, 1975.[52]