For 60 years Bob Wills made his kind of country music, and though he became ill and unfashionable, the desire to make music never left him.
Wills was born near Kosse, Texas, on March 6, 1905. His father was a fiddler who taught the young Wills to play mandolin so that he could accompany him at ranch dances. Playing with his father introduced Wills to new styles of music, featuring guitars and trumpets, that inspired him to take up the fiddle himself.
He played with his family and other bands throughout his teens, until the crop failure of 1927 spurred Wills to move to Fort Worth and take up music full-time. With singer Milton Brown, Wills appeared on radio as the Wills Fiddle Band. Their show was popular and brought in sponsors and a new name—the Light Crust Doughboys. By 1932, their program was being broadcast all over the Southwest. However, Wills’ drinking and differences of opinion with the sponsor ended the Doughboys career only a year later. Wills moved around, ending up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he formed a new band, the Texas Playboys. In 1935, Wills got a record deal with the American Recording Company—later to become Columbia Records—and the Playboys made their first studio recordings. Wills stayed in Tulsa throughout the late 1930s and the band continued to evolve. By 1940, when Wills recorded “New San Antonio Rose,” he had 18 musicians—more than the big bands of contemporaries Glenn MILLER and Benny GOODMAN. The late 1930s and early 1940s were the high point of Wills’s career. He was now one of the biggest-selling recording artists in the U.S., and able to run two live bands.
Wills was unique in the musical integration he achieved with his bands and in the wide range of styles that were encompassed by the phrase “Western swing” that best describes his music. His habits of uttering high-pitched shouts during numbers and talking to his musicians reflected the two great influences on his music—the former a remnant of his days playing at ranch dances, the latter picked up from the African-American musicians he associated with in his youth.
Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Wills kept recording and performing but the new Playboys never achieved their past success. In 1968 Wills was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, but by the 1970s, Western swing was all but dead. In 1973, although illness had forced him to stop playing, he assembled a group of musicians for a greatest hits collection. After the first night of recording, Wills had a stroke and remained in a coma until his death in 1975.
Renee Jinks
SEE ALSO:
COUNTRY.
Country music violinist Bob Wills gives an impromptu performance in his Hollywood home in 1944.
McLean, Duncan. Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob
Wills and his Texas Playboys
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1997)
Wills, Rosetta. The King of Western Swing: Bob Wills
Remembered (New York: Billboard Books, 1998).
The Best of Bob Wills; The Essential Bob Wills;
Tiffany Transcriptions Vols. 1–10.