Wills Power
He's Been Dead For Years, But He Is Hotter Than Ever: Why Bob Wills Is Still The King Of Western Swing.
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Then again, who can say if Brown would have been able to match Wills’s resourcefulness? With sophisticated guitarist Eldon Shamblin serving as their musical director, Wills and the Texas Playboys quickly moved further and further away from the string band sound, taking a staggering variety of music, rearranging it, and making it swing. Their repertoire — said to be 3,600 songs — came to include traditional fiddle tunes, commercial country, waltzes, boogie-woogie, blackface and minstrelsy, gospel, cowboy songs, polkas, New Orleans jazz, two-steps, schottisches, blues, pop, classical, Mexican-flavored songs, and more. Along with Tulsa radio station KVOO, Wills’s base was Cain’s Dancing Academy, and his music was strictly for dancers (unlike Brown, who had also played concerts). In fact, the Playboys performed each selection twice in a row — the first time so dancers could find the groove, the second so they could hold it. Though Wills featured the occasional sad song (one of the saddest, “Faded Love,” became a calling card), his music was largely upbeat at a time when working people, especially, needed a respite from their everyday economic conditions.
Though featured musicians like Shamblin, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe, pianist Al Stricklin, saxophonist Zeb McNally, and fiddler Jesse Ashlock were undeniably skilled both as soloists and as ensemble players, the music never got slick; it was raw and from the heart, and at its core there was always the earthiness of the leader’s plaintive country fiddle. With their two front lines — one of fiddles, one of horns — Wills and company were like nothing else in America. As the Jazz Age evolved into the big band era, the Playboys grew to 22 pieces, playing songs like “Big Beaver” with a polish and a drive equaling that of the orchestras of Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey. But the music always retained its spontaneous, improvised feel (to this day, Wills veterans like fiddler Johnny Gimble insist their music is more properly Texas swing, which is always improvised, rather than western swing, which isn’t necessarily).
And then there was Wills, who had charisma to burn. Onstage with his musicians, all decked out in stylish band uniforms — the western clothes and cowboy hats came later — he was a bundle of high-spirited energy, directing soloists, cuing the band, joking and jiving, letting fly his trademark “a-ha” when the spirit moved him, riding herd on that monster sound, coaxing it and shaping it and letting it rip with a smile on his face and a fat stogie in his mouth. His personal style, like his music, was infectious. Between sets, he required his musicians to mingle, shake hands, and chat with audience members about their families, jobs, crops, and cattle. This was obviously good business — especially when the band returned to the same gig months later and could call folks by name and ask after their kids — but it also reflected his personality; he was genuinely humble, and there were few airs about him. His stylish success lent his fans a sense of dignity and class that nobody else accorded them. In return, they related to him like family; parents often brought their kids in baskets, which they placed on the edge of the stage for safekeeping while they danced. When Wills got too drunk to play, an increasingly frequent situation as his career went on, the Playboys would announce that he was sick, and the audience would nod knowingly, laugh and poke each other in the ribs, enjoy the show, and go home happy; when he was sick, the band might say that he was too drunk to show up, and the dancers would have the same reaction.
At the same time, he was fiercely protective of his music. Though strictly a country fiddler himself, Wills always insisted that his band didn’t play country music, it played jazz (the term western swing wasn’t introduced until after World War II). When “legit” (as they were called) musicians mocked the Playboys, Wills shut them up by noting, “Nobody likes us but the people.” He knew what he wanted and he knew when he had it and nobody was going to interfere. When Uncle Art Satherly, the legendary British talent scout and producer, first came to Dallas from New York to record Wills in 1935, he was apparently expecting a fiddle-and-guitar band and objected when he saw musicians pulling out horns; once they began playing, he didn’t like Wills’s whooping and hollering. Wills threatened to cancel the session if Satherly wouldn’t do things his way, and the big-city bigwig backed down. In 1945, when the Playboys first appeared on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, Wills was instructed as the band set up that drums were forbidden; again, he simply told the band to start packing up, and again an exception was made. Back in those days, nobody talked back to a label or the Opry, but Wills did, and he won; drums, twin fiddles, amplified guitars, even horns, were eventually accepted as country instruments.
These scenarios were played out again in the seventies by Willie Nelson, when he turned his back on Nashville’s country conventions and came home to Texas to make his music for his audience, and they get played out today every time a progressive Texas country musician — Lyle Lovett, say, or Junior Brown — breaks through without first taking up residence in Nashville. Like the Texas Ranger who was in the right and kept on comin’, Wills stuck to his guns, both musically and personally. That’s what people responded to then, and it’s what they respond to now. Even after the war, when his original band was scattered and he chose to move to California with new musicians, he provided the ultimate Texan image to go along with the ultimate Texas music. His music has endured because it sounds as original and as soulful now as it did then, because it so fully reflects the cultural polyglot that Texas has been throughout the past century, and because Texans (unlike Southeastern country fans, who’ve always preferred concerts) still like to dance. And because as sweet as Wills could be among fans and friends, he was also the rebel who had to do things his way when he ran up against the Nashville and New York music businesses. Texas, he seemed to say, was its own place, and Bob Wills was his own man.
Essential Listening
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Anthology (193501973) (Rhino)
Milton Brown and the Musical Brownies, The Complete Recordings of the Father of Western Swing (Texas Rose)
Asleep at the Wheel, Ride With Bob (Dream Works)
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