photo courtesy Texas Music Museum and Leon Rausch (1905-1975) Birthplace: Hall County near Kosse, Texas Genre: Western Swing Influenced: Leon Rausch, Leon McAuliffe, Johnny Gimble, commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel Band Affiliations: The Light Crust Doughboys, The Texas Playboys

The Texas Playboys, under the leadership of Bob Wills, emerged as the most successful of a groundswell of young musicians who created Western Swing. The new sound was a patchwork of harmonizing elements borrowed from country string bands, jazz combos, German polka bands, blues singers, and ragtime, all pressed into service as a cohesive style of dance music. Before it was called Western Swing, some called it hillbilly jazz or simply country dance music, but it was the unique mix of cultures in Texas that made that sound possible.

Born in 1905 into a family of frontier fiddlers, James Robert Wills spent his early years on a farm in Limestone County, near Kosse. When he was eight, the family moved further west to the Texas plains. The son of an accomplished fiddler, Bob played his first dance at the age of 10. According to his biographer, Dr. Charles Townsend, he was influenced by the black blues singers he heard among his fellow workers in the cotton fields to play "fiddle music with the heat of blues and the swing of jazz."

In 1929 Wills moved from his hometown of Turkey to Fort Worth, where he joined a traveling medicine show as a blackface minstrel. That work brought him into contact with the first member of his future band, guitarist Herman Arnspiger. The duo, calling themselves the Wills Fiddle Band, played north Texas dances and performed on their own radio show. In 1930 they merged with the brothers Milton and Durwood Brown to form the Aladdin Laddies, a transitional band that led them to station KFJZ in Fort Worth and the general manager of Burrus Mill, W. Lee O'Daniel. O'Daniel renamed the group the Light Crust Doughboys after the program's sponsor, Light Crust flour, and the program was a success throughout the state, wherever it was heard. Other talented musicians joined the group, including singer and yodeler Leon Huff, steel guitar player Leon McAuliffe, and Bob's brother Johnnie Lee Wills.

Within a couple of years Wills had moved on and formed a new group that he called the Texas Playboys. Eventually Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys found a home at Tulsa's KVOO radio station and stayed for nine years, entertaining a vast swatch of the Southwest and gaining a national following through their 1940 recording of "New San Antonio Rose." Among their classic songs that seem embedded in every Texans' consciousness are "Faded Love," "Take Me Back to Tulsa," and "Panhandle Rag." The last recording session for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1973 produced the Grammy award-winning For the Last Time: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the crowning achievement of Wills's long career. He died in 1975 and is buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bob Wills' band members dispersed over the years, creating their own bands in the Western Swing mode. Among the greatest were Milton Brown's Musical Brownies, which had great success before Brown's death in 1936, and the enduring legacies of band leaders Leon McAuliffe and Leon Rausch, and the long career of fiddler Johnny Gimble.