In the pantheon of American musical icons, no legend sits quieter today than Bob Wills. As the foremost pioneer of western swing, Wills was no less a trailblazer and superstar than Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams or Elvis Presley. But even though he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame more than thirty years ago and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, Wills' vast catalog has never been remastered and reissued with the same gusto as those of his contemporaries. Ray Benson, frontman of the progressive, six-time Grammy-winning, western swing preservation society Asleep at the Wheel, hopes to rectify that with his band's second Wills tribute album, Ride With Bob. Boasting a diverse range of all-star guests ranging from Willie Nelson to the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Ride With Bob is an album as hip and daring as the man it honors.

Wills' genius was finding a way to sell a fusion of country and jazz, two seemingly incompatible forms of music, to the masses -- no small feat in the 1930s and 1940s. And he did it with a personal style that changed the look and sound of country music. Wills forced drums upon the Grand Ole Opry, and when he and his Texas Playboys showed up to play, they were decked out in Western suits instead of the standard Opry attire of overhauls and flannel shirts.

"I think it really was the perfect balance," Benson says of Wills' ability to keep one boot in substance and the other in style. "He just did it naturally. Like the old guys used to say, Bob just sold. If you've seen films of him, he had a charisma that was undeniable. He had these burning black eyes, he had this style about him that was commanding. I've always said that western swing would have probably been a footnote in music history, and I don't mean that to belittle it, if it weren't for Bob Wills."

Listening to Benson talk shop, his spiritual kinship to Wills is obvious. They were both driven to push past musical stereotypes by circumstance as well as musical curiosity. Asleep at the Wheel landed their first record deal after being championed in the late Sixties by Van Morrison in the pages of Rolling Stone. Despite their penchant for country music stylings, AATW found themselves playing with the likes of Hot Tuna, Commander Cody and the Merry Pranksters.

"To me, rock & roll is just a limb on the country music tree," Benson says. "And western swing is more important to rock and roll than any of the other genres. Bill Haley and the Comets were originally Bill Haley and the Westernaires. They were a western swing band. They had a steel guitar player, Tommy Allsup, who played all over [Ride with Bob]. He was also Buddy Holly's lead guitar player. And he joined Buddy Holly from Billy Gray's Western Swing Band, which was a big band down here in the early Fifties. So I asked him, 'Well, what did you do different?' And he said, 'I just turned my treble up. That's it.' This rock and roll PR that came out in the Sixties claiming that rock and roll was a combination of bluegrass, country and R&B is just bullshit. Western swing was all of those things already. The only difference was that music went from the big band era to the combo era. In 1950 and 1951, they started stripping off the horn players and the steel guitar player and pretty soon you had it down to a trio."

For Ride with Bob, Benson didn't just enlist the obvious Wills fans like Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett. He also brought in some of country's young lions (the Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw and Lee Ann Womack), some pop stars (Shawn Colvin, the Squirrel Nut Zippers) and fellow country preservationists Don Walser and Dwight Yoakam.

"Dwight put it very eloquently," Benson recalls of the sessions. "He said anybody who wants to pick up that broken fiddle bow that Bob left on the stage and carry that gauntlet forward is the guy who is going to save country music."

Until that particular second coming slouches toward Nashville, Benson and the Wheel are doing just fine carrying the Wills tradition into the next century. In addition to Ride with Bob, Benson is working with the Nashville Network on a deal to air two programs: a live all-star tribute to Wills and a show culled from hours of film shot during the recording of the album. For the latter, Benson also interviewed the album guests who gave their reflections on Wills.

"What I'd like to do with this year is to raise the profile of Bob Wills," Benson says. "Because we are lucky enough to be handed this mantle of bringing western swing to the present day. It's a responsibility. Bob covered such a wide variety of music. That's why we like him so much. You hear this vitality, this energy and originality and it's not polished. It's not slick. That's why Bob Wills was so cool."

ANDREW DANSBY
(August 11, 1999)