Bob Wills

Bob Wills was not the father of Western swing -- several prominent bands were championing the style well ahead of Wills' arrival on the scene -- but he quickly became its most popular and most adventurous practitioner, its reigning visionary, and its conscience; in the end his music so dwarfed all the Western swing that came before him that Wills was widely regarded not merely as the King of Western Swing, but as the genre's founding father as well. Certainly the template he shaped out of all the varieties of music he heard in his west Texas childhood had a sui generis quality, and the passage of a half century plus since his heyday has only deepened the impression of Wills as a visionary trailblazer. His in-print catalogue is not as deep as it once was, but the titles extant provide a persuasive argument for Wills' preeminence in the Western swing pantheon. That there was ever a band in America as soulful and at the same time as technically accomplished as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys is one of the wonders of the 20th century.

A fiddler in the traditional style, like his father before him, Wills fils et père played west Texas house parties together, with the son moving on to work with medicine shows touring the region. The roots of Wills' style can be traced to several key influences. The fiddle and guitar duets of virtuoso jazz players Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti were popular with musicians throughout the Southwest, not the least being young Bob Wills, who also had an affection for blues, Dixieland jazz, mariachi, Cajun music, and the native dance music of the central European immigrants who had settled in the Lone Star state. One of the first important influences in the shaping of Wills' vocal style was Emmett Miller, an enigmatic blackface singer who starred on the minstrel circuit in the late '20s and early '30s, and recorded some amazing sides for OKeh (including "Lovesick Blues," which became Hank Wil-liams' breakthrough hit, and "Right or Wrong," which became a Bob Wills classic) that had a major impact not only on Wills but on Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams as well.

In 1931 a trio of Wills, guitarist Herman Arnspiger, and vocalist Milton Brown landed a steady gig as the Light Crust Doughboys plugging a like-named flour on a Fort Worth, TX, radio station. Brown left the group in 1932 to form his own band, and Wills followed suit a year later with his banjo-playing brother Johnnie Lee in tow, along with the versatile vocalist Tommy Duncan. Christening his group the Texas Playboys, Wills relocated to Tulsa, OK, dispensed with the traditional country band lineup and assembled a large group to play dance halls. Adding a drummer and, later, horns and electric instruments to his lineup was a revolutionary step for a country artist, but it made perfect sense to Wills. Nevertheless, in his "big band" approach to country music Wills maintained the fiddles as the immediately identifiable signature of the music that has variously been called country jazz and Western swing. Always, Wills attracted stellar musicians, many of whom rank with the giants on their instruments: Wills, Duncan, and Arnspiger would be on that list, along with the inventive guitarist Eldon Shamblin; Al Stricklin, who was dealing some honky-tonk piano solos before honky-tonk as a style had even been identified; steel guitarist nonpareil Leon Mc-Auliffe, the gold standard by which all succeeding generations of steel players have been measured; jazz-influenced electric mandolin player Tiny Moore; and such maestros of the fiddle as Jesse Ashlock, Joe Holley, and Johnny Gimble.

From the time of his first sessions in 1935 through his last productive sessions in the early '60s, Wills was about change and movement, his band's membership shrinking and expanding, his music taking on different hues and textures that reflected his drive to keep it fresh, his popularity exploding throughout the South, Southwest, and West Coast as his grueling tour schedule brought Western swing to new audiences. His disdain for the commonly accepted definitions of country music enabled Wills to redefine and broaden conventional boundaries he found too limiting for a vision as expansive as his. Had he written only "New San An-tonio Rose," "Faded Love," and "Take Me Back to Tulsa," he would be considered a significant figure in country music history. That his grasp was equal to his considerable reach ranks him with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Bill Monroe, and Charlie Parker, who dreamed different dreams, and then subsequently pioneered music that changed the course of history.

Wills' catalogue is accessible from a number of vantage points. For the hits and other familiar tracks, look no further than Rhino's two-CD set, Anthology 1935–1973, which kicks off with "Maiden's Prayer," an evocative instrumental cut at Wills' first session, and ends with two tracks from the powerful final tribute to the King, For the Last Time, a reunion of Wills and several former Playboys, along with contemporary disciples such as Merle Haggard, which has finally been restored to print on CD. Anthology's 32 vital cuts show the band's remarkable range in its execution of varied styles -- check out Wills' own bluesy vocal on "Corrina, Corrina" -- as well as the evolution of Wills' sound with different configurations of Playboys. Rounder's two volumes of Wills recordings, Take Me Back to Tulsa and Stay a Little Longer, take a narrower focus, centering on the years 1935 to 1947 when Wills was recording for the American Record Corporation and Columbia and building monuments almost every time he and the Playboys stepped into the studio. The portrait that emerges from these tracks is that of a man aggressively pursuing new ideas. An early cut, "Spanish Two Step" (on Take Me Back to Tulsa) is equal parts swing and traditional Western. The band's first-ever recording, "Osage Stomp," is derived from "Bugle Call Rag" and a rowdy jazz workout, "Rukus Juice Shuffle," and sounds not unlike a wildly swinging ensemble jazz number Jelly Roll Morton might have cooked up for his Red Hot Peppers in 1927. To a Bob Nolan classic Western song, the beautiful, poetic "Away Out There," Wills adds an insistent, controlled swell of horns to heighten the effect of a train rumbling across the Texas plains en route to Amarillo, "the land of good-lookin' women," as Duncan croons one of his most affecting vocals in service to a vivid lyric. The first of several Cindy Walker–penned classics that Wills cut, "Blue Bonnet Lane," is a lovely mid-tempo reminiscence that fuses pop and country elements in its arrangement. So it goes: blues; two-steps; pop songs (the romantic classic "I'll See You in My Dreams," also on Stay a Little Longer); traditional fiddle tunes and Wills gems such as the incandescent "San Antonio Rose" and the band's first hit, "Steel Guitar Rag," a landscape-altering cut that gave Leon McAuliffe a self-penned signature song and made the steel guitar a required feature in Western swing bands forever after.

For Wills completists and historians alike, The Tiffany Transcriptions series is the Holy Grail. Originally nine volumes when released on vinyl by Kaleidoscope Records between 1982 and 1990, the recordings are now on Rhino and pared down to six volumes, Volumes 1–5 and 9, with 6, 7, and 8 missing in action. Otherwise the exemplary packaging and song selections are identical to the original vinyl versions.

The Tiffany Transcriptions story begins in 1945 when Wills, Cliff Sundlin (a monied businessman and aspiring songwriter who was hoping to persuade Wills to cut some of his tunes), and disc jockey Clifton "Cactus Jack" Johnson formed the Tiffany Music Company intending to offer for radio syndication live performances of Wills and the Playboys, who were then based in California. The sets were recorded in San Francisco in 1946 and '47, and accompanied by a script for a disc jockey to read between songs. Of the more than 370 selections recorded, only 50 sets had been issued when the Tiffany company went out of business, and the remaining transcriptions sat in Cliff Sundlin's basement in Oakland, CA, for 30 years before the folks at Kaleidoscope obtained the release rights.

It's fair to say that Wills and the Playboys functioned at their highest level during those San Francisco sessions. Duncan's singing is amazing throughout -- his mastery of blues, pop, country, ballads, and uptempo numbers alike is almost as astonishing as the powerful feeling and ingratiating personality he projects in even the most casual or lightweight of lyrics. The staggering range of music on these discs is indicated in subtitles such as "Basin Street Blues" and "You're From Texas." Virtually no genre goes unexplored. Those who would be satisfied with the tried and true Wills oeuvre are directed to Vol. 2, with "Faded Love," "San Antonio Rose," "Cotton Eyed Joe," the haunting "Time Changes Everything," and other Wills standards; those who want great music that spans everything from the Nat King Cole–penned "Straighten Up and Fly Right" (on Vol. 1) to Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" (on Vol. 3) to "Red River Valley" (Vol. 4) to Woody Herman's "At the Woodchopper's Ball" (on Vol. 5) are advised to purchase the entire Tiffany collection and cherish it until death do you part.

As if having Tommy Duncan as a lead singer weren't enough, Wills also employed the services of the sister duo Dean and Evelyn McKinney, who are heard extensively throughout the Tiffany Transcriptions albums. Twenty-two of their recordings with Wills and the Playboys, all recorded for Tiffany in 1946–47, have been preserved on a single-disc collection, The McKinney Sisters. No question about it, the McKinneys, with their bright, cheery voices, represented the pop end of the band's spectrum, even though their singing was often supported by arrangements that were more indebted to blues, Western swing, and jazz than to pop. The McKinney Sisters ranks as essential fare as well.

In the caveat emptor category, MCA's Millennium Collection entry, The Best of Bob Wills, contains a dozen familiar tracks, but these aren't the original, classic versions of monuments such as "New San Antonio Rose" and "Time Changes Everything." The recordings span 1947 to 1969, when he was recording for MGM, Kapp, and Decca. Only the two 1947 songs, "Keeper of My Heart" and "Bubbles in My Beer," feature Tommy Duncan, who left the band in 1948, after a falling out with Wills. Not that Johnny Preston, who is featured on a couple of tracks (including the Duncan-penned "Time Changes Everything") was a bad singer, but Duncan was an indisputably towering singer who invested his classic vocal style with personality to burn; Preston, and every singer who followed in Duncan's wake, paled in comparison to the master. As a result, The Best of Bob Wills is rather a depressing look at an illustrious, groundbreaking career in its endgame, although to Wills' credit the music is expertly executed and still retains a certain vibrancy of feeling and spirit.

On the other hand, Sony's The Essential Bob Wills lives up to the promise of its title. Its 20 cuts are prime Wills, spanning the glory years of 1935 to 1946 and featuring the original, enduring versions of Wills' monuments. "Right or Wrong," "Time Changes Everything," "New San Antonio Rose," "Steel Guitar Rag," "Maiden's Prayer," "Sugar Moon," "Deep Water" -- everything here is remarkable and more. There's no better single-disc overview of Wills' career than this one.

After suffering a crippling stroke on May 31, 1973, Wills recovered enough to participate in one last, truly remarkable recording session, with many of the surviving members of the Texas Playboys. Never was an album title more appropriate and more poignant all at once than the document fashioned in those late spring days, For the Last Time. The group assembled at the Sumet-Burnet Studio in Dallas, TX, on December 3–4 to reprise some of the greatest moments in the King of Western Swing's career on the 40th anniversary of the band's founding. Special guest Merle Haggard, paying tribute to a personal hero, sang on three cuts and joined the fiddle ensemble on others. Wills himself, then wheelchair-bound, his voice affected by the stroke, was energized enough to deliver a homespun recitation of Cindy Walker's "What Makes Bob Holler." The reunion took an unfortunate turn after the first session ended: Wills suffered another, more serious stroke, lapsed into unconsciousness, and died 18 months later. The Playboys recorded as scheduled the next day, closing out the session with a joyous version of "That's What I Like About the South." Here the story of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys ends, four decades after it began, in the same town where they started the journey that wrought lasting changes in American music in general and country music in particular. This is one powerhouse coda, unlike anything else in American music -- and being unlike anything else in American music is what made Bob holler in the first place. (DAVID MCGEE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide