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BOB WILLS
A bandleader, fiddler, singer, and songwriter, James Robert Wills is the most
famous exponent of the popular musical amalgam now known as western swing, which
synthesized ragtime, traditional fiddling, New Orleans jazz, blues, Mexican
songs, and big band swing. Wills blended it all into a swinging dance music that
was wildly popular in the Southwest and on the West Coast from the 1930s into
the 1950s. His greatest success was with his Texas Playboys band while based at
KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, between 1934 and 1942. Today his compositions, such as
“Faded Love,” “Maiden’s Prayer,” “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” and
“San Antonio Rose,” are considered standards of country and pop music.
Wills grew up in a musical family of fiddle players and in an area famous for
African-American music that produced Scott Joplin, Victoria Spivey, and Blind
Lemon Jefferson. From his family, young Jim Rob Wills (as he was then called)
learned to play frontier fiddle music; his father had defeated prominent country
fiddler Eck Robertson in fiddle contests on more than one occasion. At age ten
young Bob Wills played fiddle for his first ranch dance. From African-American
neighbors and migrant workers, he learned blues and jazz, which enthralled him.
In his late teens, he once rode fifty miles on horseback to see the Empress of
the Blues, Bessie Smith.
Wills left the family farm at age seventeen and drifted from one job to another
across Texas, working in construction and selling insurance in separate stops in
Amarillo; preaching in Knox County; barbering in Roy, New Mexico; and in Turkey,
Texas; laboring on several farms in various parts of the Lone Star State; and
playing ranch house dances and with medicine shows whenever possible.
In November 1929, after joining forces with guitarist Herman Arnspiger, he made
his first recordings for the Brunswick label, “Gulf Coast Blues” and
“Wills Breakdown”; they were never issued and are now presumed lost. In
1930, singer Milton Brown and his guitar-playing brother Derwood joined Wills
and Arnspiger. In due course they became the Aladdin Lamp Company’s “Aladdin
Laddies” on WBAP–Fort Worth, and tenor banjoist Sleepy Johnson joined them
for dances at the local Crystal Springs pavilion. The five-piece stringband
produced the first glimmerings of what would be called western swing a decade
later. In late 1930 Burrus Mill executive W. Lee O’Daniel hired the band to
promote the mill’s Light Crust Flour on radio, first at tiny KFJZ and soon at
WBAP, where the Doughboys became a favorite.
After the Browns left the band in September 1932 to form their own outfit, Wills
soon exited the Doughboys as well. Taking with him Tommy Duncan (who had
replaced Milton Brown as a Doughboy), Wills formed his own Playboys band and
tried Waco for three months before heading to Oklahoma City in early 1934. After
a short stint there, Wills and his five musicians arrived in Tulsa February 9
upon being offered a daily program at KVOO on a trial basis. A daily 12:30 PM
spot, sponsored first by Crazy Water Crystals and soon after by General Mills,
launched Wills as the most popular act in the Southwest. During those years he
added brass and reeds, drums, and developed a band that by 1940 numbered sixteen
members, among them such outstanding players as steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe,
guitarist Eldon Shamblin, and fiddler Jesse Ashlock. The versatile band could
play anything from a fiddle breakdown to a George Gershwin composition. Bob
Wills & His Texas Playboys enjoyed their greatest success from 1935 to 1947
while recording for ARC/Vocalion/OKeh/Columbia. These recordings sold in the
hundreds of thousands and his “San Antonio Rose” probably in the millions.
On the strength of his radio and record success, Wills began making musical
westerns in Hollywood in 1940.
A December 1942 induction into the army broke up the Texas Playboys, but upon
Wills’s discharge in 1943 he relocated to southern California and reformed the
band. There he was more financially successful than at any time in his career.
Huge crowds at his dances and big-selling recordings made him one of the
highest-paid bandleaders in America.
After the war Wills decided to give up most of the brass and reeds in his band
and rely more fiddles, guitars, steel guitars, and mandolins. This emphasis on
strings helped him maintain a fairly strong following well into the 1940s, even
after the age of the big bands was over. Unfortunately for Wills, however, his
accomplished vocalist Tommy Duncan left the Texas Playboys in 1948 to form his
own unit.
The late 1950s saw a resurging interest in western swing, with Wills returning
to Tulsa. The band quickly expanded with the additions of a saxophone section
and a new vocalist, Leon Rausch. When the band’s bookings concentrated in Las
Vegas, Wills and the band moved there in late 1959. Tommy Duncan returned
briefly (1960–1962). By 1967 Wills had disbanded the Texas Playboys. Although
he still toured and performed, he did so with house bands and one lone employee,
vocalist Gene “Tag” Lambert, who doubled as his driver.
In October 1968 Wills was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, but the
following May he suffered a stroke that marked the end of his performing days.
In December 1973 he recorded his final album, For the Last Time (United
Artists). Other strokes followed, but he held on until May 13, 1975, when
pneumonia took his life.
—Charles R. Townsend
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