Uploaded on Dec 6, 2008
From the film, Blazing the Western
Trail, with Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid, with music by Bob Wills
and The Texas Playboys, with Tommy Duncan as Lead.
Wills formed several bands and played radio stations around the South and West until he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 with Wills on fiddle, Tommy Duncan on piano and vocals, rhythm guitarist June Whalin, tenor banjoist Johnnie Lee Wills, and Kermit Whalin, who played steel guitar and bass.
The band played regularly on a Tulsa, Oklahoma radio station, and added Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar, pianist Al Stricklin, drummer Smokey Dacus, and a horn section that expanded the band's sound. Wills favored jazz-like arrangements and the band found national popularity into the 1940s with such hits as "Steel Guitar Rag", "New San Antonio Rose", "Smoke on the Water", "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima", and "New Spanish Two Step".
Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded with several publishers and companies, including Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia, and MGM, frequently moving. In 1950, he had two top ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love", which were his last hits for a decade.
Throughout the 1950s, he struggled with poor health and tenuous finances, but continued to perform frequently despite the decline in popularity of his earlier music as rock and roll took over. Wills had a heart attack in 1962 and a second one the next year, which forced him to disband the Playboys although Wills continued to perform solo.
The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Wills in 1968 and the Texas State Legislature honored him for his contribution to American music. In 1972, Wills accepted a citation from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in Nashville.
He was recording an album with fan Merle Haggard in 1973 when a stroke left him comatose until his death in 1975. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1999.
| Bob Wills | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | James Robert Wills |
| Also known as | "Jim Rob" and "Bob" |
| Born | March 6, 1905 |
| Origin | near Kosse, Texas, United States |
| Died | May 13, 1975 (aged 70) Fort Worth, Texas, United States |
| Genres | Western swing |
| Years active | 1929–1969 |
| Labels | Vocalion, OKeh, Columbia, MGM, Liberty |
| Associated acts | Light Crust Doughboys, The Texas Playboys |
| Notable instruments | |
| fiddle | |
Biography
Early years
He was born on a farm near Kosse, Texas,[4] in Limestone County near Groesbeck, to Emma Lee Foley and John Tompkins Wills.[5] His father was a statewide champion fiddle player[6] and the Wills family was either playing music, or someone was "always wanting us to play for them," in addition to raising cotton on their farm.In addition to picking cotton, the young Jim Bob learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin. Both a sister and several brothers played musical instruments, while another sister played piano. The Wills family frequently held country dances in their home, and there was dancing in all four rooms. While living in Hall County, Texas they also played at 'ranch dances' which were popular in both North Texas and eastern New Mexico.[7]
Wills not only learned traditional music from his family, he learned some Negro songs directly from African Americans in the cotton fields near Lakeview, Texas and said that he did not play with many white children other than his siblings, until he was seven or eight years old. African Americans were his playmates, and his father enjoyed watching him jig dance with black children.[8]
"I don't know whether they made them up as they moved down the cotton rows or not," Wills once told Charles Townsend, author of San Antonio Rose: The Life and Times of Bob Wills, "but they sang blues you never heard before."[9]
New Mexico and Texas
The family moved to Hall County in the Texas Panhandle in 1913,[10] and in 1919 they bought a farm between the towns of Lakeview and Turkey.[11] At the age of 16 Wills left the family and hopped a freight train. "Jim Rob", as he became known, drifted for several years, traveling from town to town to try to earn a living, at one point almost losing his life when he nearly fell from a moving train, and later being chased by railroad police.[12][13]In his 20s he attended barber school, got married, and moved first to Roy, New Mexico then returned to Turkey in Hall County (now considered his home town) to work as a barber at Hamm's Barber Shop. He alternated barbering and fiddling even when he moved to Fort Worth after leaving Hall County in 1929. There he played in minstrel and medicine shows, and, as with other Texas musicians such as Ocie Stockard, continued to earn money as a barber.
He wore blackface makeup to appear in comedy routines, something that was common at the time. "He was playing his violin and singing." There were two guitars and a banjo player with him. "Bob was in blackface and was the comic; he cracked jokes, sang, and did an amazing jig dance."[14]
Since there was already a "Jim" on the show, the manager began calling him "Bob."[14] However, it was as "Jim Rob Wills," paired with Herman Arnspiger, that he made his first commercial (though unissued) recordings in November 1929 for Brunswick/Vocalion.[15]
Wills was known for his hollering and wisecracking. One source for this was when, as a very young boy, he would hear his father, grandfather, and cowboys give out loud cries when the music moved them.[16]
When asked if his wisecracking and talking on the bandstand came from his medicine show experience, he said it did not. Rather, he said that it came directly from playing and living close to Negroes, and that he never did it necessarily as show, but more as a way to express his feelings.[17]
While in Fort Worth, Wills added the "rowdy city blues" of Bessie Smith and Emmett Miller to a repertoire of mainly waltzes and breakdowns he had learned from his father, and patterned his vocal style after that of Miller and other performers such as Al Bernard.[18]
Wills acknowledged that he idolized Miller. Furthermore, his 1935 version of "St. Louis Blues" is nearly a word-for-word copy of Al Bernard's patter on his 1928 recording of the same song.[19]
The fact that Wills made his professional debut in blackface was commented on by Wills' daughter, Rosetta: "He had a lot of respect for the musicians and music of his black friends," Rosetta is quoted as saying on the Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys Web site. She remembers that her father was such a fan of Bessie Smith, "he once rode 50 miles on horseback just to see her perform live."[9]
(Wills is quoted as saying, "I rode horeseback from the place between the rivers to Childress to see Bessie Smith...She was about the greatest thing I had ever heard. In fact, there was no doubt about it. She was the greatest thing I ever heard."[20]
In Fort Worth, Wills met Herman Arnspinger and formed The Wills Fiddle Band. In 1930 Milton Brown joined the group as lead vocalist and brought a sense of innovation and experimentation to the band, now called the Light Crust Doughboys due to radio sponsorship by the makers of Light Crust Flour.
Brown left the band in 1932 to form the Musical Brownies, the first true Western swing band. Brown added twin fiddles, tenor banjo and slap bass, pointing the music in the direction of swing, which they played on local radio and at dancehalls.[21]
Wills remained with the Doughboys and replaced Brown with new singer Tommy Duncan in 1932. He found himself unable to get along with future Texas Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the authoritarian host of the Light Crust Doughboy radio show. O'Daniel had parlayed the show's popularity into growing power within Light Crust Flour's parent company, Burrus Mill and Elevator Company and wound up as General Manager, though he despised what he considered "hillbilly music."
Wills and Duncan left the Doughboys in 1933 after Wills had missed one show too many due to his sporadic drinking.
Wills recalled the early days of what became known as Western swing music in a 1949 interview.[22] "Here's the way I figure it. We sure not tryin' to take credit for swingin' it." Speaking of Milt Brown and himself working with songs done by Jimmie Davis, the Skillet Lickers,[23] Jimmie Rodgers, and others, and songs he'd learned from his father, he said that "We'd pull these tunes down an set 'em in a dance category.
It wouldn't be a runaway, and just lay a real nice beat behind it an the people would get to really like it. It was nobody intended to start anything in the world. We was just tryin' to find enough tunes to keep 'em dancin' to not have to repeat so much."
Wills is also quoted as saying, "You can change the name of an old song, rearrange it and make it a swing." "One Star Rag," "Rat Cheese under the Hill," "Take Me Back to Tulsa," "Basin Street Blues," "Steel Guitar Rag," and "Trouble in Mind" were some of the songs in his extensive repertory.[24]
Source: Wikipedia
TTFN CYA Later Taters
Thanks for watching.
Donnie/ Sinbad the Sailor man
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