Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys~ "Tater Pie" (1950)

Uploaded on Oct 3, 2010

Recorded April 27, 1950 in Hollywood CA.

Vocals by Jack Loyd, Johnny Gimble, and Jimmie Widener.

Fiddles by Wills, Keith Coleman, and Johnny Gimble.

Billy Bowman on steel guitar.

The Texas Playboys

 

Bob Wills' bus during a parade in Tulsa

After forming a new band, The Playboys, and relocating to Waco, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market.

They left Waco in January of 1934 for Oklahoma City.

Wills soon settled the renamed Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noontime shows over the 50,000 watt KVOO radio station.

Their 12:30-1:15 p.m. Monday–Friday broadcasts became a veritable institution in the region.

Nearly all of the daily (except Sunday) shows originated from the stage of Cain's Ballroom. In addition, they played dances in the evenings, including regular ones at the ballroom on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Wills added a trumpet to the band inadvertently when he hired Everet Stover as an announcer, not knowing that he had played with the New Orleans symphony and had directed the governor's band in Austin.

Stover, thinking he had been hired as a trumpeter began playing with the band with no comment from Wills.

Young sax player Zeb McNally was allowed to play with the band, although Wills initially discouraged it.

With two horns in the band Wills realized he would have to add a drummer to balance things and create a fuller sound.

He hired the young, "modern style musician" Smokey Ducas.^[12] By 1935 Wills had added horn, reed players as well as drums to the Playboys.

The addition of steel guitar whiz Leon McAuliffe in March 1935 added not only a formidable instrumentalist but a second engaging vocalist. Wills himself largely sang blues and sentimental ballads.

With its jazz sophistication, pop music and blues influence, plus improvised scats and wisecrack commentary by Wills, the band became the first superstars of the genre.

Milton Brown's tragic and untimely death in 1936 had cleared the way for the Playboys.

Session rosters from 1938 show both "lead guitar" and "electric guitar" in addition to guitar and steel guitar in the Texas Playboys recordings.^[25]

Wills' 1938 recording of "Ida Red" served as a model for Chuck Berry's decades later version of the same song - "Maybellene".^[26][27]

About this time Wills purchased and performed with an old Guadagnini violin that had once fetched $7,600 for $1,600, the equivalent of about $24,000 in 2009.^{[12] [28]}

In 1940 "New San Antonio Rose" sold a million records and became the signature song of The Texas Playboys.

The song's title referred to the fact that Wills had recorded it as a fiddle instrumental in 1938 as "San Antonio Rose". By then, the Texas Playboys were virtually two bands: one a fiddle-guitar-steel band with rhythm section and the second a first-rate big band able to play the day's swing and pop hits as well as Dixieland.

The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.^[29]

Film career

In 1940 Wills, along with the Texas Playboys, co-starred with Tex Ritter in Take Me Back to Oklahoma.^[30]

Other films would follow. In late 1942 after several band members had left the group, and as World War II raged, Wills joined the Army, but received a medical discharge in 1943.^[31][32][33]

Wills also appeared in The Lone Prairie (1942), Riders of the Northwest Mounted (1943), Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), The Vigilantes Ride (1943), The Last Horseman (1944), Rhythm Round-Up (1945), Blazing the Western Trail (1945), and Lawless Empire (1945). According to one source, he appeared in a total of 19 films.^[21]

Swing Era

After leaving the Army in 1943 Wills moved to Hollywood, moving into a rented house in September,^[34] and began to reorganize the Texas Playboys. He became an enormous draw in Los Angeles, where many of his Texas, Oklahoma and regional fans had also relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs.

Monday through Friday the band broadcast from 12:01 to 1:00 p.m. PT over KMTR-AM (now KLAC) in Los Angeles. They also played regularly every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego.^[35]

He commanded enormous fees playing dances there, and began to make more creative use of electric guitars to replace the big horn sections the Tulsa band had boasted. For a very brief period in 1944 the Wills band included 23 members.,^[32] and around mid year he toured Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with 21 pieces in the orchestra.^[36]

Billboard reported that Wills outgrossed Harry James, Benny Goodman, "both Dorsies, et al." at Civic Auditorium in Oakland, California, in January 1944.^[37]

While on his first cross-country tour, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and defied that conservative show's ban on using drums of any sort.

In 1945 Wills' dances were outdrawing those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman,^[32] and he had moved to Fresno, California. Then in 1947 he opened the Wills Point nightclub in Sacramento and continued touring the Southwest and Pacific Northwest from Texas to Washington State. While based in Sacramento his radio broadcasts over 50,000 watt KFBK^{[disambiguation needed]} were heard all over the West.^[38]

Famous swing orchestras in California realized that many of their followers were leaving to dance to Bob Will's Western swing. Because he was in such demand, some places booked Wills any time he had an opening, regardless of how undesirable the date.

The manager of a popular auditorium in the LA Basin town of Wilmington, California: "Although Monday night dancing is frankly an experiment it was the only night of the week on which this outstanding band could be secured."^[35]

During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys show recorded at the Fairmont Hotel. Many of these recordings survive today as the Tiffany Transcriptions,^[1] and are available on CD.

They show off the band's strengths significantly, in part because the group was not confined to the three-minute limits of 78 RPM discs. They featured superb instrumental work from fiddlers Joe Holley and Louis Tierney, steel guitarists Noel Boggs and Herb Remington, guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Junior Barnard and electric mandolinist-fiddler Tiny Moore.

The original recorded version of Wills' "Faded Love", appeared on the Tiffanys as a fairly swinging instrumental unlike the ballad it became when lyrics were added in 1950.

On April 3, 1948, Wills and the Texas Playboys appeared for the inaugural broadcast of the Louisiana Hayride on KWKH, broadcasting from the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Wills and the Texas Playboys played dances throughout the West to more than 10,000 people every week. They held dance attendance records at Jantzen Beach in Portland, Oregon; Santa Monica, California, and at the Oakland (California) Auditorium, where they drew 19,000 people in two nights.^[39]

Wills also broke an attendance record of 2,100 previously held by Jan Garbner at the Armory in Klamath Falls, Oregon, by attracting 2,514 dancers.^[39]

WIlls and the Playboys also played small towns on the West Coast. Actor Clint Eastwood recalled seeing Wills when he was 18 or 19 (1948 or 1949) and working at a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon.^[40]

Appearances at the Bostonia Ballroom in San Diego continued throughout the 1950s.^[41]
Still a binge drinker, Wills became increasingly unreliable in the late 1940s, causing a rift with Tommy Duncan (who bore the brunt of audience anger when Wills's binges prevented him from appearing). It ended when he fired Duncan in the fall of 1948.

Later years

Having lived a lavish lifestyle in California, Wills moved back to Oklahoma City in 1949, then went back on the road to maintain his payroll and Wills Point. He opened a second club, the Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas, Texas.

Turning the club over to managers later revealed to be dishonest left Wills in desperate financial straits with heavy debts to the IRS for back taxes that caused him to sell many assets including, mistakenly, the rights to "New San Antonio Rose." It wrecked him financially.

In 1950 Wills had two Top Ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love". After 1950 radio stations began to increasingly specialize in one form or another of commercially popular music.

Wills did not fit into the popular Nashville country and western stations, although he was usually labeled "country and western". Neither did he fit into the pop or middle of the road stations, although he played a good deal of pop music, and was not accepted in the pop music world.^[42]

He continued to tour and record through the 1950s into the early 1960s, despite the fact that Western swing's popularity, even in the Southwest, had greatly diminished. Bob could draw "a thousand people on Monday night between 1950 and 1952, but he could not do that by 1956. Entertainment habits had changed."^[43]

On Wills' return to Tulsa late in 1957, Jim Downing of the Tulsa Tribune wrote an article headlined "Wills Brothers Together Again — Bob Back with Heavy Beat". The article quotes Wills as saying, "Rock and Roll?

Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!...We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."^[44]

The use of amplified guitars accentuates Bob's claim, some Bob Wills recordings from the `30's and `40's sound similar to rock and roll records in the `50's.

Even a 1958 return to KVOO, where his younger brother Johnnie Lee Wills had maintained the family's presence, did not produce the success he hoped for. He appeared twice on ABC-TV's Jubilee USA and kept the band on the road into the 1960s.

After two heart attacks, in 1965 he dissolved the Texas Playboys (who briefly continued as an independent unit) to perform solo with house bands. While he did well in Las Vegas and other areas, and made records for the Kapp Records label, he was largely a forgotten figure — even though inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968.

A 1969 stroke left his right side paralyzed, ending his active career.
The May 26, 1975 issue of TIME (Milestones section) read: "Died. Bob Wills, 70, "Western Swing" bandleader-composer; of pneumonia; in Fort Worth.

Wills turned out dance tunes that are now called country rock, introducing with his Texas Playboys such C & W classics as Take Me Back to Tulsa and New San Antonio Rose".^[45]

Source: Wikipedia

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CYA Later Taters

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Donnie/ Sinbad the Sailor Man

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