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Bob Wills: Western Swing
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Bob Wills would have been 100 years old today. NPR's John Burnett takes a look at the life of the man who with his band, the Texas Playboys, combined jazz and country music to create Western Swing.
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Sixty years after that beginning he was a legend-Bob Wills, the fiddle king, the man who started the sound called Western Swing. He led the most famous dance band in the Southwest - Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He wrote God only knows how many songs and saw more of them become standards than perhaps any other American songwriter. He wrote and played San Antonio Rose (which was simply called 'Spanish Dance' until Tommy Duncan wrote lyrics for it) Across The Alley From The Alamo, Faded Love, Big Ball's In Cowtown, Stay All Night, Stay a Little Longer, Ida Red Loves The Boogie, and dozens if not hundreds more. During WW II, wherever American servicemen went, Bob Wills' music went with them.
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When Bob Wills improvised, he mixed blues, jazz and pop tunes. His use of improvisation is shown in his trademark “takeoff” solos; the vocalist would sing a verse, then Wills would point at a musician, expecting him to improvise. He had no patience with solos delivered by rote. He jammed with jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman, playing bebop. His interest in improvisation was natural, coming from a fiddling tradition as well as his exposure to jazz. (Sources: Ed Ward, “The Fiddler Who Put the Swing in Western Swing;” www.rockhall.com; www.southernmusic.net)
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The dancing, smiling image of Bob Wills would ... be brought to folks all over the country in the medium that it cherished the most. Bob, Tommy, and all the boys were brought vividly to life as they appeared in several dozen 1940s western movies like 'Go West Young Lady,' 'The Lone Prairie,' 'A Tornado In The Saddle' and 'Take Me Back To Oklahoma,' in which Bob and the boys shared the screen with cowboy singing star, Tex Ritter.
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For over four decades Bob Wills influenced American country, western and popular music in general. His uninhibited, free, experimental, and often radical approach to music put him years ahead of his time. When he began his career in 1915 his music appealed to the age of jazz and swing and continues to be popular today. Truly, no other performer has appealed to the public through such a changing period in history.
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Bob Wills' name will forever be associated with Western swing. Although he did not invent the genre single handedly, he did popularize the genre and changed its rules. In the process, he reinvented the rules of popular music. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys were a dance band with a country string section that played pop songs as if they were jazz numbers. Their music expanded and erased boundaries between genres. It was ... some of the most popular music of its era.
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