Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
(Collectors' Choice)
When Bob Wills and fellow Texan Milton Brown formed the Light Crust Doughboys in the 1931 they were just two of the many young musicians in Texas, Oklahoma and other parts of the American Southwest who somewhat simultaneously started a new musical hybrid form that would become known as Western Swing. Wills, Brown and their brother musicians were doing what young white American musicians had been doing since the days of Stephen Foster and before: blending they heard in their homes and churches and at their social gatherings with music of the black culture that existed sometimes side by side with yet worlds away from their own.
It was a cultural exchange that would come again in the 1950's with rock and roll - Wills was clear and definite about the unbroken connection between his music and rock and roll, calling it "the same kind of music we've been playing since 1928 - and later with hip hop with new variations sure to come.
The exchange went both ways too. Black movie cowboy and Count Basie Band vocalist Herb Jeffries, "the Bronze Buckaroo", was among the African American artists who would embrace country and western music (and Western swing) a decade or two before the world had heard of Charley Pride. The phenomenon got a gentle send-up in "Cow Cow Boogie" a song about a "swing half-breed" who's got "a knocked out western accent with a Harlem touch" recorded by Dorothy Dandridge and Ella Fitzgerald as well as Jeffries and Ella Mae Morse a white singer who was a fixture on the R&B charts in the forties and fifties. Though white jazz musicians like Stan Kenton would even come to record with country artists like Tex Ritter the hardnosed bigotry of the time meant that there would be no Western Swing equivalent of Benny Goodman's groundbreaking integrated quartet but there was plenty of undocumented action on the QT. Who wouldn't have wanted to witness Ray Price's swinging Cherokee Cowboys jamming with the Charlie Parker, as legend has it? Cross pollination has always been the true musician's bread and butter.
In pursuit of a bigger slice of the pie - family financial concerns were part of the reason - Brown left the Doughboys in 1932 and formed his own group, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies. Headquartering in Fort Worth the band would become a popular live act and were responsible for several innovations that would become standard parts of country music, Western Swing in particular. Brown and the Brownies would become the first country and western band to utilize the electric lap steel guitar after guitarist Bob Dunn, originally a jazz man, got the idea to bring the instrument to the band after hearing a black blues musician play on the Coney Island boardwalk. Brown's life and career would be cut short after he died in 1936 due to the pneumonia he contracted while recovering from a car crash likely caused by his narcolepsy. Brown's premature death would leave the way open for Wills to become the name most associated with Western Swing music.
Wills, whose Waco based Texas Playboys were modeled after Milton Brown's Brownies got a big career boost from the film work he and the band had during the golden age of movie Westerns, especially the lower budgeted "B" westerns of the 1940's. "San Antonio Rose", also the title of the group's most well-known song had Wills and the Playboys appearing with the likes of Lon Chaney Jr. Eve Arden and Shemp Howard.
Over the years the Playboys would become the New York Yankees of country and Western Swing music. Their roster would include a changing but consistently impressive list of those styles' most iconic names; guitarists Junior Barnard and Eldon Shamblin, pianist Al Stricklin, Fiddler Johnny Gimble, mandolinist Tiny Moore, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe and vocalists Leon Rausch and Tommy Duncan. Their core instrumental lineup of guitars, fiddles, pedal steel, used in much the same way as horns were used in swing and big bands, became the template for the classic country outfits of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Their enduring influence can be heard in the music of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Mel Tillis to the Mavericks and Jim Lauderdale. Wills and the Texas Playboys were arguably Merle Haggard's most important musical role models and Eldon Shamblin would perform with Haggard's band, the Strangers, for almost ten years. He would join Tiny Moore and other one-time Playboys for Haggard's 1970 album The Best Damn Fiddle Player In The World (Or My Salute To Bob Wills). So determined to do right by Wills, Haggard, already in his early thirties, learned to play fiddle for the recording. Later, in 1973, Haggard was instrumental in the organization and execution of For The Last Time, an album of Wills classics which brought together Playboys alumni from their 1930's beginnings to their last days in the late 1960s. (Though Wills had a stroke on the second day of the sessions and was unable to contribute much to "The Last Time" thereafter, it is one of the finest recordings in his canon)
The Tiffany Transcriptions (Collectors' Choice, www.collectorschoicemusic.com; via Tiffany Music Inc., the company formed specifically for the project by Wills and his partners, a pioneering country disc jockey from California called Cactus Jack and songwriter Clifford Sundlin) were recorded during breaks from long stretches of consecutive one-night stands across the West and Southwest almost thirty years before "The Last Time." They give a glorious opportunity to hear Wills and the Playboys at the apex of their popularity and musical ability. The ten discs contain versions of many of the same classics that are on "The Last Time" and other studio recordings but the need for enough material to cover dozens of radio shows meant the Playboys also had to draw from more than just their regular repertoire. Besides the polka/mariachi/Celtic folk music rooted country music most of the band grew up playing and which they blended with the more urban/Eastern/African American music to create their signature sound, the boys got to directly address those latter styles, expertly interpreting the music of Fats Waller ("Honeysuckle Rose"), Count Basie ("Jumpin' At The Woodside") and Duke Ellington ("Take The ‘A' Train"; "C-Jam Blues") - proving they could play it straight and still cut the mustard with jazz and swing as well as with more standard country and/or western fare.
In 1946 and 1947 Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys made a series of "transcriptions" pre- recorded radio shows of the band performing with Wills also acting as MC and ringmaster - that were sent to various local radio outlets. These recordings allowed space for the local stations to insert local advertising and announcements and were aired at the stations' convenience giving the impression of immediacy and proximity.
With the project being in the control of Wills and his partners, the band had the freedom to take on a broad range of material but also to take a more expansive even improvisational approach to playing it; if somebody hit a sweet spot they were given the leg room to play it out, to wail while the wailing was good. And for these cats, farm boys, city slickers and small town sharps to play was to live, and to live was to swing.
Some of the songs here were released by Kaleidoscope records on vinyl in the early 1980s and later on CD. But this is the first time all of the transcription recordings have been available in one package. It's the first complete collection of any kind since the original 78s were distributed in the ‘40s. Each of the ten discs has a particular, though sometimes loose, theme; "Basin Street Blues"; "You're From Texas" etc. One disc, titled "Sally Goodin", is made up of fiddle tunes and reels and even includes "Oklahoma Hills." Fans of folk music and muckraking slightly "pink" patriots will recognize that one as a Woody Guthrie joint. Another disc features the singing McKinney Sisters, Dean and Evelyn. Dean would marry Playboys mandolinist Billy "Tiny" Moore.
Wills, as his film appearances show, was a dynamic, energetic, appealing performer; one hundred per cent Texas ham. Onstage, he would dance, clown and mug, employing some of the schtick he picked up from his days in blackface minstrel shows. He'd call out his musicians by name to cue solo breaks hollering his trademark "Ah!" when the feeling hit or, since no audience would feel a show was complete without it, convincingly made it seem that way. One might well ask, "What Makes Bob Holler?" and in the song of the same name the band did just. "Because he loves to play," they testify. One would be hard pressed to find any evidence in his films or recordings to the contrary. From Bob, what might have seemed corny, contrived and phony from someone else was, well, corny, sometimes contrived but hardly false. Bob Wills had loads of charm and a love of music making that transmitted easily to live audiences and are just as much in evidence on record, especially in this almost dauntingly comprehensive collection.
Despite the popularity of contemporaries like Brown, Bill Boyd, Moon Mullican, Spade Cooley and others, there are many reasons why Wills, is the enduring face of Western Swing. The lively, vital performances on The Tiffany Transcriptions give at least 150 re-mastered ones. There were better fiddle players and singers, more prolific songwriters and certainly there were more graceful dancers but somehow Bob Wills caught lightning in a bottle. He was that rarest of musical people; a great bandleader. They are generally good to great musicians but more than that they are strategists, spokesmen, focal points and sometimes even jesters and clowns.
The bandleader - Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Cab Calloway - is the locus of a band's energy, soul and magic. Wills, who as a child could not be separated from the black children and their families and friends who were his companions and early music sources, had those qualities to spare. A stroke in 1969 ended his playing career at age 64; four years older than Bruce Springsteen is now and several years younger than Willie Nelson, Buddy Guy and the surviving Beatles and original Rolling Stones. After the '73 stroke his physical decline was rapid and inexorable. A love of high living - he was married five times - and a fondness for the bottle contributed to the decline.
But since his death Wills' legend has been growing, not fading. With fuel like the "TT's" to keep it going there's no reason to expect that to change anytime soon.
Standout Tracks: "Jumpin' At The Woodside," "Lazy River" RICK ALLEN
