Bob Wills was born on March 6, 1905. In the 1930s and 1940s, Wills was one of the creators of western swing, a musical style that sat at the intersection of country and big-band swing music.
Wills was born into a musical family in rural Texas. His father was a champion fiddler; his sister and brothers all played musical instruments, and Wills learned to play fiddle and mandolin as a child. The family supplemented the income from their cotton farm by hosting dances on weekends.
In 1932, Wills formed his band, The Playboys. They quickly became popular enough that Wills decided to move them to a larger town. In 1934, the band—now called The Texas Playboys—moved to Oklahoma City, where they played dance halls in the evening, and did a daily midday radio show.
The style that Wills and the Texas Playboys helped to create was lively dance music that combined polka, blues, Dixieland, and what was then called “hillbilly” music, and added the swing of the big bands. A western swing band might have a trumpet or a saxophone in the mix, but more often, the sound was dominated by electric guitars, steel guitars, and fiddles. And where the big bands usually played from written arrangements, with improvisation coming only in solo instrumental breaks, a western swing band was usually engaged in collective improvisation throughout.
Wills’ band grew more popular throughout the 1930s and introduced the song that would become their signature in 1940. It wasn’t an entirely new song. They’d been playing an instrumental version of “San Antonio Rose” for a few years; after singer Tommy Duncan joined the group, they added lyrics and called the new version “New San Antonio Rose.” The song has become a country standard (these days, the “New” is usually left out of the name).
The Texas Playboys went on a brief hiatus during World War II when several band members joined the military. Wills himself joined the Army in 1942, at the age of 37, but was medically discharged within a year. After his discharge, he moved to Los Angeles and began reforming the band. The new version of the Texas Playboys did away with the horns and saxophones; the focus was placed solidly on fiddles and guitars.
From their base in Los Angeles, the Texas Playboys did daily radio broadcasts, and played weekend dances, most often at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego. They were also a popular touring act and were reported to have outsold Harry James, Benny Goodman, and “both Dorseys” in Oakland in early 1944. They made their first national tour late that year, including a stop of the Grand Ole Opry, where Wills insisted on performing with his drummer. Drums were thought of as part of pop music, not country, and the Opry had a firm no-drums policy.
Wills opened his own nightclub in Sacramento in 1947, and his radio broadcasts from there were powerful enough to be heard throughout the western United States. By this time, the Texas Playboys were popular enough to be booked in dance halls all week long. The manager of one auditorium in Wilmington explained that “although Monday night dancing is frankly an experiment, it was the only night of the week on which this outstanding band could be secured.”
Wills moved back to Oklahoma City in 1949 and opened a second dance hall in Dallas. Unfortunately, the managers he hired to run the Dallas hall were crooks who left him with heavy debts, in near financial ruin.
Western swing began to fade in popularity after 1950, as rock and roll began to rise. In both country and pop radio, lines of division were being drawn more sharply, and Wills found himself too country for pop radio and too pop for country radio. In a 1957 interview, Wills tried to argue for his relevance in the age of rock and roll, saying “Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!” That may be an overstatement, but there are certainly elements of western swing in the DNA of rock and roll; add a little more R&B to western swing, and you’re not too far away from rockabilly.
Wills and the Texas Playboys continued to tour into the early 1960s, and a 1960-61 reunion with singer Tommy Duncan even put him briefly back on the country charts. Wills dissolved the Texas Playboys in 1965 and continued to perform as a solo act. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968, the first of several such honors he’d receive—the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, in the “Early Influence” category; and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.
A stroke in 1969 left Wills partly paralyzed, but interest in his music was revived in the early 1970s. Merle Haggard recorded an album of Wills standards, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, and bands like Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen started a western swing revival movement.
By December 1973, Wills had recovered sufficiently from his stroke to arrange a reunion recording session with some of the original Texas Playboys. On the first day of the two-day recording session, Wills suffered another stroke. The band finished the session without him, and it was released as For the Last Time. Another stroke a few days later left Wills in a coma from which he never recovered; he died on May 13, 1975.
Several of Wills’ songs have become country standards, familiar even to people who’ve never heard Wills’ performances of them—“Take Me Back to Tulsa,” “Roly Poly,” “Faded Love.” The best of Wills’ music can be heard on several greatest hits collections; the most comprehensive is called Encore. There are several volumes in the “Tiffany Transcriptions” series, recordings of the Texas Playboys mid-1940s broadcasts from KGO radio in San Francisco. More of Bob Wills’ music is available for streaming at Hoopla.