Bob Wills

Country music fiddler, singer, bandleader, and songwriter, born in Kosse, Texas, USA. He played in bands in the late-1920s. In 1934 he formed the Texas Playboys, a band popular in the SW, before moving to California (1942) to perform in films and dance halls. Although he was a traditional hoedown fiddler, his band helped popularize Western swing in the 1950s and 1960s with an eclectic repertory of country, jazz, blues, and pop. His own best-known compositions include ‘Faded Love’, ‘Maiden's Prayer’, and ‘San Antonio Rose’.

He was born near Kosse, Texas; his father was a fiddle player who along with his grandfather, taught the young Wills to play the fiddle and the mandolin.

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.

Wills remained with the Doughboys and replaced Brown with new singer Tommy Duncan in 1932. Wills and Duncan left the Doughboys in 1933 after Wills had missed one show too many due to his sporadic drinking.

After forming a new band, "The Playboys" and relocating to Waco, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market. Wills soon settled the renamed "Texas Playboys" in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noontime shows over the 50,000 watt KVOO radio station. By 1935 Wills had added horn, reed players and drums to the Playboys. Wills himself largely sang blues and sentimental ballads.

Even as late as 1945, the use of a drum set was not accepted in country music, and the Grand Ole Opry tried to prevent the Texas Playboys drummer from playing during an appearance at the Opry. Wills defied convention and managed to have his drummer not only play, but appear on stage .

With its jazz sophistication, pop music and blues influence, plus improvised scats and wisecrack commentary by Wills (something he learned clowning in those earlier medicine shows), the band became the first superstars of the genre.

Wills' 1938 recording of "Ida Red" served as a model for Chuck Berry's decades later version of the same song - Maybellene . 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. Despite losing various members to the World War II draft, Wills kept the big band until late 1942.

By the fall of 1943, after a brief, unpleasant stint in the U.S. Army, Bob Wills had moved to Hollywood with a reorganized, downsized Texas Playboys.

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. By 1945 he was working from 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.

During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills & The original recorded version of Wills's "Faded Love," appeared on the Tiffanys as a fairly swinging instrumental unlike the ballad it became when lyrics were added in 1950.

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). Having lived a lavish lifestyle in California, in 1949 Wills moved back to Oklahoma City, then went back on the road to maintain his payroll and Wills Point. An even more disastrous business decision came when he opened a second club, the Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas, Texas. Turning the club over to what was later revealed as dishonest managers 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."

Wills 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. 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. After two heart attacks, in 1965 he dissolved the Texas Playboys (who briefly continued as an independent unit) to perform solo with house bands.

Wills's musical legacy, however, endured. His style influenced performers Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and helped to spawn a style of music now known as the Bakersfield Sound (Bakersfield, California was one of Wills's regular stops in his heyday). A 1970 tribute album by Haggard directed a wider audience to Wills's music, as did the appearance of younger "revival" bands like Asleep at the Wheel and the growing popularity of longtime Wills disciple and fan Willie Nelson. By 1971, Wills recovered sufficiently to travel occasionally and appear at tribute concerts. Wills appeared on a couple tracks from the first day's session but suffered a stroke overnight. Wills by then was comatose.

Bob Wills was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.