 |
| Hear the echoes. |
Because the subjects of this third and final chapter in this mini-series on early country music provide context all on their own, I don’t need to pad this as much as I did the last two. Both served as bridges to the growth and future of the genre and people called both of them kings….or they just laid claim to the throne. Let’s get to it.
Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music
“Stylistically, his clear, heartfelt vocals modernized the era’s predominantly stringband sound just enough to seem innovative and traditional at the same time.”
That quote from Roy Acuff’s biography on the Country Music Hall of Fame website (hereafter, “CMHoF”) caught my eye for two reasons. First, it speaks to the particular weight of tradition in the genre, i.e., innovation can’t happen without giving tradition its due. Second, I’ve heard Acuff’s voice enough to know that does it justice.
Roy Claxton Acuff was born into a prominent family in Maynardville, Tennessee in 1903. He had a Tennessee state senator hanging from his family tree, just one generation back, and his parents’ home was a popular spot for community entertaining; the young Acuff pitched in by balancing farm tools on his chin. Athletics interested him more than music growing up - just about every source I read noted he was a “three-sport standout” - but Acuff did sing in his school’s chapel choir and performed in “every play they had” during his high school career. His first pass at a career saw him try out for the Knoxville minor-league baseball affiliate to the (then) New York Giants in 1929, but Acuff collapsed during tryouts - “an after-effect of earlier sunstroke” according to the CMHoF - which resulted in what all accounts term “a nervous breakdown” that lasted into 1930. Music would carry him out of it.
Acuff learned to play the fiddle during his convalescence by listening to Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner records and kept working from there. He started playing patent medicine shows (in blackface), and Wikipedia credits his experience working with no microphones for developing a clear and powerful voice; when he and his bandmates landed their radio gigs, that voice cut through the static nicely as well as carrying over the instruments. That backing band, the Tennessee Crackerjacks, featured Jess Easteray on guitar and a Hawaiian guitarist named Clell Summey, but became the Crazy Tennesseans with the addition of bassist Red Jones and upon being introduced as such by a radio announcer named Alan Stout (WROL was one station they worked, WNOX the other).
Opportunities opened up from there, including an invitation from a producer named W. R. Calaway to record with a Chicago-based label, American Record Corporation, in 1936. Not long after, and even if the line wasn't straight, Roy Acuff (et. al.) stepped on to the stage that would define his incredible career, the Grand Ole Opry. The wobble came from the man who ran the Opry, George D. Hay, who didn’t much care for Acuff or his Crazy Tennesseans. It took some nudging from a promoter named J. L. Frank and one unremarkable guest spot in 1937 to reach the Promised Land, but everything changed thereafter.
On February 5, 1938 performance, Acuff played “The Great Speckled Bird,” a future signature song and the crowd went wild and the fan-mail bag filled to bursting. At Frank’s suggestion, and with some changes - e.g., a guy named Beecher (Pete) Kirby replaced Summey and they added Bashful Brother Oswald, who added his dobro to the band and handled the high-side of the harmony - his backing band became The Smoky Mountain Boys. That name followed Acuff for the rest of his long career. With another hit at his back - “Wabash Cannonball,” in this case (and that's a 1940 performance of it) - he became one of the first “stars” of the Opry’s “budding star system” and host of the Grand Ole Opry’s “Prince Albert” segment from 1939-1946. Even with steady work at the Opry and touring, he found time to appear in handful of B-movies (a site called Alan Cackett lists, Hi Neighbour, My Darling Clementine, Cowboy Canteen and Sing Neighbour, Sing). 1948 saw him open an amusement park (Dunbar Cave Resort; I couldn’t find anything on that, dammit!) and make a run for Governor of Tennessee as a Republican, in which he won the primary, only to lose in the general. Over the course of a 50-year career, Roy Acuff would sell north of 50 million records. At his peak, he lead a big enough act that tent-shows with him and Uncle Dave Macon on the bill (profiled in an early post) would shut down the highways around them.
His other contribution to country music came when he launched Acuff-Rose Music, a publishing company he owned and operated with a songwriter named Fred Rose (legally, ownership of the business split between Rose and Acuff’s wife, Mildred). Acuff started Acuff-Rose to publish (and profit from) his own music, but, seeing that country acts sometimes got stiffed by larger, generic distributors, he invited them to publish with his company instead. They signed/published some major talent too - e.g., Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson and the Everly Brothers. The company became a good earner and an anchor of the Nashville music scene.
That turned out to be a good thing because Acuff’s star first dimmed, then faded starting in the late 1940s. Tastes moved on, for one: sales for honky-tonk, with its electric instruments and smoother vocals, eclipsed the second generation material; when honky-tonk star Ernest Tubb signed with the Opry, the writing was on the wall. Acuff continued to perform and record, switching labels as he went, even adding a snare drum and electric guitar to his act (Alan Cackett’s the source on that), but sales never picked up and the venues got smaller and smaller. By the very end - this was in the early 1980s when he was widowed - he would just show up at the Opry to do odd jobs like filling the backstage refrigerators with sodas. Acuff probably didn’t mind that - it gave him something to do - but the Opry had already given him one hell of a swan-song on the 1974 opening night at its new venue, Ryman Auditorium:
“The first show at the new venue opened with a huge projection of a late-1930s image of Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys onto a large screen above the stage. A recording from one of the band's 1939 appearances was played over the sound system, with the iconic voice of George Hay introducing the band, followed by the band's performance of 'Wabash Cannonball.' That same night, Acuff showed President Richard Nixon, an honored guest at the event, how to yo-yo, and convinced the president to play several songs on the piano.”
Forgot to mention, but Acuff really loved the yo-yo. Apparently, he’d pull one out and do tricks on it during solos by his band members. (But also, the Southern Strategy; Nixon didn’t do anything without an angle.) The Grand Ole Opry gave one of its original stars its due, not only making him the first living artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, but also naming the Roy Acuff Theater in his honor…which was demolished in 2011 after extensive damage in the 2010 Tennessee floods. I’m guessing there’s a metaphor in there…
On the Sampler
As with most acts in this series, I stuck with Roy Acuff’s most popular tunes. I linked to the two big ones up above (“The Great Speckled Bird” and “Wabash Cannonball”), but he and his Smoky Mountain Boys got plenty of mileage out of the smartly comic “Lonely Mound of Clay” (see the opening verse), the traditionally tragic “Wreck on the Highway,” and, “Pins and Needles (In My Heart),” a song that...could have slipped into the next featured artist’s catalog. Acuff’s faith played a big role in his life and music, so I wanted to get a couple of those in, and went with upbeat numbers like “Waiting for the Light to Shine” and “That Glory Bound Train.” The rest were just songs that tugged at my ear as I listened. Some just felt like a good example of Acuff’s style - e.g., “Night Train to Memphis,” “Old Age Pension Check,” and “Low and Lonely.” One song, though, gives a great example of the voice that cut through static, “Fireball Mail.” [Ed. - Fair warning, the titles aren't consistent on Acuff's catalog across different platforms; I had to dig a little to match the titles they gave some of those songs on Spotify.]
Nearly all those songs sound…for lack of a better world, old, as if they came from a time detached from the 1970s and 80s, never mind today. It takes listening to older country to hear what Acuff slipped past tradition. And country was better for it. Or more commercial anyway.
And now, the next member of royalty…
Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, and His Texas Playboys
Like Acuff, James Robert Wills grew up around music; unlike Acuff, music was his first love. It could be that seeing his dad beat nationally-famous fiddler, Eck Robertson, in a fiddling duel made an impression. Wills picked it up both and the mandolin early, but also saw the world through wider eyes. He hailed from the same part of Texas as Scott Joplin and Blind Lemon Jefferson and he was a big enough fan of Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues (also covered earlier), that he rode a horse 50 miles to see her as a teenager. According to Wikipedia, he even patterned his vocal style after hers. Wills might have started on traditional country/folk instruments, but he learned and loved blues and jazz just as much. During his career, he lead one of the first acts to go fully electric and he championed the steel guitar in country arrangements. Between that and his unique musical inspirations, Wills became one of country’s music’s great innovators. To borrow some good lines from Alan Cackett’s entry:
“It was a bubbling gumbo of Texas fiddle tunes, rural blues, big-band jazz and just about anything else that could get the floor moving. Wills was one of the first country performers to absorb the full impact of radio, which in the 1920s and 1930s began exposing the rural country people to urban music.”
Ah, "urban music." Anyhoo, Wills was born in Kosse, Limestone County, Texas in 1905, but he outgrew it early. He left home in his late teens and bounced all over the American Southwest; his CMHoF bio mentions working construction and selling insurance in Amarillo, preaching in Knox County, and even working as a barber in Roy, New Mexico. He eventually bounced to Forth Worth and started on the minstrel/medicine show circuit, but he caught his real break after dropping “Jim” and going by “Bob” and teaming up with a guitarist named Herman Arnspiger. They built a show together and, by 1929, had even managed to record a pair of songs that would ultimately be lost (one of those songs: Bessie Smith’s “Gulf Coast Blues”). Before long, Wills and Arnspiger teamed up with a singer named Milton Brown, his brother Derwood Brown, and a tenor banjo player named Sleepy Johnson. That group played briefly as Wills Fiddle band, but later became Aladdin’s Laddies for a radio show on Forth Worth’s WBAP, and still later became The Light Crust Doughboys after Light Crust Flour started to sponsor their radio spot. That group broke up for a couple reasons, not all of which get connected across the few sources I read, but, the Brown brothers left in 1932 to start their own band, while Wills got fired from the Doughboys the same year for excessive drinking. There is math and there is a theme.
According to Wills’ Wikipedia page, Brown helped push that first band’s sound toward swing and they also credit him for forming “the first true Western swing band,” the Musical Brownies. Wills took notes and, piece-by-piece, and still bouncing around - first to Waco, TX, then to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, then finally to Tulsa, Oklahoma - he finally landed a band and base of operations at the same time. He first named the band The Playboys before goosing it to the Texas Playboys and, once they got on Tulsa’s 50,000 watt KVOO for a noon hour show, broadcasting live from the famous Cain Auditorium, things took off from there.
Wills added brass instruments to his act accidentally and one instrument at a time, starting with Everet Stover, a trumpeter who came on as an announcer, then Zeb McNally on the saxophone, then Smoky Dacus on the drums, and finally Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar. The size of his orchestra settled on a 16-piece; it included traditional country instruments, but also brass, reeds and drums, but, no less important, “the versatile band could play anything from a fiddle breakdown to a George Gershwin composition.” As early as 1935, Wills hired a vocalist/pianist to hold it all together, a smooth baritone named Tommy Duncan. After setting up base in Southern California, (Los Angeles, specifically), he scaled up his band and toured the northern California and the Pacific Northwest with a 21-piece band. That outfit set attendance records at places of particular interest like Jantzen Beach and Klamath Falls, Oregon, but also Santa Monica; a two-night engagement in Oakland, California, where they packed the house at 19,000 two nights straight. In 1945, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys drew bigger crowds than Benny Goodman and at least one of the Dorseys (Wikipedia says Tommy, but I think he topped ‘em both). Wills’ hey-day ran from 1935 all the way to 1947. His signature song, “New San Antonio Rose” sold in the millions. He did the movies as well, 19 titles in all and most with the kind of names you’d expect (e.g., Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), Rhythm Round-Up (1945) and Blazing the Western Trail (1945)), plus a couple you might not (e.g., The Vigilantes Ride (1943) the Lawless Empire (1945)).
Not everyone appreciated Wills’ impact on country, the Grand Ole Opry among them. Given Wills’ draw as a performer, they could hardly ignore him, but he still ran up against the Opry’s ban on “popular instruments” - e.g., brass and drums - when he showed up for his spot. They eventually relented on the brass and agreed that Pee Wee King and Paul Howard could perform, but the furthest they’d go on a drummer was to allow him to play behind the curtain. The Opry never agreed to allowing a drummer, but Wills nailed them by dropping his drummer, Monte Mountjoy, front and center right before the performance and for all the world to see.
That showed Wills at his stubborn best, but his lifelong battle with the bottle showed him at his stubborn worst. Per Wikipedia’s euphemism, Wills became “unreliable” by the late 1940s and, when things fell apart, he’d take out his failures on Duncan - and all the way up to firing him from the band in 1948. (Just to note it, the CMHoF buries all of this.) Business troubles caught up with him as well: on his relocation to California, Wills opened a nightclub in Sacramento called Wills Point. That was 1947, but, in a scramble to keep up his lifestyle, he opened Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas…and that was the one that nailed him. The people he hired to manage didn’t just rob him blind, they left him with an insurmountable pile of back taxes to pay off. He sold a lot of things in desperation, none more valuable than the master recording of “New San Antonio Rose.”
Desperation defined Bob Wills’ later years. He attempted a number of comebacks, even took a stab at glomming on to the rock “fad” (“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.”), but none of it took enough to matter. It’s possible (and Wikipedia makes the case), that the same knack for straddling genres that helped get his career off the ground was the same thing that crashed him back to earth in the end. Playing, as he did, in a space between country, the then-moribund genre big band style, and something like rock, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys had no natural outlet for what they did. By way of a literally terrifying succession of heart attacks and strokes, Wills fell apart little by little from 1965 until his death nearly a decade later. The math gets a little fuzzy (but also see, terrifying above), because his last stroke left him unconscious from December of 1973 but he didn’t actually depart from this life until May, 1975. Tragic, certainly, but he’d done enough by then.
About the Sampler
Having spent enough time on the big band era (and the square shit from the 1950s and 1960s), I actually enjoyed listening to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. Bluntly, that shit bops - or at least some of it ("New San Antonio Rose" sounds like Welk). It has style, it feels a little risqué and all that makes it something very important in music: it’s fun.
I only flagged one of their songs above, but I think I dropped a pretty good cross-section into the sampler. If you listen to “New San Antonio Rose,” you’ll hear something very much like big band, only with more fronted vocals. Those elements carry through on tracks like “Dusty Skies,” Swing Blues No. 1,” and even on a later number like “Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima.” I neglected to mention it above, but Wills did his bit for WWII by writing patriotic jingles in his particular idiom - something that translates to the tale end at “Iwo Jima,” but also in the picking, fiddling-heavy (and, on the phrasing side, deeply weird and dated; see verses on “heathens”) “Smoke on the Water.” (That's right, "Smoke on the Water.")
Wills could work in several veins, up and back to 20s-style jazz in songs like “Bring It Down to My House, Honey,” and, when mixed with fiddling, a rollicking number like “Get With It.” While the tone/tradition sounds the same, the “twang” plays the dominant role on numbers like, “Who Walks in When I Walk Out,” “Faded Love,” and “Ida Red Likes the Boogie.” One of his other signature numbers, “Steel Guitar Rag,” comes from a different place altogether - and it’s cool to hear Leon McAuliffe’s name called out for posterity, but, the vocal style really stands out - especially in the backdrop of everything I’ve listened to in earlier American music. It’s loose and playful, a little like a “play it, daddy-o” beatnik slur, just 10-15 years early.
And that’s it for this one. That’s also it for this era of country. For what it’s worth, and based on what I’ve got planned for the future, stepping away now risks skipping over major, defining legends of the genre, even accidentally. Basically, I’m worried I’ll get wrapped up in other shit and forget to get back to Hank Williams. And that would just be dumb.
Regardless, the series swaps over to early blues from here. Till then.
Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music
“Stylistically, his clear, heartfelt vocals modernized the era’s predominantly stringband sound just enough to seem innovative and traditional at the same time.”
That quote from Roy Acuff’s biography on the Country Music Hall of Fame website (hereafter, “CMHoF”) caught my eye for two reasons. First, it speaks to the particular weight of tradition in the genre, i.e., innovation can’t happen without giving tradition its due. Second, I’ve heard Acuff’s voice enough to know that does it justice.
Roy Claxton Acuff was born into a prominent family in Maynardville, Tennessee in 1903. He had a Tennessee state senator hanging from his family tree, just one generation back, and his parents’ home was a popular spot for community entertaining; the young Acuff pitched in by balancing farm tools on his chin. Athletics interested him more than music growing up - just about every source I read noted he was a “three-sport standout” - but Acuff did sing in his school’s chapel choir and performed in “every play they had” during his high school career. His first pass at a career saw him try out for the Knoxville minor-league baseball affiliate to the (then) New York Giants in 1929, but Acuff collapsed during tryouts - “an after-effect of earlier sunstroke” according to the CMHoF - which resulted in what all accounts term “a nervous breakdown” that lasted into 1930. Music would carry him out of it.
Acuff learned to play the fiddle during his convalescence by listening to Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner records and kept working from there. He started playing patent medicine shows (in blackface), and Wikipedia credits his experience working with no microphones for developing a clear and powerful voice; when he and his bandmates landed their radio gigs, that voice cut through the static nicely as well as carrying over the instruments. That backing band, the Tennessee Crackerjacks, featured Jess Easteray on guitar and a Hawaiian guitarist named Clell Summey, but became the Crazy Tennesseans with the addition of bassist Red Jones and upon being introduced as such by a radio announcer named Alan Stout (WROL was one station they worked, WNOX the other).
Opportunities opened up from there, including an invitation from a producer named W. R. Calaway to record with a Chicago-based label, American Record Corporation, in 1936. Not long after, and even if the line wasn't straight, Roy Acuff (et. al.) stepped on to the stage that would define his incredible career, the Grand Ole Opry. The wobble came from the man who ran the Opry, George D. Hay, who didn’t much care for Acuff or his Crazy Tennesseans. It took some nudging from a promoter named J. L. Frank and one unremarkable guest spot in 1937 to reach the Promised Land, but everything changed thereafter.
On February 5, 1938 performance, Acuff played “The Great Speckled Bird,” a future signature song and the crowd went wild and the fan-mail bag filled to bursting. At Frank’s suggestion, and with some changes - e.g., a guy named Beecher (Pete) Kirby replaced Summey and they added Bashful Brother Oswald, who added his dobro to the band and handled the high-side of the harmony - his backing band became The Smoky Mountain Boys. That name followed Acuff for the rest of his long career. With another hit at his back - “Wabash Cannonball,” in this case (and that's a 1940 performance of it) - he became one of the first “stars” of the Opry’s “budding star system” and host of the Grand Ole Opry’s “Prince Albert” segment from 1939-1946. Even with steady work at the Opry and touring, he found time to appear in handful of B-movies (a site called Alan Cackett lists, Hi Neighbour, My Darling Clementine, Cowboy Canteen and Sing Neighbour, Sing). 1948 saw him open an amusement park (Dunbar Cave Resort; I couldn’t find anything on that, dammit!) and make a run for Governor of Tennessee as a Republican, in which he won the primary, only to lose in the general. Over the course of a 50-year career, Roy Acuff would sell north of 50 million records. At his peak, he lead a big enough act that tent-shows with him and Uncle Dave Macon on the bill (profiled in an early post) would shut down the highways around them.
His other contribution to country music came when he launched Acuff-Rose Music, a publishing company he owned and operated with a songwriter named Fred Rose (legally, ownership of the business split between Rose and Acuff’s wife, Mildred). Acuff started Acuff-Rose to publish (and profit from) his own music, but, seeing that country acts sometimes got stiffed by larger, generic distributors, he invited them to publish with his company instead. They signed/published some major talent too - e.g., Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson and the Everly Brothers. The company became a good earner and an anchor of the Nashville music scene.
That turned out to be a good thing because Acuff’s star first dimmed, then faded starting in the late 1940s. Tastes moved on, for one: sales for honky-tonk, with its electric instruments and smoother vocals, eclipsed the second generation material; when honky-tonk star Ernest Tubb signed with the Opry, the writing was on the wall. Acuff continued to perform and record, switching labels as he went, even adding a snare drum and electric guitar to his act (Alan Cackett’s the source on that), but sales never picked up and the venues got smaller and smaller. By the very end - this was in the early 1980s when he was widowed - he would just show up at the Opry to do odd jobs like filling the backstage refrigerators with sodas. Acuff probably didn’t mind that - it gave him something to do - but the Opry had already given him one hell of a swan-song on the 1974 opening night at its new venue, Ryman Auditorium:
“The first show at the new venue opened with a huge projection of a late-1930s image of Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys onto a large screen above the stage. A recording from one of the band's 1939 appearances was played over the sound system, with the iconic voice of George Hay introducing the band, followed by the band's performance of 'Wabash Cannonball.' That same night, Acuff showed President Richard Nixon, an honored guest at the event, how to yo-yo, and convinced the president to play several songs on the piano.”
Forgot to mention, but Acuff really loved the yo-yo. Apparently, he’d pull one out and do tricks on it during solos by his band members. (But also, the Southern Strategy; Nixon didn’t do anything without an angle.) The Grand Ole Opry gave one of its original stars its due, not only making him the first living artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, but also naming the Roy Acuff Theater in his honor…which was demolished in 2011 after extensive damage in the 2010 Tennessee floods. I’m guessing there’s a metaphor in there…
On the Sampler
As with most acts in this series, I stuck with Roy Acuff’s most popular tunes. I linked to the two big ones up above (“The Great Speckled Bird” and “Wabash Cannonball”), but he and his Smoky Mountain Boys got plenty of mileage out of the smartly comic “Lonely Mound of Clay” (see the opening verse), the traditionally tragic “Wreck on the Highway,” and, “Pins and Needles (In My Heart),” a song that...could have slipped into the next featured artist’s catalog. Acuff’s faith played a big role in his life and music, so I wanted to get a couple of those in, and went with upbeat numbers like “Waiting for the Light to Shine” and “That Glory Bound Train.” The rest were just songs that tugged at my ear as I listened. Some just felt like a good example of Acuff’s style - e.g., “Night Train to Memphis,” “Old Age Pension Check,” and “Low and Lonely.” One song, though, gives a great example of the voice that cut through static, “Fireball Mail.” [Ed. - Fair warning, the titles aren't consistent on Acuff's catalog across different platforms; I had to dig a little to match the titles they gave some of those songs on Spotify.]
Nearly all those songs sound…for lack of a better world, old, as if they came from a time detached from the 1970s and 80s, never mind today. It takes listening to older country to hear what Acuff slipped past tradition. And country was better for it. Or more commercial anyway.
And now, the next member of royalty…
Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, and His Texas Playboys
Like Acuff, James Robert Wills grew up around music; unlike Acuff, music was his first love. It could be that seeing his dad beat nationally-famous fiddler, Eck Robertson, in a fiddling duel made an impression. Wills picked it up both and the mandolin early, but also saw the world through wider eyes. He hailed from the same part of Texas as Scott Joplin and Blind Lemon Jefferson and he was a big enough fan of Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues (also covered earlier), that he rode a horse 50 miles to see her as a teenager. According to Wikipedia, he even patterned his vocal style after hers. Wills might have started on traditional country/folk instruments, but he learned and loved blues and jazz just as much. During his career, he lead one of the first acts to go fully electric and he championed the steel guitar in country arrangements. Between that and his unique musical inspirations, Wills became one of country’s music’s great innovators. To borrow some good lines from Alan Cackett’s entry:
“It was a bubbling gumbo of Texas fiddle tunes, rural blues, big-band jazz and just about anything else that could get the floor moving. Wills was one of the first country performers to absorb the full impact of radio, which in the 1920s and 1930s began exposing the rural country people to urban music.”
Ah, "urban music." Anyhoo, Wills was born in Kosse, Limestone County, Texas in 1905, but he outgrew it early. He left home in his late teens and bounced all over the American Southwest; his CMHoF bio mentions working construction and selling insurance in Amarillo, preaching in Knox County, and even working as a barber in Roy, New Mexico. He eventually bounced to Forth Worth and started on the minstrel/medicine show circuit, but he caught his real break after dropping “Jim” and going by “Bob” and teaming up with a guitarist named Herman Arnspiger. They built a show together and, by 1929, had even managed to record a pair of songs that would ultimately be lost (one of those songs: Bessie Smith’s “Gulf Coast Blues”). Before long, Wills and Arnspiger teamed up with a singer named Milton Brown, his brother Derwood Brown, and a tenor banjo player named Sleepy Johnson. That group played briefly as Wills Fiddle band, but later became Aladdin’s Laddies for a radio show on Forth Worth’s WBAP, and still later became The Light Crust Doughboys after Light Crust Flour started to sponsor their radio spot. That group broke up for a couple reasons, not all of which get connected across the few sources I read, but, the Brown brothers left in 1932 to start their own band, while Wills got fired from the Doughboys the same year for excessive drinking. There is math and there is a theme.
According to Wills’ Wikipedia page, Brown helped push that first band’s sound toward swing and they also credit him for forming “the first true Western swing band,” the Musical Brownies. Wills took notes and, piece-by-piece, and still bouncing around - first to Waco, TX, then to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, then finally to Tulsa, Oklahoma - he finally landed a band and base of operations at the same time. He first named the band The Playboys before goosing it to the Texas Playboys and, once they got on Tulsa’s 50,000 watt KVOO for a noon hour show, broadcasting live from the famous Cain Auditorium, things took off from there.
Wills added brass instruments to his act accidentally and one instrument at a time, starting with Everet Stover, a trumpeter who came on as an announcer, then Zeb McNally on the saxophone, then Smoky Dacus on the drums, and finally Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar. The size of his orchestra settled on a 16-piece; it included traditional country instruments, but also brass, reeds and drums, but, no less important, “the versatile band could play anything from a fiddle breakdown to a George Gershwin composition.” As early as 1935, Wills hired a vocalist/pianist to hold it all together, a smooth baritone named Tommy Duncan. After setting up base in Southern California, (Los Angeles, specifically), he scaled up his band and toured the northern California and the Pacific Northwest with a 21-piece band. That outfit set attendance records at places of particular interest like Jantzen Beach and Klamath Falls, Oregon, but also Santa Monica; a two-night engagement in Oakland, California, where they packed the house at 19,000 two nights straight. In 1945, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys drew bigger crowds than Benny Goodman and at least one of the Dorseys (Wikipedia says Tommy, but I think he topped ‘em both). Wills’ hey-day ran from 1935 all the way to 1947. His signature song, “New San Antonio Rose” sold in the millions. He did the movies as well, 19 titles in all and most with the kind of names you’d expect (e.g., Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), Rhythm Round-Up (1945) and Blazing the Western Trail (1945)), plus a couple you might not (e.g., The Vigilantes Ride (1943) the Lawless Empire (1945)).
Not everyone appreciated Wills’ impact on country, the Grand Ole Opry among them. Given Wills’ draw as a performer, they could hardly ignore him, but he still ran up against the Opry’s ban on “popular instruments” - e.g., brass and drums - when he showed up for his spot. They eventually relented on the brass and agreed that Pee Wee King and Paul Howard could perform, but the furthest they’d go on a drummer was to allow him to play behind the curtain. The Opry never agreed to allowing a drummer, but Wills nailed them by dropping his drummer, Monte Mountjoy, front and center right before the performance and for all the world to see.
That showed Wills at his stubborn best, but his lifelong battle with the bottle showed him at his stubborn worst. Per Wikipedia’s euphemism, Wills became “unreliable” by the late 1940s and, when things fell apart, he’d take out his failures on Duncan - and all the way up to firing him from the band in 1948. (Just to note it, the CMHoF buries all of this.) Business troubles caught up with him as well: on his relocation to California, Wills opened a nightclub in Sacramento called Wills Point. That was 1947, but, in a scramble to keep up his lifestyle, he opened Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas…and that was the one that nailed him. The people he hired to manage didn’t just rob him blind, they left him with an insurmountable pile of back taxes to pay off. He sold a lot of things in desperation, none more valuable than the master recording of “New San Antonio Rose.”
Desperation defined Bob Wills’ later years. He attempted a number of comebacks, even took a stab at glomming on to the rock “fad” (“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.”), but none of it took enough to matter. It’s possible (and Wikipedia makes the case), that the same knack for straddling genres that helped get his career off the ground was the same thing that crashed him back to earth in the end. Playing, as he did, in a space between country, the then-moribund genre big band style, and something like rock, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys had no natural outlet for what they did. By way of a literally terrifying succession of heart attacks and strokes, Wills fell apart little by little from 1965 until his death nearly a decade later. The math gets a little fuzzy (but also see, terrifying above), because his last stroke left him unconscious from December of 1973 but he didn’t actually depart from this life until May, 1975. Tragic, certainly, but he’d done enough by then.
About the Sampler
Having spent enough time on the big band era (and the square shit from the 1950s and 1960s), I actually enjoyed listening to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. Bluntly, that shit bops - or at least some of it ("New San Antonio Rose" sounds like Welk). It has style, it feels a little risqué and all that makes it something very important in music: it’s fun.
I only flagged one of their songs above, but I think I dropped a pretty good cross-section into the sampler. If you listen to “New San Antonio Rose,” you’ll hear something very much like big band, only with more fronted vocals. Those elements carry through on tracks like “Dusty Skies,” Swing Blues No. 1,” and even on a later number like “Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima.” I neglected to mention it above, but Wills did his bit for WWII by writing patriotic jingles in his particular idiom - something that translates to the tale end at “Iwo Jima,” but also in the picking, fiddling-heavy (and, on the phrasing side, deeply weird and dated; see verses on “heathens”) “Smoke on the Water.” (That's right, "Smoke on the Water.")
Wills could work in several veins, up and back to 20s-style jazz in songs like “Bring It Down to My House, Honey,” and, when mixed with fiddling, a rollicking number like “Get With It.” While the tone/tradition sounds the same, the “twang” plays the dominant role on numbers like, “Who Walks in When I Walk Out,” “Faded Love,” and “Ida Red Likes the Boogie.” One of his other signature numbers, “Steel Guitar Rag,” comes from a different place altogether - and it’s cool to hear Leon McAuliffe’s name called out for posterity, but, the vocal style really stands out - especially in the backdrop of everything I’ve listened to in earlier American music. It’s loose and playful, a little like a “play it, daddy-o” beatnik slur, just 10-15 years early.
And that’s it for this one. That’s also it for this era of country. For what it’s worth, and based on what I’ve got planned for the future, stepping away now risks skipping over major, defining legends of the genre, even accidentally. Basically, I’m worried I’ll get wrapped up in other shit and forget to get back to Hank Williams. And that would just be dumb.
Regardless, the series swaps over to early blues from here. Till then.
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