The King of Western Swing Goes National

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The New York Sun

“Sunbonnet Sue,” the first track on the new four-CD boxed set, “Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys: Legends of Country Music,” pretty much gives the whole game away. “Sunbonnet Sue” is played by the Light Crust Doughboys, who were broadcasting regularly in Fort Worth, Texas, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The song is roughly in the standard A-A-B-A form used in show tunes and pop songs, as opposed to the A-B-A-B structures more commonly found in folk music.

It’s a subtle but important difference, especially because the lyrics in the bridge compare the girl described in the title with the ladies mentioned in other pop songs, like “Miss Sadie Green From New Orleans,” “True Blue Lou,” “Ramona,” and “Sweet Jennie Lee From Tennessee.” (In fact, the melody of “Sunbonnet Sue,” credited to Wills himself, is more than a little similar to “Sweet Jennie Lee.”) The key here is that these are all references to roughly contemporary Tin Pan Alley songs.

Why is this important? Traditionally, we have been told that “roots” music forms like jazz, blues, folk, and country have a one-way relationship with the commercial music industry. New York publishers and record companies would smell potential profit in one of these primary forms, then dress it up and water it down in order to repackage it for the rest of the country and, eventually, the world. Yet the moral of “Sunbonnet Sue”is that even by 1932, there was no longer such a thing as pure roots music. The phonograph had already entertained several generations, and particularly after about 1920 — when commercial broadcasting began and when jazz, blues, and country began to be heard regularly on record — everyone in every part of the nation began listening to everybody else.

One of the more exciting results of the mixing and blending of different musical ideas from different parts of the country was the short-lived genre known as western swing.The Doughboys included the two undisputed leaders of the movement, the violinist Bob Wills (1905–75) and the singer Milton Brown. Neither had yet spent any real time outside Texas, but they were deeply influenced by sounds from all over America. As the country music authority Rich Kienzle notes in his essay to the new boxed set, Wills and Brown actually rehearsed their new band in a record store; they went through stacks of the latest hits, absorbing mainstream dance band records from New York, blues from the Mississippi Delta, and jazz from the South and Midwest.

The Doughboys represented the same kind of wellspring the Blue Devils and the Bennie Moten Orchestra did to Kansas City jazz. In 1932, Brown left to form Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, generally regarded as the first western swing band.The following year, Wills, who was about to be fired anyway for being drunk and generally irresponsible, quit the Doughboys and shortly thereafter assembled his Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Okla. He began collecting what would become a famous cast of supporting players, starting with the warmvoiced country crooner Tommy Duncan, then the steel guitar virtuoso Leon McAuliffe, who also sang, and the arranger Eldon Shamblin, who was also an outstanding guitar soloist.

At the time, the mainstream music press labeled all sounds produced by black people as “race music”and all music produced by white people anyplace other than the two coasts or the Great Lakes as Hillbilly.Wills hated this term, much the same way New Orleans jazzmen hated being called “Dixieland.” He brought both new energy and sophistication to records by importing ideas wholesale from the swing bands that were starting to dominate the music business in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

In 1935, when the Texas Playboys entered a recording studio for the first time, the producer Art Satherley was surprised (and not in a good way) to see that the band not only included the expected guitars, fiddles, and banjos, but also saxophone, trombone, and a full jazz rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums. Two titles from the first session, “Osage Stomp” and especially “Get With It,”show that this highly rhythmic, jazz-infused country sound was already well-formed.

By the late 1930s, and especially during the World War II era, when Benny Goodman was the king of swing, Wills was the undisputed king of western swing; the Texas Playboys had come to include a full contingent of brass and reeds, and were a perfect synthesis of country music and big band jazz.

The group found inspiration in the stomps and breakdowns that were indigenous to western music, as in the 1941 “Take Me Back to Tulsa” (which contains the couplet: “Darkie raises cotton / White man gets the money”).

Even more interesting are the examples of Wills and the Playboys processing outside influences: Spencer Williams’s early jazz classics “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Basin Street Blues”; Earl Hines’s “Rosetta”; “My Window Faces the South” by three New York songwriters, including “Stardust” lyricist Mitchell Parish, and associated with Fats Waller; “Pray for the Lights Go Out,” a mock spiritual based on an earlier jazz record by Joe Haymes, who essentially put together Tommy Dorsey’s first band.Their 1937 take on Will Hudson’s “White Heat” compares favorably with the classic Jimmie Lunceford version.The Texas Playboys were a cowboy band you could jitterbug to.

Two titles from 1941, both unissued at the time, show how far Wills was willing to take it: “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” based on a traditional British song, was a hit for Kay Kyser, yet Wills’s brassy reading stomps and swings considerably harder; and “Lieberstraum,” which was inspired by Tommy Dorsey’s 1937 version and shows how a bunch of Texas Playboys and Tulsa Cowboys could swing even Franz Liszt to a fare-thee-well.That same year, Bing Crosby’s version of Wills’s most famous composition, “San Antonio Rose,” became a mass-market top 10 hit, and is often cited as the first million-selling country song.

Wills, who occasionally sang a full vocal himself but can be heard shouting out encouragement (like a redneck Cab Calloway) in a spunky falsetto on nearly every track on the boxed set, roughly did for country what Louis Jordan did for rhythm and blues, helping to bring regional styles of music, long regarded as marginal, into the cultural mainstream.

Both men peaked during World War II, but after the war their moment had passed, and they began fading, ironically, just as country and western and rhythm and blues were ascending. Wills was never again a superstar, but against the mounting odds of unscrupulous managers, alcoholism, and fading health, he continued to make wonderful music in the 1950s and ’60s, which also is sampled in the new set.

Wills suffered a stroke while recording a reunion album in 1973 and died two years later. In his essay, Mr. Kienzle notes that Wills was a musician of rare talent and influence — a member of both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s also the only country fiddler who deserves a full-dress tribute from Jazz At Lincoln Center. Maybe someday.


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