New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma
He was born near
Kosse, Texas to Emma Lee Foley and John Tompkins Wills. His father was a
fiddle player who along with his grandfather, taught the young Wills to play the fiddle and the
mandolin. Wills spent his youth picking cotton and listening to adults sing their way through the day. "I don't know whether they made them up as they moved down the cotton rows or not," Wills once told Charles Townsend, author of
San Antonio Rose: The Life and Times of Bob Wills, "but they sang blues you never heard before."
After several years of drifting, "Jim Rob," then in his 20s, attended barber school, got married, and moved first to
Roy, New Mexico then to
Turkey, Texas (now considered his home town) to be a barber. He alternated barbering and fiddling even when he moved to
Fort Worth to pursue a career in music. It was there that while performing in a
medicine show, he learned comic timing and some of the famous "patter" he later delivered on his records. The show's owner gave him the nickname "Bob."
The irony that Wills made his professional debut in blackface is not lost on Wills' daughter, Rosetta. "He had a lot of respect for the musicians and music of his black friends," Rosetta is quoted as saying on the Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys Web site. She remembers that her father was such a fan of
Bessie Smith, "he once rode 50 miles on horseback just to see her perform live."
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. Brown added twin fiddles, tenor
banjo and slap bass, pointing the music in the direction of swing, which they played on local
radio and at
dancehalls. http://ctmh.its.txstate.edu/artist.php?cmd=detail&aid=25
Wills remained with the Doughboys and replaced Brown with new singer
Tommy Duncan in 1932. He found himself unable to get along with future Texas Governor
W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the authoritarian host of the Light Crust Doughboy radio show. O'Daniel had parlayed the show's popularity into growing power within Light Crust Flour's parent company, Burrus Mill and Elevator Company and wound up as General Manager, though he despised what he considered "hillbilly music." Wills and Duncan left the Doughboys in
1933 after Wills had missed one show too many due to his sporadic drinking.
Wills recalled the early days of what became known as Western swing music, in a 1949 interview. "Here's the way I figure it. We sure not tryin' to take credit for swingin' it." Speaking of Milt Brown and himself working with songs done by
Jimmie Davis, the Skillet Lickers,
http://www.southernmusic.net/gidtanner.htm Jimmie Rodgers, and others, and songs he'd learned from his father, he said that "We'd pull these tunes down an set 'em in a dance category. It wouldn't be a runaway, and just lay a real nice beat behind it an the people would get to really like it. It was nobody intended to start anything in the world. We was just tryin' to find enough tunes to keep 'em dancin' to not have to repeat so much."
After forming a new band, "The Playboys", and relocating to
Waco, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market. They left Waco in January of
1934 for
Oklahoma City. Wills soon settled the renamed "Texas Playboys" in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noontime shows over the 50,000 watt
KVOO radio station. Their 12:30-1:15 Monday-Friday broadcasts became a veritable institution in the region.
Nearly all of the daily (except Sunday) shows originated from the stage of
Cain's Ballroom. In addition, they played dances in the evenings, including regular ones at the ballroom on Thursdays and Saturdays.
By
1935 Wills had added
horn, reed players and
drums to the Playboys. The addition of
steel guitar whiz Leon McAuliffe in March, 1935 added not only a formidable instrumentalist but a second engaging vocalist. Wills himself largely sang
blues and sentimental
ballads.
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. Milton Brown's tragic and untimely death in 1936 had cleared the way for the Playboys.
Wills' 1938 recording of "Ida Red" served as a model for Chuck Berry's decades later version of the same song -
Maybellene.
In
1940 "New San Antonio Rose" sold a million records and became the
signature song of The Texas Playboys. 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.
In 1940 Wills, along with the Texas Playboys, co-starred with Tex Ritter in “Take Me Back to Oklahoma”. Other films would follow. In late 1942 after several band members had left the group, and as World War II raged , Wills joined the Army, but received a medical discharge in 1943.
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/WW/fwi45.htmlhttp://www.bobwills.com/history.htmlhttp://www.cmt.com/artists/az/wills_bob/bio.jhtml
