This article is about the musical subgenre. For the dance, see West Coast Swing.

Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands.^[1][2] It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat,^[3][4] which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 40s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 led to its decline.

The movement was an outgrowth of jazz,^[5][6][7] and similarities with Gypsy jazz are often noted. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, folk, Dixieland jazz and blues blended with swing;^[8] and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar.^[9] The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound.^[10] Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.

Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands—even the fully orchestrated bands—vocals and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead. Additionally, although popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively.^[11]

Prominent groups during the peak of Western swing's popularity included The Light Crust Doughboys, Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, and Spade Cooley and His Orchestra. Contemporary groups include Asleep at the Wheel and The Hot Club of Cowtown.

According to legendary guitarist Merle Travis, "Western swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have Western swing."

History[link]

Origin of the name[link]

Western swing in its beginnings was just dance music. The term swing, meaning big band dance music, wasn't used until after the 1932 hit "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)".^[12] Recording companies came up with several names before World War II trying to market it—hillbilly, old-time music, novelty hot dance, hot string band, and even Texas swing for music coming out of Texas and Louisiana.^[13] Most of the big Western dance bandleaders simply referred to themselves as Western bands and their music as Western dance music, many adamantly refusing the hillbilly label.^[14]

Bob Wills and others believed the term Western swing was used for his music while he and his band were still in Tulsa, Oklahoma between 1939 and 1942.^[15] The Los Angeles-area Wilmington Press carried ads for an unidentified "Western Swing Orchestra" at a local nightspot in April 1942. That winter, influential LA-area jazz and swing disc jockey Al Jarvis held a radio contest for top popular band leaders. The winner would be named "the King of Swing". When Spade Cooley unexpectedly received the most votes, besting Benny Goodman and Harry James, Jarvis declared Cooley to be the King of Western Swing.^[16][17] The Billboard, on the other hand, reported in its January 29, 1944 issue that Jarvis held the contest and Cooley came in fourth in the orchestra section, behind Sammy Kaye, Freddie Martin, and Jimmy Dorsey.

About 1942, Cooley's promoter, Foreman Phillips, began using "Western swing" to advertise his client.^[18][19] The first known use of the term Western swing in a national periodical was the June 10, 1944 issue of The Billboard: "...what with the trend to Western music in this section, Cooley's Western swing band is a natural. ... Music is not the true Western type... Dancers can foxtrot or do a slow jitter to it."^[20] A more widely known "first use" was a 1944 Billboard item mentioning a forthcoming songbook by Cooley titled Western Swing.^[21] This, however was preceded by this item on page 11 of the May 6, 1944 Billboard. "Spade Cooley, who moved in with his Western swing boys several months ago, has released the Breakfast Club. Cooley moved up from Foreman Phillip County barn dances at Venice, Calif., ballroom, where he was featured for 74 weeks."^[22]

After that, the music was known as Western swing.

Late 1920s to mid-30s: Beginnings[link]

Western swing began in the dance halls of small towns throughout the lower Great Plains in the late 1920s and early 30s,^[23][24] growing from house parties and ranch dances where fiddlers and guitarists played for dancers. During its early development, scores of groups from San Antonio to Shreveport to Oklahoma City played different songs with the same basic sound.^[25] Prince Albert Hunt's Texas Ramblers out of Terrell in East Texas, and the East Texas Serenaders in Lindale, Texas, both added jazz elements to traditional music in the later half of the 1920s through the early 30s.^[26] Fred "Papa" Calhoun recalled that around 1930, he played in a band in Decatur, Texas that played "a lot of swing stuff like the Louisiana Five was playing back in those days. We also liked Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke."^[27]

The Light Crust Doughboys in Oh, Susanna!, a 1936 film starring Gene Autry

After ending his pioneering partnership with Vernon Dalhart, country music trailblazer Carson Robison formed "Carson Robison's Madcaps", a "hot jazz" band with a decidedly country sound. Their recording of "Nonsense" (Edison Lateral 14085) in September 1929 was an uptempo and frantic number that would be a pioneering effort of the sound that was to be known as western swing. It featured instrumentation that was common with dance bands of the time, such as reed and brass instruments, but also several elements that gave it some "Western" flair, such as a banjo being prominently "finger picked" rather than strummed (the standard role for the banjo in jazz of that time), a lush fiddle sound, and drums played prominently with a strong and syncopated beat.

In the early 1930s, Bob Wills and Milton Brown co-founded the string band that became the Light Crust Doughboys, the first professional band in this genre. The group, with Fred "Papa" Calhoun on piano, played dance halls and was heard on radio. Photographs of the Light Crust Doughboys taken as early as 1931 show two guitars along with fiddle player Wills.^[28]

On February 9, 1932, Milton Brown, his brother Durwood, Bob Wills, and C.G. "Sleepy" Johnson were recorded by Victor Records at the Jefferson Hotel in Dallas, Texas under the name, The Fort Worth Doughboys. Brown played guitar and Johnson played tenor guitar. Both "Sunbonnet Sue" and "Nancy Jane" were recorded that day. The record was released by Victor (23653), Blue Bird (5257), Montgomery Ward (4416 & 4757), and (Canadian) Sunrise (3340). Montgomery Ward credited "Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies".^[29]

When Milton Brown left the Doughboys later in 1932, he took his brother Durwood to play rhythm guitar in what would be called the Musical Brownies.^[30] In January 1933, fiddler Cecil Brower, playing harmony, joined Jesse Ashlock to create the first example of harmonizing twin fiddles.^[31] Brower, a classically trained violinist, was the first to master Joe Venuti's double shuffle and his improvisational style was a major contribution to the genre. Photos from 1933 show three guitar players in the Doughboys.^[28]

In October 1933, Wills was fired and a new group of Doughboys went to Chicago for a recording session with Vocalion (later Columbia) Records. The years between 1935 and World War II were the most successful for the group. By 1937, some of the best musicians in the history of Western swing had joined the band. Kenneth Pitts and Clifford Gross played fiddles; and in 1939, Brower joined the Doughboys, replacing Buck Buchanan as fiddler in the string section but playing lead (Buchanan had played harmony).

In late 1933, Wills organized the Texas Playboys in Waco, Texas. Recording rosters show that beginning in September 1935, Wills utilized two fiddles, two guitars, and Leon McAuliffe playing steel guitar, banjo, drums and other instruments during recording sessions.^[32]

The amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, gave the music its distinctive sound.^[10] As early as 1934 or 1935 Bob Dunn electrified a Martin O-series acoustic guitar while playing with Milton Brown's Brownies.^[33] According to Jimmy Thomason, "It happened when Dunn was working at Coney Island in New York...he ran into this black guy who was playing a steel guitar with a homemade pickup attached to it...hooked up to this old radio or something and was playing blues licks...and he got this guy to show him how he was doing it. I never knew this black musician's name but both Bob and Avis talked to me about him often."^[34]

In 1935, Brown and His Musical Brownies recorded W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" (Decca 5070) using a shortened arrangement of what they played at dances at the Crystal Palace outside Fort Worth, Texas. In the dance hall arrangement, the band would play at slow-drag tempo for as long as 15 minutes with an accompanying vocal. The tempo would then increase to presto for the final choruses. The crowds of dancers loved the arrangement and eagerly anticipated the change in tempo.^[35] Waltzes and ballads were interspersed among faster songs if the dancers, who would dance two-step or round dances, became tired after faster numbers.^[36]

A documented instance of a Western swing group adopting the newer, by then mainstream 4/4 meter swing jazz style, replacing the 2/4 style, was when producer Art Satherley required it at a September 1936 Light Crust Doughboy recording session.^[37]

1938 session rosters for Wills recordings show both "lead guitar" and "electric guitar" in addition to guitar and steel guitar.^[38] The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.^[39] That helped the style gain a much wider following through the music of Wills and his Playboys in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Brown and the Light Crust Doughboys in Fort Worth.

Wills recalled the early days of Western swing music in a 1949 interview. "Here's the way I figure it," he said. "We sure not tryin' to take credit for swingin' it." Speaking of Milton Brown and himself—working with popular songs done by Jimmie Davis, the Skillet Lickers, Jimmie Rodgers, songs he'd learned from his father and others—Wills said that "We'd...pull these tunes down an set 'em in a dance category. ...They wouldn't be a runaway...and just lay a real beat behind it an' the people would began 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."^[40]

By the mid-1930s, Fort Worth was a hub for Western swing. The Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion was at the center, and it prospered as a country music venue until the 1950s. An estimated 1,800 persons attended a New Year's Eve Dance there in 1955.^[41]

Late 1930s to mid-40s: Height of popularity[link]

Western swing was extremely popular throughout the West in the years before World War II and blossomed on the West Coast during the war.^[42] In the 1940s, the Light Crust Doughboys' broadcasts went out over 170 radio stations in the South and Southwest, and were heard by millions of listeners.^[43] From 1934 to 1943, Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys played nightly at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, reaching crowds as large as 6,000 people. The 50,000-watt KVOO-AM radio station broadcast daily programs. Regular shows continued until 1958 with Johnnie Lee Wills as the bandleader. Doyle Brink and his Texas Swingsters out of Waco, Texas also played on the road for almost 50 years.^[44]

Burt (or Bert) "Foreman" Phillips developed a circuit of dance halls and bands to play for them. Among these halls in 1942 were the Los Angeles County Barn Dance at the Venice Pier Ballroom, the Town Hall Ballroom in Compton, the Plantation in Culver City, the Baldwin Park Ballroom, and the Riverside Rancho. These Western dances were a huge success.^[45] According to Hank Penny, Phillips had said, "I don't want any of that Western Swing!" But that's what he got, and it got him huge eclectic crowds. Writer Gerald Vaughn wrote that "a Dance band hopes to make people move, not stand and listen, so the emphasis has to be on beat, rhythm, syncopation."^[46]

One of the groups which played at the Venice Pier Ballroom was led by Jimmy Wakely with Spade Cooley, his successor as bandleader, on fiddle. Several thousand dancers would turn out on Saturday night to swing and hop. "The hordes of people and jitterbuggers loved him."^[47] When Bob Wills played the Los Angeles Country Barn Dance at the Venice Pier for three nights shortly before he broke up his band to join the U.S. Army during World War II, the attendance was above 15,000. Fearing that the dance floor would collapse, police stopped ticket sales at 11 p.m. The line outside at that time was ten deep and stretched into Venice.^[48] Another source states that Wills attracted 8,600 fans.^[49]

Riverside Rancho, operated by Marty Landau, had a 10,000-square-foot (930 m²) dance floor, three bars and a restaurant. According to Merle Travis, "At that time "Western swing" was a household word. Al Dexter had had a million-seller on his "Pistol Packin' Mama" record. Bob Wills was heard on every jukebox with this "San Antonio Rose". T. Texas Tyler was doing well with his "Remember Me (When the Candlelights are Gleaming)". It was practically impossible to wedge your way into the Palace Barn where Red Murrell and his band were playing. A mile down the hill was the Riverside Rancho. You were lucky to find a ticket on a Wednesday night. Tex Williams and his Western Caravan were playing there."^[50]

Other LA "country nightclubs", that is, places that weren't "dives" (and there were many), included The Painted Post ("Where the sidewalk ends and the West begins"), Willow Lake, Cowtown, Valley Ballroom, Cowshed Club, Dick Ross's Ballroom, and Dave Ming's 97th Street Corral. In 1950, Hank Penny and Armand Gautier opened the Palomino in North Hollywood, "one of country music's most fabled venues, the commercial and social focal point of Hollywood's country set." "Western jazz" brought it its initial popularity.^[51]

According to one report, crowds of ten thousand people were not uncommon at Western swing dances in the Los Angeles area. Another eyewitness report described the California crowds as "huge."^[52] Western swing bandleader Hank Thompson, who was stationed in San Pedro during World War II, said that it was not uncommon to see "ten thousand people at the pier," referring to Redondo Beach.^[53]

Fred "Poppa" Calhoun, piano player for Milton Brown, vividly remembered how people in Texas and Oklahoma danced when Bob Wills played. "They were pretty simple couples dances, two steps and the Lindy Hop with a few Western twirls added for good measure. By 1937 the jitterbug hit big in the West and allowed much greater freedom of movement. But the jitterbug was different in the West. It wasn't all out boogie woogie; it was 'swingier'—more smooth and subdued."^[54]

Another orchestra from the era was The Duece Spriggens Orchestra, which played nightly at the Western Palisades Ballroom on the Santa Monica Pier, then known as the largest ballroom on the West Coast. The music was broadcast as a radio show, The Cavalcade of Western Music, on KFI-AM. The group also appeared on the U.S. military's Melody Roundup radio program during the war.^[55]

In the 1940s, many "jukebox" short film features featuring prominent bands (Wills, Cooley and others) were produced by several small companies, usually based on simple Western movie plots.

1944: Nightclub tax[link]

In 1944, with the United States' continuing involvement in World War II, a 30 percent federal excise tax was levied against "dancing" nightclubs. Although the tax was later reduced to 20 percent, "No Dancing Allowed" signs went up across the country. Jazz drummer Max Roach argued that, "This tax is the real story why dancing...public dancing per se...were just out." Club owners and promoters couldn't afford the combined city, state government taxes.^[56][57] The decline of Western swing in the years following the war also reflected the waning of the more mainstream big band sound.

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys remained popular after the war, and could not provide enough new recordings to fill demand. In 1947 Columbia reissued 70 older Wills recordings.^[58] In January 1953 Billboard reported that band leader Spade Cooley played to 192,000 payees over 52 Saturday night dates at the Santa Monica Ballroom, grossing $220,000.^[59]

Dance-O-Rama[link]

In 1955 Decca Records, in what Billboard called "an ambitious project", issued seven albums of "country dance music" featuring "swingy arrangements of your customers 'c&w' dance favorites". Miton Brown and His Brownies, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley and His Buckle-Busters, Adolph Hofner and His San Antonians, Tex Williams and His String Band, Grady Martin and His Winging Strings, and Billy Gray and His Western Okies all had their own albums.^[60] In November, Billboard reported that Decca was rushing out three more albums in the series, albeit with less of a Western swing flavor.^[61]

Legacy[link]

Moon Mullican, who had performed with Western swing bands, later found more success as a solo artist and his 1940s and 50s hits often were done with a more Western swing than pure country feel.

1949 Bill Haley record label

Western swing was one of the many subgenres to influence rockabilly and rock and roll. Bill Haley's music from the late 1940s and early 50s is often referred to as Western swing, and his band from 1948 to 1949 was named Bill Haley and The 4 Aces of Western Swing.

Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Asleep at the Wheel helped make Austin, Texas a major center of Western swing beginning in the 1970s. The annual South by Southwest music festival and the Austin City Limits PBS television series have contributed to this success.^[42] Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen were also key players in this revitalization. Western Swing Monthly,^[62] based in Austin, is a newsletter for musicians and fans.

In a Clint Eastwood's 1982 movie Honkytonk Man, his character meets Bob Wills (played by Johnny Gimble, an original Texas Playboy), who is recording in a studio with other former band members.

Western swing lives on at the Bobby Boatright Memorial Music Camp in Goree, Texas. (Boatright was a fiddle player originally from Goree.)^[63]

In 2011 the Texas Legislature adopted a resolution designating western swing as the official "State Music of Texas".^[64][65]

See also[link]

• Western music
• Swing music
• Western swing fiddle
• List of Western swing and swing (big band) musicians
• Category:Western swing musical groups
• Category:Western swing performers

Bibliography[link]

• Boyd, Jean Ann. Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-292-70859-4
• Boyd, Jean A. "Western Swing: Working-Class Southwestern Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s". Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950 (ch. 7, pp. 193–214), edited by Michael Saffle. Routledge, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8153-2145-3
• Brink, Pamela H. "Western Swing". Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, David J. Wishart (ed.), p. 550. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8032-4787-1
• Carney, George O. "Country Music". Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, David J. Wishart (ed.), pp. 535–537. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8032-4787-1
• Coffey, Kevin. Merl Lindsay and his Oklahoma Nite Riders; 1946-1952. (Krazy Kat KKCD 33, 2004) booklet.
• Ginell, Cary. Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-252-02041-4
• Ginell, Cary; Kevin Coffey. Discography of Western Swing and Hot String Bands, 1928-1942. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-313-31116-1
• Kienzle, Rich. Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2003. ISBN 978-0-415-94102-0
• Komorowski, Adam. Spade Cooley: Swingin' The Devil's Dream. (Proper PVCD 127, 2003) booklet.
• Lange, Jeffrey J.Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music's Struggle for Respectability, 1939-1954. ISBN 978-0-8203-2623-8
• Logsdon, Guy. "The Cowboy's Bawdy Music". The Cowboy: Six-Shooters, Songs, and Sex (pp. 127–138) edited by Charles W. Harris and Buck Rainey. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-8061-1341-8
• Logsdon, Guy. "Folk Songs". Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, David J. Wishart (ed.), pp. 298–299. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8032-4787-1
• Malone, Bill C.; Judith McCulloh (eds.) Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez. University of Illinois Press, 1975. ISBN 978-0-252-00527-5
• Marble, Manning; John McMillian; Nishani Frazier (eds.). Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience. Columbia University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-231-10890-4
• Price, Michael H. "Jazz Guitar and Western Swing". pp. 81–88 The Guitar in Jazz: An Anthology, James Sallis (ed.). University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-8032-4250-0
• Saffle, Michael (2000), Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 978-0-8153-2145-3 .
• Townsend, Charles. San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob wills. University of Illinois Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-252-01362-1
• Wetlock, E. Clyde; Richard Drake Saunders (eds.). Music and dance in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Southwest. Hollywood, CA: Bureau of Musical Research, 1950.
• Wills, Bob. 1949 interview from Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues. Part 2: "Raising the Roof", first broadcast by NPR July–September 2003. Written by Kathie Farnell, Margaret Moos Pick, Steve Rathe.
• Wolff, Kurt; Orla Duane. Country Music: The Rough Guide. Rough Guides, 2000. ISBN 978-1-85828-534-4
• Zolten, Jerry. Western Swingtime Music: A Cool Breeze in the American Desert. Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine. Volume 23/Number 2, 1974.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys website
• Milton Brown biography at TSHA
• Western swing at Big Bands Database Plus
• Westernswing.com links
• "A Short History of Western Swing"
• Sound documentation of Western swing
• Western Swing Monthly

Associations[link]

• Northwest Western Swing Music Society
• Western Swing Music Society of the Southwest
• Western Swing Society–Sacramento
• The Academy Of Western Artists

Public radio programs[link]

• KANZ-FM, Garden City, Kansas—Western Swing and Other Things, Allen Bailey, Saturdays, 10 a.m.–1 p.m Central Time (US)
• KFSR-FM, Fresno, California—Big Fresno Barn Dance, Don Fischer & Steve Barile, Sundays, 2–4 p.m. Pacific Time (US)
• KWGS-FM, Tulsa, Oklahoma—Swing On This, John Wooley, Saturdays, 7–8 p.m. Central Time (US)
• KZUM-FM, Lincoln, Nebraska—The Heyride, John Schmitz, Fridays, 7:30–9 p.m. Central Time (US)
• WVOF-FM, Fairfield, Connecticut—Swingin' West, Mike Gross, Fridays (May–November), 1–4 p.m. Eastern Time (US)

Listen[link]

• Allen D. Bailey Saturdays, 10 a.m.–1 p.m. Central Time (US)
• Swingin' West radio-online Mike Gross-Fairfield University Student Radio, Fridays 1–4 p.m. Eastern Time (US)
• Swingin' West Hour - Swingin' West — Hosted by TwangTownUSA; available 24 hours; requires RealPlayer (two-minute commercial introduction)
• The Western Hour—Western & Western Swing - Golden Graham — Hosted by TwangTownUSA; requires RealPlayer (two-minute commercial introduction)
• buckatune.net - download Western swing mp3s
• Jazzabillies Western Swing Music
• Asleep at the Wheel band leader Ray Benson relates his experiences reintroducing Western swing to Texans

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Donnell Clyde Cooley (December 17, 1910–November 23, 1969), better known as Spade Cooley, was an American Western swing musician, big band leader, actor, and television personality. His career ended in 1961 when he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his second wife, Ella Mae Evans.^[1]

Biography[link]

Music career[link]

One of the groups which played at the Venice Pier Ballroom in Venice, California was led by Jimmy Wakely with Spade Cooley on fiddle. Several thousand dancers would turn out on Saturday night to swing and hop. "The hoards (sic) of people and jitterbuggers loved him." When Wakely got a movie contract at Universal, Cooley replaced him as bandleader.^[2]

To capitalize on the pioneering success of the Bob Wills–Tommy Duncan pairing, Cooley hired vocalist Tex Williams who was capable of the mellow deep baritone sound made popular by Duncan. Cooley's 18-month engagement at Santa Monica's Venice Pier Ballroom was record-breaking for the early half of the 1940s. His "Shame on You", released on Columbia's Okeh label, was recorded in December 1944, and was No. 1 on the country charts for two months.^[1] A Red Foley / Lawrence Welk collaboration issued by Decca (18698) was No. 4 to Cooley's No. 5 on Billboard's "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records" listing in September 1945.^[3] Soundies Distributing Corp. of America issued one of their "music video like" film shorts of Cooley's band titled "Shame on You" in the fall of 1945.^[4][5] "Shame on You" was the first in an unbroken string of six Top Ten singles including "Detour" and "You Can't Break My Heart".

Cooley appeared in 38 Western films, both in bit parts and as a stand-in for cowboy actor Roy Rogers. Billed as Spade Cooley and His Western Dance Gang, he was featured in the soundie Take Me Back to Tulsa released July 31, 1944 along with Tex Williams and Carolina Cotton.^[6] Corrine, Corrina was released August 28, 1944 minus Cotton.^[7]

The film short Spade Cooley: King of Western Swing was filmed in May 1945 and released September 1, 1945.^[8] It was followed by Melody Stampede released on November 8, 1945.^[9] Spade Cooley & His Orchestra came out in 1949.^[10] In 1950, Cooley had significant roles in several films.

Beginning in June 1948, Cooley began hosting a variety show on KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, California broadcast from the Santa Monica Pier Ballroom. The show became a mainstay of television in the area, and won local Emmy awards in 1952 and 1953. Guests included Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore.^[11][12] The Hoffman Hayride was so popular that an estimated 75 percent of all televisions in the L.A. area were tuned into the show each Saturday night. Making use of video transcriptions, The Spade Cooley Show was viewed coast-to-coast via the Paramount Television Network.^[13]

Although by 1956 Lawrence Welk was achieving increasing success at the nearby Aragon Ballroom, Cooley's ratings continued to drop.^[14]

After a "battle of the bands" with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys at the Venice Pier Ballroom, which Cooley claimed he won, he began to promote himself as the King of Western Swing.^[15] Evidently Western swing, not used prior to 1942 for this style of music, was a term thought up by Cooley's then promoter, Forman Phillips.^[16] It is worthy to mention that most historians of Western swing agree that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys is regarded the true 'King of Western Swing', and Fort Worth's Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies is considered the pioneering 'Father of Western Swing'.

Cooley's music was like that of the then-current big band orchestras, and its sound was drawn from those dance-oriented hot bands like Bob Wills and Milton Brown. In contrast to Bob Wills' work, the performances and arrangements of Cooley's orchestra were more big-band Swing than improvised Western.

Murder of Ella Mae Evans[link]

Cooley suspected his second wife, Ella Mae Cooley (née Evans), 38, who was a singer in his band before they married 15 years earlier, of repeatedly being unfaithful. In March 1961, she told a friend she had an affair with Roy Rogers in 1952 or 1953.^[1][17] She soon asked Cooley, who had his own affairs, for a divorce. On March 23, Cooley filed for divorce, citing "incompatibility" and seeking custody of their three children, Melody, Donnell Jr. and John.^[18]

On April 26, 1961, Cooley was indicted by a Kern County grand jury for the murder of his wife on April 3 at the couple's Willow Springs ranch home. Cooley's 14-year-old daughter, Melody, reportedly told the jury she watched in terror as her father beat her mother's head against the floor, stomped on her stomach, then crushed a lighted cigarette against her skin to see whether she was dead.^[19] Cooley claimed his wife had been injured by falling in the shower.

He was unsuccessfully defended by prominent attorney P. Basil Lambros^[20] in what was the longest case in county history at the time; and was convicted of first-degree murder by a Kern County jury on August 21, 1961 after unexpectedly withdrawing an insanity plea. He was spared death in the gas chamber and sentenced to life in prison.^[21]

Death[link]

After he had served eight years, the state of California agreed to parole him on February 22, 1970. In November 1969, he received 72-hour furlough to play a benefit concert for the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County at the Oakland Auditorium, now known as the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, in Oakland. After the performance, on November 23, Cooley suffered a fatal heart attack in the backstage area. He is interred at Chapel of the Chimes cemetery in Hayward.^[22]

In popular culture[link]

John Gilmore has written an in-depth portrait of Cooley's life and tragic end in Shame on You, a segment of Gilmore's non-fiction work, L.A. Despair. Cooley is a recurring character in James Ellroy's fiction, including in the story "Dick Contino's Blues", which appeared in issue No. 46 of Granta magazine (Winter 1994) and was anthologized in Hollywood Nocturnes.

He is referenced in one of the Honeymooners episodes (from Art 'Ed Norton' Carney to Jackie 'Ralph Kramden' Gleason): "They wouldn't-a won that except some guy slipped in a Spade Cooley record."

Ry Cooder's 2008 album I, Flathead features a reference to Cooley on the track "Steel Guitar Heaven" ("There ain't no bosses up in heaven / I heard Spade Cooley didn't make the grade"), as well as a track named "Spayed Kooley", the name of the singer's dog.

Discography[link]

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Aragon Ballroom (Ocean Park)
• Spade Cooley's Western Swing Song Folio

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Logsdon, Guy. "The Cowboy's Bawdy Music." The Cowboy: Six-Shooters, Songs, and Sex (pp. 139–138) edited by Charles W. Harris and Buck Rainey. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8061-1341-3
• Komorowski, Adam. Spade Cooley: Swingin' The Devil's Dream. (Proper PVCD 127, 2003) booklet.
• Whitburn, Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits. Billboard Books, 2006. ISBN 0-8230-8291-1

External links[link]

• Spade Cooley's Murder Trial
• Biography at CMT.com
• Biography at Allmusic
• Spade Cooley at the Internet Movie Database
• "A Swing King Reemerges" (LA Times)
  • text version @ steelguitar forum
• Complete Discography
• Shame on You
• Podcast - the life of Spade Cooley (with song samples)
• Spade Cooley at Bakersfield Sound
• Spade Cooley at B-Westerns.com
• Spade Cooley...rich, famous and a murderer
• Spade Cooley at Find a Grave
• In the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
• Complete Decca sessionography and discography

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (September 2010)

Brent Mason (born July 13, 1959^[1]) is an American session guitarist and occasional songwriter. He is known primarily for his work in the field of country music.^[2] In addition to releasing two instrumental studio albums,^[2] he holds several credits as a songwriter. He is a 12 time winner of the Academy of Country Music Guitarist of the Year Award and a two time winner of the CMA Award Musician of the Year.

Biography[link]

Brent Mason was born on July 13, 1959, in Van Wert, Ohio. At five years old, he taught himself to play guitar by ear.^[2] He moved to Nashville, Tennessee after graduating from high school, in order to pursue a career in country music. Eventually, he was discovered by country guitarist Chet Atkins, who invited him to play on his Stay Tuned album. From there, Mason went on to play on several other artists' albums, including those of George Strait, Alan Jackson, Shania Twain, David Gates, and Neil Diamond.^[1] Mason also co-wrote singles for Clinton Gregory ("Play, Ruby, Play") and McBride & the Ride ("Hurry Sundown").

Mason signed to Mercury Records in 1997, releasing an instrumental album entitled Hot Wired that year. This was his only major-label album. He made a decision to break his contract with Mercury records soon after to remain in Nashville and work in the recording studio as an A-List session guitarist rather than spend most of his time on the road touring and away from his family. He and his brother Randy released a second album, entitled Smokin' Section, in 2006.

Brent produced, Faroe Island Country singer, Evi Tausen’s first album called Wishing Well, in 2011. This was Brent's first album as a producer and was recorded in Nashville with A-string players. The album has a duet with Evi Tausen and Grand Ole Opry star legend Jim Ed Brown and an old forgotten song that Vivian Cash wrote to Johnny Cash in 1956, but has been keep a secret ever since. The album was a big success in Scandinavia and Europe. See more on www.evitausen.com

Other contributions[link]

At the 51st Grammy Awards, he and several other guitarists won the Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental, for the track "Cluster Pluck" from Brad Paisley's mostly-instrumental album Play.^[3]

Gear[link]

This section requires expansion.

In 2003 Gibson Guitar Corporation released a Valley Arts signature guitar designed to be a replica of Mason's 1968 Fender Telecaster.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Brent Mason on Myspace

BobWillsBlueYodelNo1

James Robert Wills (March 6, 1905 – May 13, 1975), better known as Bob Wills, was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the co-founder of Western swing,^[1][2][3] he was universally known as the King of Western Swing.

Wills formed several bands and played radio stations around the South and West until he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 with Wills on fiddle, Tommy Duncan on piano and vocals, rhythm guitarist June Whalin, tenor banjoist Johnnie Lee Wills, and Kermit Whalin, who played steel guitar and bass. The band played regularly on a Tulsa, Oklahoma radio station, and added Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar, pianist Al Stricklin, drummer Smokey Dacus, and a horn section that expanded the band's sound. Wills favored jazz-like arrangements and the band found national popularity into the 1940s with such hits as "Steel Guitar Rag", "New San Antonio Rose", "Smoke on the Water", "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima", and "New Spanish Two Step".

Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded with several publishers and companies, including Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia, and MGM, frequently moving. In 1950, he had two top ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love", which were his last hits for a decade. Throughout the 1950s, he struggled with poor health and tenuous finances, but continued to perform frequently despite the decline in popularity of his earlier music as rock and roll took over. Wills had a heart attack in 1962 and a second one the next year, which forced him to disband the Playboys although Wills continued to perform solo.

The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Wills in 1968 and the Texas State Legislature honored him for his contribution to American music. In 1972, Wills accepted a citation from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in Nashville. He was recording an album with fan Merle Haggard in 1973 when a stroke left him comatose until his death in 1975. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1999.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

He was born on a farm near Kosse, Texas,^[4] in Limestone County near Groesbeck, to Emma Lee Foley and John Tompkins Wills.^[5] His father was a statewide champion fiddle player^[6] and the Wills family was either playing music, or someone was "always wanting us to play for them," in addition to raising cotton on their farm.

In addition to picking cotton, the young Jim Bob learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin. Both a sister and several brothers played musical instruments, while another sister played piano. The Wills family frequently held country dances in their home, and there was dancing in all four rooms While living in Hall County, Texas,they also played at 'ranch dances' which were popular in both West Texas and eastern New Mexico.^[7]

Wills not only learned traditional music from his family, he learned some Negro songs directly from African Americans in the cotton fields near Lakeview, Texas and said that he did not play with many white children other than his siblings, until he was seven or eight years old. African Americans were his playmates, and his father enjoyed watching him jig dance with black children.^[8]

"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."^[9]

New Mexico and Texas[link]

The family moved to Hall County in the Texas Panhandle in 1913,^[10] and in 1919 they bought a farm between the towns of Lakeview and Turkey.^[11] At the age of 16 Wills left the family and hopped a freight train. "Jim Rob", as he became known, drifted for several years, traveling from town to town to try to earn a living, at one point almost losing his life when he nearly fell from a moving train, and later being chased by railroad police.^[12][13] In his 20s he attended barber school, got married, and moved first to Roy, New Mexico then returned to Turkey in Hall County (now considered his home town) to work as a barber at Hamm's Barber Shop. He alternated barbering and fiddling even when he moved to Fort Worth after leaving Hall County in 1929. There he played in minstrel and medicine shows, and, as with other Texas musicians such as Ocie Stockard, continued to earn money as a barber. He wore blackface makeup to appear in comedy routines, something that was common at the time. "He was playing his violin and singing." There were two guitars and a banjo player with him. "Bob was in blackface and was the comic; he cracked jokes, sang, and did an amazing jig dance."^[14] Since there was already a "Jim" on the show, the manager began calling him "Bob."^[14] However, it was as "Jim Rob Wills," paired with Herman Arnspiger, that he made his first commercial (though unissued) recordings in November 1929 for Brunswick/Vocalion.^[15]

Wills was known for his hollering and wisecracking. One source for this was when, as a very young boy, he would hear his father, grandfather, and cowboys give out loud cries when the music moved them.^[16] When asked if his wisecracking and talking on the bandstand came from his medicine show experience, he said it did not. Rather, he said that it came directly from playing and living close to Negroes, and that he never did it necessarily as show, but more as a way to express his feelings.^[17]

While in Fort Worth, Wills added the "rowdy city blues" of Bessie Smith and Emmett Miller to a repertoire of mainly waltzes and breakdowns he had learned from his father, and patterned his vocal style after that of Miller and other performers such as Al Bernard.^[18] Wills acknowledged that he idolized Miller. Furthermore, his 1935 version of "St. Louis Blues" is nearly a word-for-word copy of Al Bernard's patter on his 1928 recording of the same song.^[19]

The fact that Wills made his professional debut in blackface was commented on by 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."^[9] (Wills is quoted as saying, "I rode horeseback from the place between the rivers to Childress to see Bessie Smith...She was about the greatest thing I had ever heard. In fact, there was no doubt about it. She was the greatest thing I ever heard."^[20]

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.^[21]

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.^[22] "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,^[23] 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."

Wills is also quoted as saying, "You can change the name of an old song, rearrange it and make it a swing." "One Star Rag," "Rat Cheese under the Hill," "Take Me Back to Tulsa," "Basin Street Blues," "Steel Guitar Rag," and "Trouble in Mind" were some of the songs in his extensive repertory.^[24]

The Texas Playboys[link]

Bob Wills' bus during a parade in Tulsa

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 p.m. 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.

Wills added a trumpet to the band inadvertently when he hired Everet Stover as an announcer, not knowing that he had played with the New Orleans symphony and had directed the governor's band in Austin. Stover, thinking he had been hired as a trumpeter began playing with the band with no comment from Wills. Young sax player Zeb McNally was allowed to play with the band, although Wills initially discouraged it. With two horns in the band Wills realized he would have to add a drummer to balance things and create a fuller sound. He hired the young, "modern style musician" Smokey Ducas.^[12] 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, 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.

Session rosters from 1938 show both "lead guitar" and "electric guitar" in addition to guitar and steel guitar in the Texas Playboys recordings.^[25] Wills' 1938 recording of "Ida Red" served as a model for Chuck Berry's decades later version of the same song - "Maybellene".^[26][27]

About this time Wills purchased and performed with an old Guadagnini violin that had once fetched $7,600 for $1,600, the equivalent of about $24,000 in 2009.^{[12] [28]}

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.

The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.^[29]

Film career[link]

In 1940 Wills, along with the Texas Playboys, co-starred with Tex Ritter in Take Me Back to Oklahoma.^[30] 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.^[31][32][33]

Wills also appeared in The Lone Prairie (1942), Riders of the Northwest Mounted (1943), Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), The Vigilantes Ride (1943), The Last Horseman (1944), Rhythm Round-Up (1945), Blazing the Western Trail (1945), and Lawless Empire (1945). According to one source, he appeared in a total of 19 films.^[21]

Swing Era[link]

After leaving the Army in 1943 Wills moved to Hollywood and began to reorganize the Texas Playboys. He became an enormous draw in Los Angeles, where many of his Texas, Oklahoma and regional fans had also relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs. Monday through Friday the band broadcast from 12:01 to 1:00 p.m. over KMTR-AM (now KLAC) in LA. They also played regularly every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego.^[34]

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. For a very brief period in 1944 the Wills band included 23 members.,^[32] and around mid year he toured Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with 21 pieces in the orchestra.^[35] Billboard reported that Wills outgrossed Harry James, Benny Goodman, "both Dorsies, et al." at Civic Auditorium in Oakland, California, in January 1944.^[36]

While on his first cross-country tour, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and defied that conservative show's ban on using drums of any sort.

In 1945 Wills' dances were outdrawing those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman,^[32] and he had moved to 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. While based in Sacramento his radio broadcasts over 50,000 watt KFBK^{[disambiguation needed ]} were heard all over the West.^[37]

Famous swing orchestras in California realized that many of their followers were leaving to dance to Bob Will's Western swing. Because he was in such demand, some places booked Wills any time he had an opening, regardless of how undesirable the date. The manager of a popular auditorium in the LA Basin town of Wilmington, California: "Although Monday night dancing is frankly an experiment it was the only night of the week on which this outstanding band could be secured."^[34]

During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys show recorded at the Fairmont Hotel. Many of these recordings survive today as the Tiffany Transcriptions,^[1] and are available on CD. They show off the band's strengths significantly, in part because the group was not confined to the three-minute limits of 78 RPM discs. They featured superb instrumental work from fiddlers Joe Holley and Louis Tierney, steel guitarists Noel Boggs and Herb Remington, guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Junior Barnard and electric mandolinist-fiddler Tiny Moore. The original recorded version of Wills' "Faded Love", appeared on the Tiffanys as a fairly swinging instrumental unlike the ballad it became when lyrics were added in 1950.

On April 3, 1948, Wills and the Texas Playboys appeared for the inaugural broadcast of the Louisiana Hayride on KWKH, broadcasting from the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Wills and the Texas Playboys played dances throughout the West to more than 10,000 people every week. They held dance attendance records at Jantzen Beach in Portland, Oregon; Santa Monica, California, and at the Oakland (California) Auditorium, where they drew 19,000 people in two nights.^[38] Wills also broke an attendance record of 2,100 previously held by Jan Garbner at the Armory in Klamath Falls, Oregon, by attracting 2,514 dancers.^[38] WIlls and the Playboys also played small towns on the West Coast. Actor Clint Eastwood recalled seeing Wills when he was 18 or 19 (1948 or 1949) and working at a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon.^[39]

Appearances at the Bostonia Ballroom in San Diego continued throughout the 1950s.^[40]

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). It ended when he fired Duncan in the fall of 1948.

Later years[link]

Having lived a lavish lifestyle in California, Wills moved back to Oklahoma City in 1949, then went back on the road to maintain his payroll and Wills Point. He opened a second club, the Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas, Texas. Turning the club over to managers later revealed to be dishonest 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." It wrecked him financially.

In 1950 Wills had two Top Ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love". After 1950 radio stations began to increasingly specialize in one form or another of commercially popular music. Wills did not fit into the popular Nashville country and western stations, although he was usually labeled "country and western". Neither did he fit into the pop or middle of the road stations, although he played a good deal of pop music, and was not accepted in the pop music world.^[41]

He 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. Bob could draw "a thousand people on Monday night between 1950 and 1952, but he could not do that by 1956. Entertainment habits had changed."^[42]

On Wills' return to Tulsa late in 1957, Jim Downing of the Tulsa Tribune wrote an article headlined "Wills Brothers Together Again — Bob Back with Heavy Beat". The article quotes Wills as saying, "Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!...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. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."^[43] The use of amplified guitars accentuates Bob's claim, some Bob Wills recordings from the `30's and `40's sound similar to rock and roll records in the `50's.

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. He appeared twice on ABC-TV's Jubilee USA and kept the band on the road into the 1960s. After two heart attacks, in 1965 he dissolved the Texas Playboys (who briefly continued as an independent unit) to perform solo with house bands. While he did well in Las Vegas and other areas, and made records for the Kapp Records label, he was largely a forgotten figure — even though inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968. A 1969 stroke left his right side paralyzed, ending his active career.

The May 26, 1975 issue of TIME (Milestones section) read: "Died. Bob Wills, 70, "Western Swing" bandleader-composer; of pneumonia; in Fort Worth. Wills turned out dance tunes that are now called country rock, introducing with his Texas Playboys such C & W classics as Take Me Back to Tulsa and New San Antonio Rose".^[44]

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

Singles[link]

Legacy[link]

Wills' 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' regular stops in his heyday). A 1970 tribute album by Haggard directed a wider audience to Wills' 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. In 1973 he participated in a final reunion session with members of some the Texas Playboys from the 1930s to the 1960s. Merle Haggard was invited to play at this reunion. The session, scheduled for two days, took place in December 1973, with the album to be titled For the Last Time. Wills, speaking or attempting to holler, appeared on a couple tracks from the first day's session but suffered a stroke overnight. He had a more severe one a few days later. The musicians completed the album without him. Wills by then was comatose. He lingered until his death on May 13, 1975.

In addition to being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968, Wills was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category along with the Texas Playboys in 1999, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

From the 1970s until his 2002 death, Waylon Jennings performed a song called "Bob Wills is Still the King". In addition, The Rolling Stones performed this song live in Austin, Texas at Zilker Park for their DVD The Biggest Bang. In a 1968 issue of Guitar Player, rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix said of Wills and the Playboys: "I dig them. The Grand Ole Opry used to come on, and I used to watch that. They used to have some pretty heavy cats, some heavy guitar players."

Wills ranked No. 27 in "CMT's 40 Greatest Men in Country Music" in 2003.

Fats Domino once remarked that he patterned his 1960 rhythm section after that of Bob Wills.^[45]

During the 49th Grammy Awards, Carrie Underwood performed his song "San Antonio Rose". Today, George Strait performs Wills' music on concert tours and also records songs greatly reflecting the magic of Wills and his Texas-style swing.

Asleep at the Wheel, the Austin, Texas-based Western swing band has been paying homage to Wills for over 35 years, best demonstrated by their continuing performances of the musical drama A Ride With Bob^[46] which debuted in Austin in March 2005 to coincide with celebrations of Wills' 100th birthday.

Another band that contributes to keeping the Western swing tradition alive are The Armadillos, who hail from Manchester, England and have been performing for more than 15 years.

In 2004, a documentary film about his life and music music, entitled Fiddlin' Man: The Life and Times of Bob Wills, was released by VIEW Inc.

In 2011, Proper Records released an album by Hot Club of Cowtown titled What Makes Bob Holler: A Tribute to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

In 2011 the Texas Legislature adopted a resolution designating western swing as the official "State Music of Texas".^[47][48]

See also[link]

• Aragon Ballroom (Ocean Park)

.

References[link]

47. Paula Jungmann Lobbiest. http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/82R/billtext/html/SC00035F.htm

Bibliography[link]

• Townsend, Charles R. (1998). "Bob Wills". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kinsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 594–5.
• West, Elliot. "Trails and Footprints: The Past of the Future Southern Plains". The Future of the Southern Plains (pp. 17–37) edited by Sherry L. Smith. University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. ISBN 0-861-3735-5
• Whitburn, Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits. Billboard Books, 2006. ISBN 0-8230-8291-1
• Wolff, Kurt; Orla Duane. Country Music: The Rough Guide. Rough Guides, 2000. ISBN 1-85828-534-8

External links[link]

• Official Web site and virtual museum
• Texas Playboys Web site
• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
• The Bob Wills Tiffany Transcriptions
• Western Swing
• Famous Texans
• Bob Wills at Find a Grave

Ray Benson
Ray Benson performing in April 2008
Background information
Birth name	Ray Benson Seifert[1]
Born	(1951-03-16) March 16, 1951 (age 61)[2]
Origin	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Genres	Western Swing, Country Music
Occupations	Singer, Songwriter, Producer
Instruments	Guitar[3]
Years active	1969–present
Associated acts	Asleep at the Wheel
Website	www.raybenson.com

Ray Benson (born March 16, 1951) is the front man of the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.

Ray Benson performing in April 2009

In 1970, Benson, a Jewish ^[4] native of Philadelphia, formed Asleep at the Wheel with friends Lucky Oceans and Leroy Preston. The group relocated to Austin in 1973 after a suggestion from Willie Nelson .

Since then, the group has released more than 20 albums and earned 9 Grammy awards. Though the band's lineup has changed greatly over the years (about 90 people have been part of Asleep at the Wheel at some point), Benson has always remained at the helm as the band's driving force.

In addition to his work with Asleep at the Wheel, Benson is also an accomplished producer whose credits include albums by Dale Watson, Suzy Bogguss, Aaron Watson, James Hand and Carolyn Wonderland; also single tracks for Willie Nelson, Aaron Neville, Brad Paisley, Pam Tillis, Trace Adkins, Merle Haggard, and Vince Gill.

In 2003, Benson released his first solo album entitled Beyond Time.

Benson is also a founding member of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which raises money to help aging R&B artists, and a member of the board of directors of the SIMS Foundation, which provides low-cost mental health services to Austin musicians and their families. He is also a trustee for the Texas chapter of NARAS, a board member of St Davids Community Health Foundation, Board member and founding member of Health alliance for Austin musicians (HAMM).

Benson is 6 feet, 7 inches tall with size 16 EEE feet.

"A Ride With Bob"[link]

In the Spring of 2005, Ray Benson and Asleep At The Wheel began the production of "A Ride With Bob" that follows the travels of legendary singer/songwriter Bob Wills. A Ride With Bob includes the live performance of 15 of Wills’ most well-known songs in a plot that interweaves Ray Benson’s present day with various stages in Wills’ storied career. The play continues to tour throughout the country.

Awards[link]

Benson has been presented numerous awards throughout his career. Most recently, the 16th Annual Midsouth Regional Emmy Award for the making of "A Ride With Bob", an Honorary Junior Member of the United States Secret Service, and the Darrel K. Royal Music Patron Award by The Texas Heritage Songwriters' Association. In 2007, the Austin Chronicle recognized Benson for Male Vocals, Band of the Year, Songwriter, Record Producer, and for the Country Genre. Benson was inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame in 2002, was given The Texas Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, and recognized as an Outstanding Producer by the National Academy of Recording Arts in 1988. He has also been given numerous Citations of Achievement by Broadcast Music, Inc. for his work in the country music field. Ray Benson has been one of the strongest names in Country Music for the last forty years. Ray Benson has earned 9 Grammy awards in 4 different decades.

Willie and the Wheel[link]

In February 2009, Asleep at the Wheel and Willie Nelson released "Willie and the Wheel," a western swing collaboration suggested by veteran producer Jerry Wexler. Nelson has a long-time interest in western swing and had toured with the band in 2007.^[5] Paul Shaffer and Vince Gill also perform on this album.

References[link]

External links[link]

• http://www.aridewithbob.com
• http://www.raybenson.com
• http://www.asleepatthewheel.com
• http://www.bismeauxstudio.com