BOB WILLS

James Robert Wills was born on March 6, 1905. Better known as Bob Wills, he was an American Western Swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Bob Wills is considered one of the fathers of Western swing and is called the King of Western Swing by his fans.

Bob Wills' father was a statewide champion fiddle player. The young Bob Wills learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin. The Wills family frequently held country dances in their home, and there was dancing in all four rooms.

As a young man "Jim Rob", as he was then known, drifted for several years, hopping freight trains and traveling from town to town to try and earn a living. In his 20s he attended barber school, got married, and moved to Turkey, Texas to be a barber. Turkey is now considered to be Bob Wills' hometown. He alternated barbering and fiddling even when he moved to Fort Worth in 1929. 

In Fort Worth, Wills formed The Wills Fiddle Band. When the Light Crust Flour company started sponsoring their radio show, the band changed their name to the Light Crust Doughboys. Bob Wills found himself unable to get along with the authoritarian host of the Light Crust Doughboy radio show, future Texas Governor "Pappy" O'Daniel. Wills left the Doughboys in 1933.

After forming a new band and relocating to Waco, Wills found enough popularity there to move to 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. In addition, they played dances in the evenings, including regular ones at the ballroom on Thursdays and Saturdays. By 1935 Wills had added horns, reeds, and drums to the Playboys. The band became the first Western Swing superstars. 

In 1940 "New San Antonio Rose" sold a million records and became the signature song of The Texas Playboys. The "new" in the song's title referred to the fact that Wills had recorded it as a fiddle instrumental in 1938 as "San Antonio Rose". 

In 1940 Wills, along with the Texas Playboys, co-starred with Tex Ritter in "Take Me Back to Oklahoma". Other films would follow. According to one source, he appeared in a total of 19 films. In late 1942 after several band members had left the group, and as World War II raged, Wills joined the Army. He received a medical discharge in 1943.

After leaving the Army in 1943 Wills moved to Hollywood and began to reorganize the Texas Playboys. He played for huge crowds in Los Angeles, where many of his Texas and Oklahoma fans had also relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs. 

Bob Wills made a great deal of money playing dances there, and began to make more creative use of electric guitars to replace the big horn sections the Tulsa band had included. 

While on his first cross-country tour, Wills appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and used drums in the performance even though they were banned.

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 were heard all over the West. Wills and the Texas Playboys played dances throughout the West to more than 10,000 people every week.

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 stations, although he played a good deal of pop music. He was not accepted in the pop music world.

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.

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. Wills kept the band on the road into the 1960s. A 1969 stroke left his right side paralyzed, ending his active career.

During his recovery, Merle Haggard -- the most popular country singer of the late '60s -- recorded an album dedicated to Wills, which helped spark a widespread Western swing revival. In the fall of 1973, Wills and Haggard began planning a Texas Playboys reunion album. The first session was held on December 3, 1973, with Wills leading the band from his wheelchair. That night, he suffered another massive stroke in his sleep. The stroke left him in a coma. The Texas Playboys finished the album without him. Wills never regained consciousness and died on May 15, 1975, in a nursing home.