BOB WILLS

Bob Wills

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Band SET TWO Recorded Live August 09, 2002, Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Band SET ONE Recorded Live August 09, 2002, Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Recorded Live May 21, 2000 SR-7711 © Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup.

Bob Wills' "A Tribute to Bobs' 100th Birthday" from Leon Rausch and Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills & Friends - The Best Of Western Swing - Three CD Set

Bob Wills "For The Last Time" This Classic 24 Song CD is Still Available!!!

50 Song Tribute To The Music Of Bob Wills - 3 CD Box Set Plus detailed Booklet - Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills, The Essential Bob Wills 1934-1947

Bob Wills, The Best Of Bob Wills - 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection

Bob Wills,

Bob Wills, The Hits

Bob Wills, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys "The King of Western Swing' - 25 Hits 1935-1945"

Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys "San Antonio Rose BCD-15933 LL" Boxset contains Eleven (11) CD's plus One (1) DVD

Bob Wills

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Band SET TWO Recorded Live August 09, 2002, Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Band SET ONE Recorded Live August 09, 2002, Featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

Bob Wills' Texas Playboys Recorded Live May 21, 2000 featuring Legendary Western Swing Vocalist Leon Rausch and Grammy Award Winner Tommy Allsup

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Bob Wills' "A Tribute to Bobs' 100th Birthday" from Leon Rausch and Tommy Allsup (0-97037-72302-6 Twenty One Songs on CD) $15.99 plus S/H

1. Big Beaver 2:48 (Texas Playboys) 2. New Worried Mind 3:29 (Leon Rausch) 3. Heart to Heart Talk 3:02 (Tanya Tucker) 4. Stay All Night 2:53 (Charlie Daniels) 5. Misery 3:11 (Merle Haggard) 6. San Antonio Rose 3:04 (Joe Diffie, Robin English) 7. Turkey Texas Blues 3:20 (Billy Grammer) 8. Milk Cow Blues 3:20 (Cody Canada of CCR) 9. Ten Years 3:15 (Dierks Bentley) 10. Lilly Dale 3:22 (Gene Watson) 11. Warm Red Wine 2:52 (Archie Bell) 12. I Want to be Wanted 3:38 (Glen Campbell) 13. Snap Your Finger 3:20 (Terry Bradshaw, Rachel Bradshaw) 14. Keeper of My Heart 3:24 (B.J. Thomas) 15. Take Me BAck to Tulsa 3:00 (Porter Waggoner, Terry Bradshaw, Tanya Tucker) 16. Across the Alley (From the Alamo) 3:28 Wilford Brimley) 17. Faded Love 4:02 (Johnny Rodriquez, Lynn Anderson) 18. Right or Wrong 2:46 (George Jones) 19. Sugar Moon 3:09 (Larry Gatlin) 20. That's What I Like About The South 2:48 (Chance/Muzik Mafia) 21. Bob's Got A Swing Band in Heaven 3:07 Red Steagall)

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Bob Wills & Friends - The Best Of Western Swing - Three CD Set (0-1130-15220-2-3 Thirty Six Songs on CD) $29.98 plus $4.00 S/H

Volume One Featuring Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys: 1. San Antonio Rose 2.Stay A Little Longer 3. New Spanish Two-Step 4. A Maiden's Prayer 5. Roly-Poly 6. Take Me Back To Tulsa 7. Time Changes Everything 8. Texas Playboy Rag 9. Corrine Corina 10. Steel Guitar Rag 11. Cotton-Eyed Joe 12. Let's Ride With Bob

Volume Two Featuring Asleep At The Wheel: 1. House of Blue Lights 2. Miss Molly 3. Choo Choo CH"Boogie 4. Blood-Shot Eyes 5. Tulsa Straight Ahead 6. Coast To Coast 7. Way Down Texas Way 8. Blowin' Lake A Bandit 9. Don't Ask Me Why (I'm Going To Texas) 10. Boogie Back To Texas 11. Dead Man 12. Chattanooga Choo Choo

Volume Three Featuring Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys: 1. Faded Love 2. Deep Water 3. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 4. My Confession 5. Bubbles In My Beer 6. Rubber Dolly 7. Home In San Antone 8. Hang Your Head In Shame 9. Liberty Bell 10. The Kind of Love I Can't Forget 11. Your Old Love Letters 12. Lil' Liza Jane

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Order Form - The Essential Bob Wills 1934-1947 (0-7464-48958-2)

Bob Wills, The Essential Bob Wills 1934-1947 (0-7464-48958-2 Twenty Songs On CD Only) $17.98 Plus $2.00 S/H. Creators of an inventive amalgamation of Black country blues, traditonal Mexican, big band swing and early country-western, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys are, to this day, recognized as the Kings of Western Swing. This Comprehensive 20 song collection includes such Wills' favorites as "Stay A Little Longer", "Time Changes Everything", "Take Me Back to Tulsa", as well as 6 previously unissued alternative takes.

Osage Stomp, Steel Guitar Rag, Right Or Wrong, Time Changes Everything, New San Antonio Rose, Bob Wills' Special, Twin Guitar Special, Take Me Back To Tulsa, A Maiden's Prayer, Home In San Antone, Miss Molly, Texas Playboy Rag, Stay A Little Longer, Roly Poly, New Spanish Two Step, Sugar Moon, Brain Cloudy Blues, Fat Boy Rag, Deep Water, Bob Wills' Boogie

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Order Form - The Best Of Bob Wills - (0-08817-01172-1)

Bob Wills, The Best Of Bob Wills - 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection (0-08817-01172-1 Twelve Songs On CD Only) $14.98 Plus S/H. Featuring Songs From His MGM, Decca & Knapp Years. OUT OF STOCK

Keeper Of My Heart, Bubbles In My Beer, Faded Love, Cadillac And A Model "A", New San Antonio Rose, Lone Star Rag, New Spanish Two Step, Bob's Breakdown, Across The Alley From The Alamo, Time Changes Everything, Cherokee Maiden, Milk Cow Blues

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Order Form - Bob Wills Texas Playboys - (0-0881-10547-2-4)

Bob Wills, Bob Wills Texas Playboys - (0-0881-10547-2-4 Sixteen Songs On CD Only) $14.98 Plus S/H

Cornball Rag, San Antonio Rose, Don't Keep It A Secret, Hoopaw Rag, My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You, So Let's Rock, Little Star Of Heaven, It's The Bottle Talkin', Gotta Walk Alone, Lilly Dale, Texas Two Step, I'll Always Be In Love With You, With Tears In My Eyes, If No News Is Good News, A Big Ball In Cowtown, If You'll Come Back To Me

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Order Form - BobWills, The Hits - (7-314-534669-2-0)

BobWills, The Hits (7-314-534669-2-0 Eleven Songs On CD Only) $14.98 Plus S/H

Bubbles In My Beer, Little Cowboy Lullaby, Keeper Of My Heart, Don't Be Ashamed Of Your Age, Cotton Patch Blues, Thorn In My Heart, Ida Red Like To Boogie, I Ain't Got Nobody, Faded Love, St. Louis Blues, Texas Blues

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Order Form - Bob Wills, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys "The King of Western Swing' - 25 Hits 1935-1945" 7-43625-52502-1

Bob Wills, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys "The King of Western Swing - 25 Hits 1935-1945" ( 7-43625-52502-1 Twenty Five Songs On CD Only) $17.98 Plus S/H

New San Antonio Rose - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Osage Stomp; Never No More Hard Times Blues - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Steel Guitar Rag; Sugar Blues - Bob Wills, vocal; Fan It - Johnnie Lee Wills, vocal; Right Or Wrong - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Whoa Baby - Leon McAuliffe, vocal; That's What I Like About The South - Leon McAuliffe, vocal; Lone Star Rag; Corrine, Corrina - Bob Wills, vocal; Bob Wills Special; Time Chages Everything - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Big Beaver; Take Me Back To Tulsa - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Dusty Skies - Tommy Duncan, vocal; We Might As Well Forget It - Leon Huff, vocal; Home In San Antone - Tommy Duncan, vocal; You're From Texas - Leon McAuliffe, vocal; Goodbye, Liza Jane - Leon McAuliffe, vocal; Texas Playboy Rag; Roly Poly - Tommy Duncan, vocal; Stay A Little Longer - Tommy Duncan, vocal; New Spanish Two - Step - Tommy Duncan, vocal; I'm Feelin' Bad - Harley Huggins, vocal

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Order Form - For The Last Time - (7-2438-28331-2-3)

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, For The Last Time was Recorded December 3rd and 4th, 1973 (7-2438-28331-2-3 Twenty Four Songs On CD Only) $14.99 Plus S/H. Featuring vocals by Leon Rausch, Merle Haggard and others.... Produced by Tommy Allsup, Grammy Award Winner for Konawa Music Production.

Playboy Theme, Yearning (Just For You), Faded Love, What Makes Bob Holler, Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer), Goin' Away Party, Big Ball's In Cowtown, Keeper Of My Heart, Twin Guitar Boogie, Bubbles In My Beer,Blue Bonnet Lane, When You Leave Amarillo (Turn Out The Lights), San Antonio Rose, I Wonder If You Feel The Way I Do, My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You, Miss Molly, I Can't Go On This Way, That's What I Like 'Bout The South, Silver Lake Blues, Milk Cow Blues, Comin' Down From Denver, Baby, That Would Sure Go Good, She's Really Gone, Crippled Turkey

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Homecoming: Reflections on Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys

1915-1973

by Charles R. Townsend

The recording session that resulted in this album was an important event in the history of American music. It brought together Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the man and the band that created Western Swing and, for over forty years, influenced popular American music in general and country and western in particular. The year this album was made, 1973, was the fortieth anniversary of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Wills first called his band the "Playboys" in 1933 in Waco, Texas. The fact that this album was recorded forty years later tells a part of the story of their enduring popularity and incredible appeal.

The story really began in West Texas in 1915. That year, James Robert Wills played the fiddle at his first "country" or "ranch" dance. When his father, John Wills, failed to show up to play for that dance, Jim Rob began playing one of the six selections he knew. The cowboys and their ladies were amused at the ten-year-old fiddler, but soon they were dancing.

There were three basic influences in Jim Rob's formative years that were important throughout his subsequent career. His music was for the most part "western music"; the fiddle dominated his music, and it was always primarily for dancing. He grew up in the heart of one of the best ranching areas in the world, and his music always reflected the western environment he knew and loved so well. His music was also western in the senses that it was oriented in general to the people in the western part of the United States.

It was at the ranch dances that Jim Rob played the folk-fiddle music that he learned from his father. He first learned the old "breakown" fiddle tunes, folk music that had moved with the American frontier across the Mississippi and into Jim Rob's West Texas. He added a new demension to that style by learning blues and jazz, the folk music of the Blacks. From the time he was three years old, he played with Black children and later worked with Blacks in the cotton fields. Jim Rob learned the blues style directly from the Blacks. "I don't know whether they made them up as they moved down the cotton rows or not," Wills told the author, "but they sang blues you never heard before." One of his favorite artists was the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith, and he rode nearly fifty miles on horseback to see her in person. He also learned a good deal about rhythm from the Blacks. While he lived in West Texas he began to combine the folk-fiddle music he learned from his family with the Negro blues and jazz to develop his own style of dance music. It took him years to develop the style he wanted, but Wills eventually incorporated every jazz idiom into his music: blues notes, syncopation, improvisation, and a heavy New Orleans or dixieland beat. In combining the elements ooof the fiddle music of the frontier with New Orleans jazz, Jim Rob Wills created a new music that could as properly be called "Western Jazz" as "Western Swing". In fact, it was the jazz that made his western music swing.

Jim Rob lived in West Texas for over fourteen years after he played the fiddle at his first dance. He always said he developed his style while he lived "down between the rivers" on the family farm. In those years, he played for dances at ranches all over West Texas, won fiddlers' contest, and became one of the area's favorite musicians. These were good years for young Wills musically, but they were difficult years financially. John Wills and his family worked in the fields all day and played dances at night to earn a living and make mortgage payments on their river farm. The Wills family referred to those years as "hubbin' it" or hard times. As the oldest of nine children, Jim Rob worked hard to help provide. During those years, he was a farmer, rancher, shoe-shine boy, insurance salesman, construction worker, preacher, medicine-show musician, and almost a sailor in the United States Navy. He went to barber college in Amarillo and practiced the barber trade in New Mexico and his hometown of Turkey, Texas.

In the fall of 1929, Jim Rob left his boyhood home in West Texas and moved to Fort Worth. He and the Great Depression arrived in Fort Worth at about the same time. He worked as a musician, singer, and black-faced comic on Doc's Medicine Show; he barbared a while after the show went broke; he then began playing for dances and various radio stations in Fort Worth. These included KTAZ, KFJZ, and WBAP. He formed the Wills Fiddle Band that consisted of himself as fiddler and Herman Arnspiger as guitarist. Their popularity spread as they appeared on radio shows, won fiddlers' contests, and played for "house dances" (a country or ranch dance moved to town). In 1930 Bob added Milton Brown as vocalist; Durwood Brown as guitarist; and Clifton Johnson as tenor banjoist (rhythm-style). In that same year, the band begarn playing dances at Crystal Springs, a Forth Worth dance hall that became famous not only because Bob Wills played there early in his career, but also because Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and other underworld figures frequently danced there.

While in Fort Worth Bob added a great deal to the folk music of the frontier he learned "between the rivers" in West Texas. This was still the Jazz Age, and by listening to the radio and phonograph, Bob and his musicians heard swingy jazz in all kinds of dance music. If he was to be successful in dance music, he knew he would have to move closer to this music, blues, New Orleans jazz, ballads, folk, and race music (blues and jazz performed by Blacks). Durwood Brown said, "We listened to all kinds of music, but especially whatever kind of music people danced by ". Using the piano, guitar, and tenor banjo, Bob developed a rhythm section that laid down a good danceable jazz beat. With more instruments playing rhythm, Durwood Brown was free to take jazz choruses. Bob said Brown was the first to do so in any of his bands. Improvised jazz choruses were one of the contributions Bob Wills made to what was later called western music. Time later summed up what Wills had begun in Fort Worth : "His [Bob Wills'] trick was to bring ranch-house music nearer to the city."

In early January 1931, Bob Wills got a big break when he began a radio show on KFJ for Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth. That firm manufactured Light Crust Flour; so Wills' band advertised the flour and called themselves the Light Crust Doughboys. W. Lee O'Daniel, President and General Manager of Burrus Mill and later Governor of Texas and United States Senator, became the announcer, manager, and greatest fan of the Light Crust Doughboy Radio Show. O'Daniel put the show on the "prime time" of 12:30 noon on WBAP. Six months later, he broadcast the show over WOAI in San Antonio and KPRC in Houston and later over the Southwest Quality Network which included KTAT in Fort Worth and KOMA in Oklahoma City. The show became one of the most popular in all the Southwest and had many listeners as far away as Michigan.

A year later, on February 9, 1932, Bob had the first recording session of his career. He, Milton Brown, Durwood Brown, and Clifton Johnson recorded tow sides for Victor in Dallas. Later that year O'Daniel made the band quit playing dances; this started a rift between Wills and O'Daniel. When Milton Brown quit over the decision concerning the dances, the rift grew much wider. Bob had to audition sixty-seven singers before he finally hired Thomas Elmer Duncan as his new vocalist. Later a disagreement over hiring and firing of band members and Wills' periodical drinking brought an end to the original Light Crust Doughboys. At various times during the nearly three years Bob and his band worked for O'Daniel, he had gotten drunk and missed broadcasts. This had happened only a few times, but each time it left O'Daniel in a critical situation. He warned him, and when it happened again in late August 1933, O'Daniel fired Bob. As is well known, though generally exaggerated, Bob's drinking was a serious problem and his greatest professional handicap during most of his career.

Though Bob could not believe it in those lean years of economic depression, being fired by O'Daniel was best for him. He had already made Fort Worth the cradle of Western Swing or Western Jazz, and his career had hardly begun. Most of the Doughboys sensed this, for they left good jobs to move to Waco with Wills. They were rewarded by becoming the original "Playboys". While they were broadcasting over WACO in the fall of 1933, Bob first called his band "Bob Wills and his Playboys" The original Playboys were Bob Wills, fiddle; Tommy Ducan, vocals and piano; Kermit Whalen, steel guitar; Johnnie Lee Wills, tenor banjo, and June Whalen, bass and rhythm guitar. Though Wills and his Playboys did quite well in Waco, their stay was just from September 1933 to January 1934. They were there long enough, however, for O'Daniel and Burrus Mill to bring a lawsuit against them for $10,000 for advertising they were "formerly the Light Crust Doughboys". Bob and the Playboys won their lawsuit and headed for Oklahoma where their destiny lay.

It did not appear that way at first. They began broadcasting over WKY in Oklahoma City as "Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys", and in less than a week O'Daniels got their sustaining show cancelled by promising to put his Light Crust Doughboy show on the station. Disillusioned but not defeated, the band that made radio history in Oklahoma headed for Tulsa and on February 9, 1934 had its first broadcast on KVOO. Wills eventually bought his own radio time and advertised Play Boy Flour for General Mills. It was the beginning of a happy relationship all the way around. Though O'Daniel tried to get his show cancelled again and again, Bob Wills was there to stay, and he or his brother, Johnnie Lee, would have programs on KVOO for the next twenty-four years.

more info to come.............

1997 RELEASE SIMS Records (SRBS-100) 1997 RELEASE

Leon Rausch & Tommy Allsup, Grammy Award Winner A 50 Song Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills

"Seven decades of Western Swing--Leon & Tommy are carrying on the tradition."50 Songs Available 3 Compact Disk Box Set $41.99 plus $4.00 for S/H

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