* Still the king of king Swing //Bob Wills transformed country music
and set the stage for the rock era. It's only right that this Texas
fiddler tonight will enter the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame
Don McLeese
* 03/15/99
Austin American-Statesman
(Copyright 1999)
Throughout her girlhood, Rosetta Wills was embarrassed about her
famous father. It wasn't the circumstances of her birth that
bothered her, though the marriage of her 17-year-old mother to a
husband twice that age barely lasted beyond their daughter's
conception, leaving her father all but a stranger to Rosetta. But
what really bothered her about her dad was the way he made his
living.
"I didn't want to tell anybody that my daddy played a fiddle,"
explained Rosetta, who has lived in Austin since 1989 and who came to
terms with her father's legacy by writing last year's biographical
memoir, "The King of Western Swing: Bob Wills Remembered."
TD * "In the '50s, I didn't want anything to do with country music, and
I was embarrassed. I thought it was corny."
Thus, there's a certain irony in tonight's induction of Bob Wills
and His Texas Playboys into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, an honor
that will find Rosetta and her half-sister Cindy accepting on behalf
of their late father. It was rock 'n' roll, after all, that made
Wills sound corny to his daughter, and it was rock 'n' roll that all
but killed the career of a man who had ranked high among America's
most popular band leaders in the 1940s.
What goes around comes around, particularly on the dance floor, as
swing in all its varieties finds itself more fashionable than it has
been in a half-century. The swing revival that has filled rock clubs
with jitterbugs has been accompanied by a renewed appreciation for
Wills, whose music never fell from favor in the roadhouses and honky-
tonks of Texas. Tonight, he'll be inducted into the Hall of Fame as
an "early influence" on rock at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel (a
ceremony that will be edited for telecast on VH1 on Wednesday).
The other honorees include Billy Joel, Curtis Mayfield, Paul
McCartney, Del Shannon, Dusty Springfield, the Staple Singers,
Charles Brown (another "early influence") and producer George Martin.
The Elvis of his form
* "He changed the face of country music in the '40s, which is how
it moved into the '50s with rock 'n' roll," said Ray Benson, whose
Asleep at the Wheel has both contributed to and benefited from the
resurgence of interest in Western swing. "Western swing would have
been a footnote without Bob Wills, because Bob Wills was the Elvis
Presley of this form. He had these burning black eyes and he had
this strut, like a peacock. Women came to see him because he was so
charismatic and the energy was incredible. He moved all over the
place, and that spontaneous energy is what rock 'n' roll is all
about."
Though Wills didn't invent the form or lead the first Western
swing band (that distinction goes to vocalist Milton Brown, Wills'
former bandmate in the Light Crust Doughboys), his maverick spirit
transformed American music. Decades before rock 'n' roll was
described as combining black and white musical strains in its
synthesis of blues and country, Wills was indulging in a similar sort
of musical miscegenation to overwhelmingly popular effect, amplifying
his sound with electric instrumentation and using drums (previously
anathema on the Grand Ole Opry) to reinforce the rhythm. Wills
considered his music closer to big-band jazz than hillbilly country,
but it filled the country dance halls all over the Southwest.
"He was a very open guy who was willing to try a lot of things and
was borrowing freely from a lot of different areas, and that sounds
like rock 'n' roll to me," said Jon Langford, who finds common spirit
in the music he once made with Britain's punk-rocking Mekons and his
loose aggregation that will play a South by Southwest showcase Sunday
at La Zona Rosa, performing their album "The Pine Valley Cosmonauts
Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills." The album features Alejandro
Escovedo, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Robbie Fulks and other boundary-
bending artists.
Sound of blues, Tex-Mex
"People think of rock 'n' roll as Elvis and white people starting
to play the blues," said Langford. "But Wills was obsessed with the
blues and jazz and the Tex-Mex sound, and he was willing to take it
all onboard into the stodgy areas of white music."
"He's the godfather of South by Southwest," said Escovedo, who
will follow his appearance with the Cosmonauts with his own set at La
Zona Rosa, the traditional festival finale. "There's really only a
handful of pioneers, and then everyone else just copped it."
Born in Hall County, Texas, on March 6, 1905, Wills based his
Playboys in Tulsa, Okla., where they had their own radio show over
KVOO from 1934 to 1958. His "San Antonio Rose" -- and vocal version
as the "New San Antonio Rose" -- sold more than a million copies both
for Wills and in a cover version by Bing Crosby. In the '60s, Wills
suffered a series of heart attacks. He had a stroke while recording
a reunion album with the Texas Playboys in 1973 and died on May 13,
1975. Together and separately, many of the musicians who passed
through the ranks of the Playboys have continued to keep the music's
spirit alive, with virtuoso fiddler Johnny Gimble still active as an
Austin treasure.
When rock 'n' roll became the musical rage among the younger
listeners of the '50s, many performers who had played Western swing
simply stripped it down, turned it up and sped it up. Only a couple
of years before he would "Rock Around the Clock" with the Comets,
Bill Haley was fronting the Four Aces of Western Swing. Before Roy
Orbison joined the rockabilly stable of Sun Records, he was singing
Wills-inspired music with the Wink Westerners. When Chuck Berry
auditioned for Chess Records in Chicago, he played the Wills staple
"Ida Red," which he was persuaded to transform into "Maybellene."
When Buddy Holly parted company with the Crickets, he recruited
Western swing guitarist Tommy Allsup -- who would later close the
circle as producer for Asleep at the Wheel.
"I asked Tommy, who used to play with Billy Gray and his Western
swing band out of Dallas, `Well, how did you change for rock 'n'
roll?' " said Benson. "And he said, `I didn't do anything but turn
the treble up.' "
While Wills cut some rock 'n' rolling records in the '50s that
sounded similar to Haley's, he was never able to transfer his
popularity to the new arena. Like the Western equivalent of a Benny
Goodman, he was typecast by the younger listeners who became the
dominant musical tastemakers as an anachronism who played their
parents' music. The supremacy of the electric guitar left no room
for fiddling around.
Still, the legend refused to fade, particularly in country
* circles, where Wills was enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame
in 1968. Merle Haggard subsequently recorded a tribute album to "The
Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World," while Waylon Jennings toasted
him with "Bob Wills Is Still the King."
With one tribute album to Wills already under its belt, Asleep at
the Wheel is in the process of recording another, slated for July
release on Dreamworks Records. Titled "Ride With Bob," it will
feature a range of artists encompassing Dwight Yoakam, the Dixie
Chicks, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Lyle
Lovett and the Manhattan Transfer.
Each generation likes it
"It just seems to be cyclical; it seems to come around," said
Benson of the resurgence of interest in Wills' music. "All I know is
it appealed to me when I was 18 years old, that whole snap-your-
fingers, tap-your-foot, put-a-smile-on-your face feeling. There are
18-year-old kids in every generation that are going to discover and
love it. It just depends on the generation whether that's a large
number or a small number. I never saw this as mainstream music, but
it's sure trying to sneak in there."
Rosetta Wills, whose embarrassment over her father's music long
ago turned to pride, also likes the way 1999 is treating Bob Wills.
"It's really kind of amazing to me how much attention it's getting,
and how I meet all these younger artists who were influenced by him.
You think when somebody dies, they're dead and gone, but that's just
not true."
