King of Western Swing Bob Wills was born in Kosse, Texas, in 1905 to a family of farmers and fiddle players. Kosse is a small town in eastern Texas, located halfway between Dallas and Houston. Shortly after it was settled, it became the end of the Houston and Texas Central railway, making it easy for people to travel there. Due to its proximity to areas of prominent cotton farms, there was a strong African American influence in the community, which Bob Wills and his family embraced in their music. The area was known specifically for its African American roots, producing legendary musicians such as Scott Joplin, Victoria Spivey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, who all played a critical role in shaping Wills as a creative. It was from his Black neighbors that he learned blues and jazz, a passion that eventually drove him across the state of Texas, where he played ranch house dances and medicine shows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After leaving the family farm at 17, Wills traveled around, pursuing musical interests and taking up odd jobs. At the age of 10, he played the fiddle at his first ranch dance and relied heavily on this talent through his young adulthood to carry him through his time of occupational uncertainty. In 1929, after settling in Fort Worth, Wills was working multiple jobs, acting as a barber and a musician in medicine shows where he would perform in blackface. This is ironic because it\u2019s incredibly well known that Bob Wills was influenced so heavily by the music of his African American neighbors, and arguably wouldn\u2019t have been able to develop country-western music without that influence. Even Wills\u2019 daughter, Rosetta, is quoted, openly conveying her confusion for his participation in minstrel shows, saying “He had a lot of respect for the musicians and music of his black friends”. She even recalls that her father loved Bessie Smith, an African American blues singer so, so much that “…he once rode 50 miles on horseback just to see her perform live”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was around the same time when Wills met guitarist Herman Arnspiger, and the pair recorded two songs for the Brunswick label, which were never commercially released. They stuck together, and a year later, brothers Milton and Derwood Brown joined wills and Arnspiger to create the Aladdin Lamp Company\u2019s \u201cAladdin Laddies,\u201d a musical advertisement for the WBAP-Fort Worth radio station. Later that same year, the band was hired to promote Light Crust Flour, also on WBAP, and were renamed the Light Crust Doughboys.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These groups were instrumental in helping Wills develop his signature \u201cwestern swing\u201d sound, influenced heavily by his roots in African American music and traditional country music. Wills was free to explore these interests more in 1934 when he formed the Playboys, who started in Waco, TX, and eventually migrated to Oklahoma City, then Tulsa, where they found the most success. The band was a revolving door for talented musicians, ranging in number from 6 to 22, comprised mainly of traditional string instruments, adding drums, amplified steel, and standard guitar, and horns, which weren\u2019t typically popular in country music. As the pioneer of the new \u201cwestern swing\u201d genre, Wills had the creative freedom to use this non-traditional instrumentation to his advantage, drawing from country, jazz, Dixieland, big band, minstrelsy, pop, blues, and various ethnic styles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Texas Playboys were Bob Wills\u2019 most successful venture from 1935 to 1947. In those twelve years, the group recorded for ARC, Vocalion, OKeh, and Columbia, selling records in the hundreds of thousands. The groups\u2019 biggest hit, \u201cSan Antonio Rose\u201d is estimated to have sold millions of copies. \u201cSan Antonio Rose\u201d is written in the first person about the rose of San Antonio, the love interest of the story\u2019s narrator. This tune helped bring Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys the national fame they\u2019re known for today, charting in its release year 1940, and again in 1941. Recorded at Burrus Sawmill Studio in Saginaw, Texas, \u201cSan Antonio Rose\u201d is the epitome of western swing, with a blues-inspired bassline and a true country string section. It was with these recordings that Wills popularized his \u201cah-ha!\u201d, which he called out with the names of each of his performers in every song. <\/p>\n\n\n\n