James Robert Wills (March 6, 1905 – May 13, 1975) was an American musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing (although Spade Cooley self-promoted the moniker "King of Western Swing" from 1942 to 1969). He was also noted for punctuating his music with his trademark "ah-haa" calls.
Wills formed several bands and played radio stations around the South and West until he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 with himself on fiddle, Tommy Duncan on piano and vocals, the rhythm guitarist June Whalin, the tenor banjoist Johnnie Lee Wills, and Kermit Whalin, who played steel guitar and bass. The Oklahoma guitarist Eldon Shamblin joined the band in 1937, bringing jazzy influence and arrangements. The band played regularly on the Tulsa, Oklahoma, radio station KVOO and added Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar, the pianist Al Stricklin, the 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," "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. In 1950, Wills had two top 10 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. He continued to perform frequently despite a decline in the popularity of his earlier hit songs and the growing popularity of rock and roll. Wills had a heart attack in 1962 and a second one the next year, which forced him to disband the Texas Playboys. 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 recorded an album with his fan Merle Haggard in 1973. Later he suffered two strokes that left him partially paralyzed and unable to communicate. He was comatose the last two months of his life and died in a Fort Worth nursing home from pneumonia in 1975. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1999.
Wills was born on a cotton farm in Kosse, Texas, to Emma Lee Foley and John Tompkins Wills. His parents were both of primarily English ancestry, but had distant Irish ancestry, as well. The entire Wills family was musically inclined. His father was a statewide champion fiddle player, and several of his siblings played musical instruments. The family frequently held country dances in their home, and while living in Hall County, Texas, they also played at "ranch dances", which were popular throughout West Texas. In this environment, Wills learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin early.
Wills not only learned traditional music from his family, but he also learned some blues songs directly from African-American families who worked in the cotton fields near Lakeview, Texas. As a child, he mainly interacted with African-American children, learning their musical styles and dances such as jigs. Aside from his own family, he knew few other white children until he was seven or eight years old.
The family moved to Hall County in the Texas Panhandle in 1913, and in 1919 they bought a farm between the towns of Lakeview, Texas, and Turkey, Texas. At the age of 16, Wills left the family and hopped a freight train, travelling under the name Jim Rob. He drifted from town to town trying to earn a living for several years, once nearly falling from a moving train.
In his 20s, he attended barber school, married his first wife Edna, 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 Ham's Barber Shop. He alternated barbering and fiddling, even when he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, 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. Wills played the violin and sang, and had two guitarists and a banjo player with him. "Bob was in blackface and was the comic; he cracked jokes, sang, and did an amazing jig dance."
Since there was already a Jim on the show, the manager began calling him Bob. As Jim Rob Wills, though, paired with Herman Arnspiger, he made his first commercial (though unissued) recordings in November 1929 for Brunswick/Vocalion. Wills quickly became known for being talkative on the bandstand, a tendency he picked up from family, local cowboys, and the style of Black musicians he had heard growing up.
While in Fort Worth, Wills added the "rowdy city blues" of Bessie Smith and Emmett Miller, whom he idolized, 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. His 1935 version of "St. Louis Blues" replicates Al Bernard's patter from the 1928 version of the song. He described his love of Bessie Smith's music with an anecdote: "I rode horseback 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."
In Fort Worth, Wills met Herman Arnspiger 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, which became known as the Aladdin Laddies and then soon renamed itself the Light Crust Doughboys because of 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.
After forming a new band, The Playboys, and relocating to Waco, Texas, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market. They left Waco in January 1934 for Oklahoma City. Wills soon settled the renamed Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noon shows over the 50,000-watt KVOO radio station, from the stage of Cain's Ballroom. They also played dances in the evenings. Wills largely sang blues and sentimental ballads. "Lone 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 the extensive repertory played by Wills and the Playboys.
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, and Wills never stopped him. Although Wills initially disapproved of it, young saxophonist Zeb McNally was eventually hired. Wills hired the young, "modern-style musician" Smoky Dacus as a drummer to balance out the horns.
He continued to expand the lineup through the mid- to late 1930s. The addition of steel guitar whiz Leon McAuliffe in March 1935 added not only a formidable instrumentalist, but also a second engaging vocalist. Wills and the Texas Playboys did their first recordings on September 23–25, 1935, in Dallas. Session rosters from 1938 show both lead guitar and electric guitar in addition to guitar and steel guitar in the Texas Playboys recordings. About this time, Wills purchased and performed with an antique Guadagnini violin. The instrument, worth an estimated $7,600 at the time, was purchased for only $1,600. In 1940, "New San Antonio Rose" sold a million records and became the signature song of the Texas Playboys. The "front line" of Wills' orchestra consisted of either fiddles or guitars after 1944.