A bandleader, fiddler, singer, and songwriter, Bob Wills is the most famous exponent of the popular musical amalgam now known as western swing, which synthesized ragtime, traditional fiddling, New Orleans jazz, blues, Mexican songs, and big band swing. Wills blended it all into a swinging dance music that was wildly popular in the Southwest and on the West Coast from the 1930s into the 1950s. His greatest success was with his Texas Playboys band while based at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, between 1934 and 1942. Today his compositions, such as “Faded Love,” “Maiden’s Prayer,” “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” and “San Antonio Rose,” are considered standards of country and pop music. James Robert Wills grew up in a musical family of fiddle players and in an area famous for African-American music that produced Scott Joplin, Victoria Spivey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. From his family, young Jim Rob (as he was then called) learned to play frontier fiddle music; his father had defeated prominent country fiddler Eck Robertson in fiddle contests on more than one occasion. At age ten young Bob Wills played fiddle for his first ranch dance. From African-American neighbors and migrant workers, he learned blues and jazz, which enthralled him. In his late teens, he once rode fifty miles on horseback to see the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith.
Wills left the family farm at age seventeen and drifted from one job to another across Texas, working in construction and selling insurance in separate stops in Amarillo, preaching in Knox County, barbering in Roy, New Mexico, and in Turkey, Texas; laboring on several farms in various parts of the Lone Star State; and playing ranch house dances and traveling medicine shows whenever possible.
In November 1929, after joining forces with guitarist Herman Arnspiger, he made his first recordings for the Brunswick label, “Gulf Coast Blues” and “Wills Breakdown;” they were never issued and are now presumed lost. In 1930, singer Milton Brown and his guitar-playing brother Derwood joined Wills and Arnspiger. In due course they became the Aladdin Lamp Company’s “Aladdin Laddies” on WBAP-Fort Worth, and tenor banjoist Sleepy Johnson joined them for dances at the local Crystal Springs pavilion. The five-piece stringband produced the first glimmerings of what would be called western swing a decade later. In late 1930, Burrus Mill executive W. Lee O’Daniel hired the band to promote the mill’s Light Crust Flour on radio, first at tiny KFJZ and soon at WBAP, where the newly renamed Light Crust Doughboys became a favorite.