Bob Wills is kind of a folkloric figure in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wills and his band were based out of Tulsa for several years in the 1930s and, even as they did tour around the country, they made Cain’s Ballroom, still a venerable and beloved live music venue in Tulsa, their headquarters. I feel like Wills has been somewhat forgotten to history as far as the mainstream music fan goes and that’s really a shame. He was a pioneer in the area of what is now known as “Western Swing.” He was a band-leader essentially of a band that contained both fiddles and saxophones, trumpet solos and steel guitar riffs. They performed old folk classics and blues and jazz numbers that were new at the time, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and their ilk. And, a fact that kept Wills off the Grand Ole Opry for years, they had a drummer who kept up a steady half-time beat and occasionally even got to rip off a crazy solo. And through it all, Wills couldn’t contain his exuberance, bursting into the music with witty asides or maybe just a heart-felt “yee-haw.” I’ve heard some of their early tracks from the late twenties and early thirties and I felt the sound quality wasn’t ever good enough for me to really get what made the band so beloved across the country at that time.
But in the mid-1940s, during a period when Wills’ concerts were outselling Benny Goodman, they recorded over 350 songs for the Tiffany Music Company; the plan was for these songs to go out to radio stations across the nation as what were known as transcriptions – it was kind of the radio version of when a television show becomes syndicated. A lot of those songs were just lost or set in vaults until a revival of interest in Wills lead to a series of records dedicated to putting the best of those recordings back out into the world. This is, obviously, the first of those records and if I failed to connect with those early recordings from the thirties, I had no such problems here. This is hopped up, balls to the walls party music with a beat that just won’t stop; Wills would later claim to have been playing rock and roll for years before it had a name and while this isn’t exactly rock and roll, you get why he made the statement. There’s a raucous energy here with the old folk songs like Dinah and Sweet Jennie Lee taken about twice as fast as you’ve ever heard them before. Cotton Patch Blues is a real stand-out with singer Tommy Duncan at times struggling to hold in his laughter as Wills keeps inserting snarky asides about the lyrics. Lone Star Rag, Nobody’s Sweetheart and the absolutely ridiculous What’s the Matter With the Mill are all standouts, but then every track on this album is great; the album clocks in at not much over thirty minutes, and it blows by with every track at manic speed. And then, just to remind you that Bob Wills never was much for genre barriers, he wraps up with a cover of Count Basie’s Jumpin’ at the Woodside. The band just cooks; Tiny Moore on electric ukulele (!), Herb Remington on steel guitar, Eldon Shamblin on electric guitar (in 1946!!) and Millard Kelso on the piano are all on top of their game on this CD. I mean, this is the best band in country music, period, and their facility with a number of genres is outstanding; Millard Kelso really never played a country piano – he was always doing swing or jazz. Anyway, this is just flat-out party music that’ll make you want to get up and dance, music that refuses to settle down into any rote genre cliches. It’s exuberant and fun and good-natured. I honestly can’t imagine someone not liking this. 4 stars.
tl;dr – archive recordings find pioneer of Western Swing with his band at the height of its power mashing up blues, country, folk and jazz into an intoxicating burst of pure party music. 4 stars.