Stay all night, stay a little longer
Dance all night, dance a little longer
Pull off your coat, throw it in the corner
Don’t see why you don’t stay a little longer
Well, I’m wrapping up my deep-dive into the music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys with this, the eleventh album I’ve listened to, and by this time, there’s nothing really surprising about when I say that I loved this album. It’s a one disc, twenty track CD that attempts to be a broad introduction to Wills, I guess; it covers some of the same ground that the Tiffany Transcriptions series covered, so a few songs that I’ve already heard from that series show up here, but who cares? They’re still great. I’ve given nine out of the ten prior Wills albums four stars and this one’s going to get that many too. This blend of Western Swing is just intoxicatingly fun, unflappably good-natured and brilliantly performed. There’s just a vibe to this music that I love, a good-time party vibe that has no interest in being pretentious or gloomy or serious. It’s just pure fun. I should point out that you shouldn’t confuse this album with the two disc release called The Essential Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys; it’s got forty songs on it, but the sound quality is far inferior to this album and The Tiffany Transcriptions. I failed to connect with that album when I listened to tracks from it before because the sound quality was so poor. As to this one, the sound quality is pretty well up to the quality of the Tiffany Transcription set, so very good indeed. In terms of the overall songs, I’d put this one up high in my rankings, probably behind only vols 1, 2, 3 & 10 of the Transcriptions. This journey with Bob Wills has been profoundly fun and invigorating. I can’t recommend this music highly enough. 4 stars.
tl;dr – single disc, twenty song album is an excellent brief survey of Wills, if you’re afraid to plunge into the ten disc Tiffany Transcriptions; either way, acquaint yourself with this music. 4 stars.