In Praise of BOB WILLS

I've been listening to the Tiffany Transcriptions set a lot today. I picked up the whole thing at once and so I'm just getting to know the individual volumes little by little, but this is some of the most infectious stuff I have ever heard. I'm not the hugest western swing fan -- my favorite type of early country music is string band music -- but this stuff is really convincing me I need to delve deeper than the compilation LPs I have (all 8 volumes of the Old-Timey label's Western Swing series are solid all the way thru.)

UNDENIABLE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU3ce07nL-4

still the king

otm

ian, might i recommend ray price's amazing early '60s bob wills tribute album, san antonio rose?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ-TKmUKusA

i love bob wills! how about a little community singing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l7rLA9Jm1I

jinx

Moon in all your splendor, known only to my heart,
Bring back my rose, rose of San Antone.
Lips so sweet and tender, like petals falling apart,
Speak once again of my love, my own

one of my favorite experiences was during a marathon 44 hr drive from L.A. to chicago and stopping at that famous 72 oz steakhouse in amarillo and my wife and i being serenaded tableside by a quartet of old gents playing this tune.

that rulez.
i will check out that ray price record! ray price is kind of one of my blind spots -- i know a lot of ppl revere him as one of the best honky tonk country singers, but the only records i ever come across of his are smoothed out over-produced prettiness.

yeah after a certain point things get a little slick w/price, not my cup o tea either. this one is pretty sweet though, and can be found on the cheap iirc.

Have San Antonio Rose on 78 and love it! Sounds great on the victrola.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/take-me-back-to-tulsa-proper-box-mw0000218699

solid gold

Tommy's vocal on "Right or Wrong" is as hardcore as it gets. We gave up a lot when we quit the pain yodel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxHu_71sU1E

Right?

tiffany transcriptions have a serious claim to be the most infectiously fun live recordings of popular music in the 20th century. i got them from rhino in about... 1997? this was in the days when massive box sets were still a novelty. gave them to my dad (who grew up in west texas) for his birthday and blew his mind.

"up the lazy river", "milk cow blues"

etc etc

I have the best of the Tiffany Transcriptions cos I found it cheap in a sale that I think had several other volumes in. Wouldn't have known where to start on the individual volumes. Glad I got what I did though.
Have quite a bit of it on a walkman that I play at random so tracks from it turn up juxtaposed with very different things, Sonic Youth & such like.

Also got some Milton Brown & his Musical Brownies on that player. Also great stuff.

"i bet you think that's two fiddles playin....... well, it is"

Listening to Bob making Tommy Duncan crack up never fails to put a smile on my face.

the tiffany transcriptions are his best but the classic stuff he re-recorded for decca in the 50s is great too.

roooooly poly, daddy's little fatty

otm

http://www.premierguitar.com/ext/resources/archives/6b9b87a7-7f96-4e4a-919e-5c59bb9577a0.JPG

the hot rock

fantastic page here:

https://birthplaceofwesternswing.com/pioneers.html

the tiffany transcriptions remain for me this inexhaustible fount, like just a fuckin codex of popular american music. i think of daddino’s “bomb at the middle of the century” spotify playlist, comprised entirely of songs from 1950. the TT are a little earlier than this but they feel similar in the way they reach back to the 19th century, forward into the rock n roll that hadn’t been invented yet, sideways into hot jazz, into blues, and into the boys’ own childhood, soaking it all up. just endless. and when you think maybe the sound recordist might not have been arranged, or paid, and these recordings might not have happened… best not to think about it.

yeah, may need to get some more of the set than that best of I have. Can see that crossroads thing with a number of things. Was thinking about the ethnic folky roots of r'n'r earlier thsi week. Like picking up the Proper Farewell To Ireland set in the early 00ies and hearing echoes of that Irish stuff and subsequently thinking they weren't the only ethnicity to feed into the sound.
That and the Hillbilly Boogie set I also got from Proper and thinking it sounds majorly like r'n'r without the amplification and does directly tie in with jazz roots as does Bill Monroe I think.
I have a Proper Bob Wills too and one on Milton Brown seem to be doing that reissuing things coming out of copyright in a decent way. Not sure who else does as well I think if i have anything on JSP it's the Rembetika set Do They Have Hashish in Hell.

But yeah seems like Wills was pretty dashed fine archetypal an dfun things like that

lol i finally listened to the actual lyrics of “bring it on down to my house honey” and i have no idea how they allowed this stuff on the radio

bring it on down to my house honey, there ain’t nobody going but me
bring it on down to my house honey, i need your company
now i ain’t braggin but it’s understood
i don’t do nothin that i cain’t do good
bring it on down to my house honey, there ain’t nobody going but me

bring it on down to my house honey, there ain’t nobody going but me
bring it on down to my house honey, i need your company
now we ain’t good lookin and we don’t dress fine
the way we whip it is a hangin crime
bring it on down to my house honey, there ain’t nobody going but me

now that’s songwriting

So many bangers

Milton Brown was quite fun too.

sorry it's ain't nobody HOME but me. typing on my phone soz.

just endless good times.

play it junior

haha yes

and he could play it

This is my favourite, is it folk? is it swing? it it R&B?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP28DIewLMk

he eats everything from soup to hay!

one of the things that's struck me, learning some of these on guitar, and this is something you probably know about more than most people on this board CaAL, is how many of these tunes come from a pre-"country", pre-"folk", pre-R&B tradition of black minstrel music. the jangly strummy songbook stuff. once you layer in a fiddle, and once you layer in an electric guitar playing a blues riff, it becomes something quite different, but the bones of about half these numbers are straight up antebellum black pop music. thank god these guys never did black face ffs.

This is the most interesting book I've read about this particular musical genealogy, many contentious bits but nobody else covers it quite so thoroughly - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stomp-Swerve-American-Music-1843-1924/dp/155652496X

Allen Lowe’s books also tease these threads

Nice piece here
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/bring-it-on-down-to-my-house/

which references this episode of 500 songs
https://500songs.com/podcast/ida-red-by-bob-wills-and-his-texas-playboys/

which apparently mentions that Bob himself apparently worked as a blackface comedian in his pre-Playboys days

The white jazz guitarist Les Paul — of whom we’ll almost certainly be hearing more — used to tell a story. Paul was so amazed by Bob Wills’ music that in 1938 he travelled from Waukesha Wisconsin, where he was visiting his mother, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to hear Wills’ band play, after his mother made him listen to Bob Wills on the radio. Paul was himself a famous guitarist at the time, and he got drawn on stage to jam with the band.

And then, in an interval, a black man in the audience — presumably this must have been an integrated audience, which would have been *very* unusual in 1938 in Oklahoma, but this is how Les Paul told the story, and other parts of it check out so we should probably take his word for it absent better evidence — came up and asked for Les Paul’s autograph. He told Paul that he played guitar, and Paul said for the young man to show him what he could do. The young man did, and Paul said “Jesus, you *are* good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”

And he did — that was the first time that Les Paul met his friend Charlie Christian, shortly before Christian got the offer from Benny Goodman. Hanging out and jamming at a Bob Wills gig.