Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys: Blue Prelude - 1950's

Upload on YouTube by saucerblock "Joe "Frank" Ferguson on lead vocal, he switched off playing bass and singing with Joe Andrews, no idle time on the Bob Wills bandstand you know/Outstanding Bobby Koefer, Skeeter Elkin, Cotton Whittington " -saucerblock After leaving the Army in 1943 Bob Wills moved to Hollywood and began to reorganize the Texas Playboys. He became an enormous draw in Los Angeles, where many of his Texas, Oklahoma and regional fans had also relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs. Monday through Friday the band broadcast from 12:01 to 1:00 p.m. over KMTR-AM (now KLAC) in LA. They also played regularly every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego. He commanded enormous fees playing dances there, and began to make more creative use of electric guitars to replace the big horn sections the Tulsa band had boasted. For a very brief period in 1944 the Wills band included twenty-three members, and around mid year he toured Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with a 21-pieces in the orchestra. Billboard reported that Wills outgrossed Harry James, Benny Goodman, "both Dorsies, et al." at Civic Auditorium in Oakland, California, in January 1944. While on his first cross-country tour, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and defied that conservative show's ban on using drums of any sort. In 1945 Wills' dances were outdrawing those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and he had moved to Fresno, California. Then in 1947 he opened the Wills Point nightclub in Sacramento and continued touring the Southwest and Pacific Northwest from Texas to Washington State. While based in Sacramento his radio broadcasts over 50,000 watt KFBK were heard all over the West.Famous swing orchestras in California realized that many of their followers were leaving to dance to Bob Will's Western swing. Because he was in such demand, some places booked Wills any time he had an opening, regardless of how undesirable the date. The manager of a popular auditorium in the LA Basin town of Wilmington, California: "Although Monday night dancing is frankly an experiment it was the only night of the week on which this outstanding band could be secured." During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys show recorded at the Fairmont Hotel. Many of these recordings survive today as the Tiffany Transcriptions, and are available on CD. They show off the band's strengths significantly, in part because the group was not confined to the three-minute limits of 78 RPM discs. They featured superb instrumental work from fiddlers Joe Holley and Louis Tierney, steel guitarists Noel Boggs and Herb Remington, guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Junior Barnard and electric mandolinist-fiddler Tiny Moore. The original recorded version of Wills' "Faded Love", appeared on the Tiffanys as a fairly swinging instrumental unlike the ballad it became when lyrics were added in 1950. Wills and the Texas Playboys played dances throughout the West to more than 10,000 people every week. They held dance attendance records at Jantzen Beach in Portland, Oregon; Santa Monica, California, and at the Oakland (California) Auditorium, where they drew 19,000 people in two nights. Wills also broke an attendance record of 2,100 previously held by Jan Garbner at the Armory in Klamath Falls, Oregon, by attracting 2,514 dancers. Appearances at the Bostonia Ballroom in San Diego continued throughout the 1950s. Still a binge drinker, Wills became increasingly unreliable in the late 1940s, causing a rift with Tommy Duncan (who bore the brunt of audience anger when Wills's binges prevented him from appearing). It ended when he fired Duncan in the fall of 1948. Having lived a lavish lifestyle in California, in 1949 Wills moved back to Oklahoma City, then went back on the road to maintain his payroll and Wills Point. An even more disastrous business decision came when he opened a second club, the Bob Wills Ranch House in Dallas, Texas. Turning the club over to managers later revealed to be dishonest left Wills in desperate financial straits with heavy debts to the IRS for back taxes that caused him to sell many assets including, mistakenly, the rights to "New San Antonio Rose." It wrecked him financially. In 1950 Wills had two Top Ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love". After 1950 radio stations began to increasingly specialize in one form or another of commercially popular music. Wills did not fit into the popular Nashville country and western stations, although he was usually labeled "country and western". Neither did he fit into the pop or middle of the road stations, although he played a good deal of pop music, and was not accepted in the pop music world. He continued to tour and record through the 1950s into the early 1960s, despite the fact that Western swing's popularity, even in the Southwest, had greatly diminished. Bob could draw "a thousand people on Monday night between 1950 and 1952, but he could not do that by 1956. Entertainment habits had changed." On Wills' return to Tulsa late in 1957, Jim Downing of the Tulsa Tribune wrote an article headlined "Wills Brothers Together Again — Bob Back with Heavy Beat". The article quotes Wills as saying, "Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!...We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important." Even a 1958 return to KVOO, where his younger brother Johnnie Lee Wills had maintained the family's presence, did not produce the success he hoped for. He appeared twice on ABC-TV's Jubilee USA and kept the band on the road into the 1960s.