Bob Wills: The King of Western Swing

Today is the birthday of Bob Wills. He would be 122 today.

James Robert Wills was born on March 6, 1905, on a farm near Kosse in Limestone County, Texas. His father played fiddle. His grandfather played fiddle. The fiddle was already in the blood. He grew up dancing to it at breakdown dances across Central Texas, where the music blended whatever was available — cowboy songs, blues from the cotton fields, Mexican ranchera drifting up from the south. Wills heard all of it and kept it.

The Music Nobody Had a Name For Yet

By the 1930s, Wills had formed the Texas Playboys and was broadcasting on KVOO radio out of Tulsa. Then came “San Antonio Rose” in 1940 — a million-selling record that crossed every genre line. Western Swing, people called it. It was country and jazz and blues and pop all playing at once, with a horn section and a full rhythm band behind the fiddle. Dance floors across Texas and the Southwest filled every weekend. Wills moved back to Texas after the war and kept recording until a stroke stopped him in 1973. He died May 13, 1975. The Texas Playboys played on. Learn more at the Texas State Historical Association.