Bob Wills Tribute-Disc recaptures spirit of Western Swing
No such thing, of course. The CD-album is entirely new and of digital-audio pedigree. Its 21 selections sound for the most part, though, as if they might date from Bob Wills’ long heyday of the Depression-into-postwar years of the last century. The evocative fiddling and largely understated rhythm-keeping, along with the Dixieland-into-swing horn-section arrangements, recapture the styles of microphone placement and harmonic notation that once defined the idiom with which Wills (1905-75) had helped to trigger upheavals in country music, jazz and popular music as a class.
It all calls to mind a recent advertising-campaign slogan from Fort
Worth’s Justin Boot Co.: “Old is the New New.” This
old-is-new album’s arrival in the year following Wills’ 100th
birthday merely bespeaks a dedication to |  |
Somebody once said that Wills towers over the Fort Worth-bred Western-swing scene like an oil derrick over the Plains.
Which is true enough. The simile scarcely begins, however, to account for Wills’ greater bearing upon popular music as a class, or for his standing as an example of how music can liberate its practitioners from what might otherwise be a life of tedium and drudgery.
When my Uncle Grady Wilson informed Wills of my enrollment at age 7 in the city’s Arts Conservatory, Wills told me: “Now, boy — there’s your ticket! … just look at me and my band — ain’t none of us, hardly, ever went to no highfalutin’ conservatory, and still we’ve turned what music we know into somethin’ good for us.” He paused, then added: “Sure enough, it spared me from a lifetime of choppin’ cotton and plowin’ at the south end of a northbound mule!”
I know from experience how difficult it is to recapture that distinctive Wills sound and attitude, having worked since the 1970s on studio sessions with such kindred acts as Amarillo’s New Sons of the West with latter-day Wills drummer Jimmy Benjamin, Dallas-Fort Worth’s Light Crust Doughboys, and the surviving members of Wills’ Original Texas Playboys during their 1980s affiliation with Navasota-based Delta
Records. Ray Benson’s Asleep at the Wheel and Alvin Crow’s Pleasant Valley Boys
— the bands most directly responsible for restoring a youth-market cachet to Western swing at a time when the music might have faded into the mists of nostalgia —
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have made the process look deceptively easy. (Wills’ own For the Last Time album, which Allsup produced in Dallas not long before the bandleader’s death, is a transcendent example of music’s staying power. Allsup also produced the earlier efforts of Asleep at the Wheel.) In all the vocalizing talents assembled on Tribute, Allsup taps a common interest in recapturing both the spirit and the letter of Wills, with mixed traditionalism and innovation. The Johnny Rodriguez-Lynn Anderson duet on “Faded Love,” for example, segues effortlessly into a Spanish-language lyric, ideal for the inherent sense of longing. George Jones’ reading of “Right or Wrong” is just right and never wrong. The inclusion of “Snap Your Fingers,” |
a Grady Martin–Alex Zanetis composition that charted twice as a
rhythm-and-blues hit (for Joe Henderson and Barbara Lewis)
during the early 1960s, is particularly enlightening as to the
adventurous nature that motivated Wills, early and late. Wills
had adapted the ballad into countrified swing in 1963; Allsup
follows that lead here with a back-and-forth duet between Terry
Bradshaw and Rachel Bradshaw. The present arrangement of Andy
Razaf’s Depression-era exercise in rhyming couplets, “That’s
What I Like about the South,” with vocalist Chance from the
upstart-country MuzikMafia coalition, hints at an infusion of
hip-hop — and there’s no telling as to what new directions Bob
Wills might have taken, had he belonged to some later
generation. Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net |
