Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys:
For the Last Time at 50

Leon McAuliffe (steel guitar), Eldon Shamblin (guitar), Smokey Dacus (drums), and Al Stricklin (piano) were all part of the original Tulsa band in the 1930s, with Eldon rejoining the band (occasionally managing the band) at times during the 1940s and 1950s. They were joined by Texas Playboys from later eras: Fiddlers Johnny Gimble and Keith Coleman became Texas Playboys in 1949; Gimble also played electric mandolin on the session. Vocalist Leon Rausch joined as a vocalist and guitarist in 1958 and led the Texas Playboys after Bob retired as a bandleader in 1964. Tommy Allsup produced the Bob Wills-Tommy Duncan reunion albums for Liberty Records in the early 1960s and played rhythm guitar and bass on a few of them; he produced and played bass on this session. Bob Moore, who played bass on Bob Wills's late-'60s Nashville recording sessions for Kapp Records, is also listed among the session personnel.

Four special guests played important roles in the recording: Fellow bandleader and fiddler Hoyle Nix, his son, vocalist and drummer Jody Nix, historian Charles Townsend, and country music superstar Merle Haggard. Townsend, a professor of history at West Texas State University, had been working closely for about three years with Bob and Betty Wills in preparation for his biography, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills. Townsend served as the announcer for the recording of the Texas Playboys Theme, proclaiming "The Texas Playboys are on the air!" He also wrote the liner notes for the album.

Merle Haggard deserves a great deal of credit for making the album possible. (I wrote at length about his important role in the Western Swing revival in my 2016 tribute to Merle Haggard.) In 1970, Haggard used his early fame and clout with his record label to pay tribute to three of his musical influences -- Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, and gospel music -- in a series of albums:

• Same Train, a Different Time: Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers (1969)
• A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills) (1970)
• The Land of Many Churches (1971)

Haggard's Bob Wills tribute album featured six of Wills's sidemen, mostly from the California-based Texas Playboys lineup that Haggard heard as a child in the 1940s -- guitarist Eldon Shamblin, mandolinist Tiny Moore, fiddlers Joe Holley and Johnny Gimble, and trumpeter Alex Brashear -- but also Johnnie Lee Wills, who played tenor banjo in his brother's 1930s Tulsa band (along with Shamblin) before becoming a bandleader in his own right.

In 1971, Merle Haggard facilitated a reunion between Bob Wills and an even larger number of Texas Playboys alumni at the housewarming party for Haggard's new Bakersfield home. Haggard served as MC, sang, and played fiddle with his childhood musical heroes. The session was recorded for Capitol Records but never released until its inclusion on Faded Love, Bear Family Records comprehensive 14-disc collection of Bob Wills commercial recordings from 1947 (when Wills left Columbia Records for MGM) until 1973.

Haggard had a performance in Chicago that prevented him from joining the first day of the 1973 Dallas session:

He had appeared in Chicago the night before and made the drive to Dallas just to record with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. In mid-October, when Haggard learned about the session, he had gone to Wills's motel room in Nashville and asked if he could be included. Someone in the room joked, "Why, this is only union scale, Merle. You don't want in this." Haggard wanted in the session, and money had nothing to do with it. In fact, he was paid the same as every other musician there that day. For him, the day was the fulfillment of a boyhood dream.'* He was vocalist on three selections and joined Coleman and Gimble on a few occasions, proudly playing one of Bob's old violins in the fiddle ensemble. As Haggard sang the "Texas Playboy Theme," which included the line "We're the Texas Playboys from the Lone Star State," it occurred to me, standing beside him, that Merle Haggard should in fact have been a Texas Playboy, because he had always been one at heart. Betty Wills summed it up best: "Merle wanted to be a Texas Playboy for a day." (San Antonio Rose, p. 319)

At 21, Jody Nix was the youngest musician in the studio that day. He sang and played drums for his father's band, Hoyle Nix and the West Texas Cowboys, based at the Stampede dance hall in Big Spring, Texas. Jody Nix presides over the Stampede to this day as leader of the Texas Cowboys and tours other dance halls around the region; I've seen them at Anhalt Hall near New Braunfels and at the Texas Cowboy Reunion in Stamford.

Jody Nix wrote a detailed, heartwarming memoir of the For the Last Time session, including the gathering and jam session at the Wills home on December 2. Wills gave him the opportunity to sing three of the newer songs on the album: "When You Leave Amarillo," "My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You", and "I Can't Go On this Way." He includes many little details and snippets of conversations to paint a vivid picture, trying to preserve every memory of the historic occasion. It begins:

I first heard about this recording session in the middle of September of 1973 or somewhere there about. My Daddy, Hoyle Nix told me one Saturday night at the Stampede, that there was going to be a recording with Bob Wills, and that Johnny Gimble was going to be there too. At that time I didn't know who all would be there. As time went on and it got closer, I did know. I felt very honored to be a part of this, I didn't know what all I was to do...but I knew I was going to record with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and I was only 21 years old.

As time drew closer, it all was becoming a reality. The morning that we left which was Sunday December 2nd, 1973, Daddy, my Stepmother, my little sister Robin and me took off on a historical trip, never to be again. I drove my own pickup, I had my drums, I furnished them for the session, and my clothes, and the family was in Daddy's car, we left for Ft. Worth, Texas. We went to Bob Wills' home for a jam session, a meal, a get together, a rehearsal, a homecoming of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in preparation of an album which was to make musical history, and I was part of it. We arrived around noon or soon after, Al Stricklin and Keith Coleman were already there. It was great to see them, we visited for a short while. I remember in the conversation that Al Stricklin said "We are here because of the old Master". We talked to Betty, and then we went in to see Bob. He was lying in bed..very alert, and seemed so happy that all this was taking place. I took his hand and talked to him, I had known him personally since I was 4 years old, had played drums with him countless times, and worked many dances with him.

But now it was different, I just wasn't the drummer, he said to me and I remember it as if it were yesterday and I quote "You see what I wanted don't you?" He meant, that he wanted me to be featured on this album vocally, as a singer, a chance to be heard by other people and it was him that gave me that chance, it was him that I was singing for. It was a great feeling, an honor, and a humbling experience. Soon after the visit, other Texas Playboys, and family members started arriving. Johnny Gimble, Tommy Allsup the producer and long time friend of Bob, Charles Townsend, the author of the book San Antonio Rose, Smokey Dacus, Eldon Shamblin, Leon McAuliffe, Leon Rausch, Al Stricklin and Keith Coleman......all former and famous Texas Playboys. The jam session had started, Betty rolled Bob into the living room, there were drums, fiddles, steel, guitars, all of it was there, and he was in the middle of it again......we rehearsed, played for fun, ran over songs for the session.

Hoyle Nix played a key role on the album for his friend and fellow bandleader. Bob Wills lost his ability to fiddle with his 1969 stroke; Hoyle played two fast fiddle tunes on this album: "Coming down from Denver" and "Crippled Turkey." He sang two of his own compositions: "Big Ball's in Cowtown" and "She's Really Gone." Hoyle Nix also supplied Bob's famous hollers on the "Texas Playboy Theme," "San Antonio Rose," and the other tracks recorded after Bob left on the first day and the entire second day of the session, from which Bob was absent. You can hear Hoyle's hollers starting on the instrumental "Silver Lake Blues."

Bob's role was bandleader. With microphone in hand, he would be able to interject his trademark hollers, reacting to the music, calling out sidemen as they took solos. His voice can be heard on the first six tracks of the session, most prominently in "When You Leave Amarillo," where he reacts to the final lyrics by saying, "Cut out the lights." The last instance is his reaction to Leon McAuliffe's chorus on "My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You." But his voice was weak, and Townsend records (p.319), "Betty said Bob was feeling well as she drove him back to Fort Worth, but he was disappointed at not being able to speak and holler more distinctly while he was recording."

Prolific songsmith Cindy Walker had written a new tune for the session, "What Makes Bob Holler." I've not read this anywhere, but it seems to me the idea was to feature Bob Wills with some spoken lyrics, since he could no longer play fiddle and didn't have the energy to sing. In the end, while you can hear a few of Bob's hollers on the tune, the spoken lyrics were overdubbed by Hoyle Nix.

Twenty-seven songs are on the session tapes, but only 24 would fit on the double album. The three that were unissued, all instrumentals, are on Disc 12 of the aforementioned Bear Family Faded Love collection. While each has technical flaws, they're still worth hearing if you can find them.

• "La Golondrina": This recording is actually a run-through of the traditional waltz tune, a favorite of Bob's. There are bits of band chatter throughout: At one point Leon McAuliffe asks, "Is that minor?" and Eldon Shamblin replies, "That's minor." At the very end, they're discussing whether the tempo was OK. (The Original Texas Playboys recorded "La Golondrina" for the soundtrack of Places in the Heart
• "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star": This is a fiddle tune that has nothing to do with the Mozart tune for the nursery rhyme. This recording is actually of the band listening to a playback of them playing the tune. It begins with some chatter, a mention of blues guitarist Charlie Christian, and then Johnny Gimble and Keith Coleman practicing the duet section of "Bob Wills Special," and then the playback starts. The band comments and laughs throughout. At one point, Eldon mock-complains, "I get a break, and ol' Leon covers me up!" On his solo chorus, Johnny Gimble scats along with his fiddle.
• "Bob Wills Special": A slow, bluesy number, with each band member taking a chorus, and some twin fiddle and twin guitar, spoiled only by some wheezy laughter in the middle. After a brief pause at end of the song, the studio breaks out in applause and cheers.

Jon McConal of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote a lengthy account of the recording session that was published in the December 6, 1973, edition. He notes that the album was to be titled, "What Makes Bob Holler?" Smokey Dacus, Al Stricklin, Leon McAuliffe, Bob's wife Betty Wills, and friend Don Dennis from Brady, Oklahoma spoke to McConal about their recollections of Wills. About Bob's participation in the session, McConal wrote:

Wills was concentrating on the music. His right side is paralyzed. So he held the microphone in his left hand.

He would open his mouth at different places during each number. The music drowned his sounds out, until the play-backs. Then the old Wills trademark came out.

Midway through that first day, Betty Wills saw that Bob was tired and ready to go home. On their way out of the studio, they had a brief encounter with the young, new western swing band Asleep at the Wheel. Bandleader Ray Benson remembers going to the studio to meet Bob, arriving just as the Willses were leaving, and Bob was too tired to say anything. Benson had hoped to speak with Bob later, but later never came. The conversation he never had with Bob Wills became the inspiration and framework for Benson's biographical musical, A Ride with Bob, which premiered at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center in November 2005, in the centennial year of Bob Wills's birth.

Merle Haggard spoke to McConal of his own frustration with fate:

For 39 years this has been my dream... to record with Bob Wills. And, it was just a foot away, and now it's still a dream....

He's a living legend. A man who paved the way for people like me. I've got a lot of love and admiration for this man.

Around the same time as his final recording session, Columbia, the Texas Playboys first record label, issued a double album from their vaults: The Bob Wills Anthology, 24 tracks from 1935-1947. (Praguefrank has the track listing in his discography.) Bill McAllister reviewed the album for the December 8, 1973, Star-Telegram, noting Wills's hospitalization and the recording session earlier that week. His review spotlighted the variety of genres performed by the Texas Playboys:

The gamut of styles is amazing. Western? How about "Mexicali Rose" and "New San Antonio Rose." Dixieland? "Sittin' on Top of the World." Big band: "I Found a Dream." Blues: "Honey What You Gonna Do." Swing: "That's What I Like About the South." Folk: "Blue Yodel No. 1." Early rock: "Corrine Corrina."

Wills, always an innovator, made full use of horns, reeds, drums and any other instrument he thought might add to the Playboys' sound. They're all in full evidence here, as is the work of the many now-almost-legendary sidemen he used: Leon McAuliffe, Eldon Shamblin, Al Stricklin, Johnny Gimble, "Smokey" Dacus, vocalist Tommy Duncan and a host of others.

(Many of the former Playboys were in Dallas earlier this week to record with Wills, who was confined to a wheelchair but still managed to take charge of the United Artists session, the first musical work he had done since suffering a stroke in 1969. Then Wednesday, he had another stroke and was forced back into the hospital.)

The album was released by United Artists in May 1974 to great reviews. Allan Gilbert, writing in the Northwest Arkansas Times, remembered listening to KVOO for the Texas Playboys' noon broadcasts with his University of Arkansas Sigma Nu brothers and the dance the band played for the fraternity in the fall of 1940.

Great as one's memories are of the old days -- Wingy Manone, for instance, and Bunny Berigan -- the lack of fidelity of old-time recording techniques makes most of what was cut before World War II seem thin, and somehow more hollow than the mind insists it should be.

Thus, the chance to play some "modern" Bob Wills music (recorded by the finest of electronic equipment less than a year ago) was a treat almost too marvelous for belief. There had to be a catch. What was it?

None as it turns out.... It is monstrously unlikely, of course, that a 12-member orchestra (plus Wills, who was in a wheelchair and seriously ill at the time) that hadn't been together for literally years could, on short notice, assemble and pick up right where it left off. But hearing is the proof of the project. This is the original Wills' western swing that still sets the pattern and style for western and country music from Austin to Nashville. It is clean, high-spirited and authentic....

Some old favorites (Take Me Back to Tulsa, Steel Guitar Rag, etc.) may be missing from the program, but the spontaneity, heat and enthusiasm, and the wonderful "presence" of the new recording make the tunes pale in comparison to the marvel of hearing that wonderful old sound again.

Patrick Carr, reviewing For the Last Time for the Register and Tribune Syndicate:

Unlike so many profit-oriented efforts to reunite the Great Bands of Yesteryear (from the Beatles on down), the albums stand out as an eminently respectable piece of work.

Wills' music, from "San Antonio Rose" on, has enough good feeling, dateless appeal, and basic substance to make it a very attractive proposition for someone like Haggard (or, for that matter, Willie Nelson or Asleep at the Wheel, a bunch of young Californians who reproduce Western Swing virtually note-for-note) to spend some considerable effort on bringing it back to life.

It really is ideal music for today: danceable, "country" melodic, and blues soulful. The answer to doubts on that question can be found any time Willie Nelson gets up on a stage and plays "Bubbles in My Beer" to a bunch of kids who only knew Bob Wills as someone their parents might have mentioned once or twice.

It's hard to pick a favorite song. "Blue Bonnet Lane," a Cindy Walker composition from the 1940s, was the song Bob Wills chose when Leon McAuliffe asked him, "Jim Rob, what do you want to record first?" It kicks off with a wistful fiddle duet that matches the lyric and sets the tone for the whole album. "Goin' Away Party" was another new Cindy Walker song written for the album, and it captures the mood with Walker's characteristic eloquence: "I'm throwin' a goin'-away party, a party for a dream of mine.... Don't worry. It won't be a loud party. Dreams don't make noise when they die." "Silver Lake Blues," which kicks off as a Coleman/Gimble fiddle duet, just sounds like motoring down the open road under beautiful blue skies. "Twin Guitar Special," written by and featuring Leon McAuliffe and Eldon Shamblin, is taken at an easy swinging pace. Smokey Dacus's drumbeat and Al Stricklin's piano don't let the proceedings drag at any point.

Although you can stream the album in various ways, For the Last Time, still available as a CD, is worth owning, especially as it comes with a 24-page booklet, a reformatted version of the original liner notes, featuring Charles Townsend's historical essay, historical photos of Wills, and Townsend's eyewitness account of the recording session. (I'd love to see it re-released at some point with the unissued songs as bonus tracks.)

MORE:

In 2015, producer Tommy Allsup gave Robert Huston of Arkansas's Western Swing Rules band a glimpse of the master tapes of the "For the Last Time" sessions, and he has a few photos. Huston says that Allsup was going to be donating them to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in Muskogee. The tape labels show 16-track Dolby, 15 IPS.

In 1993, Asleep at the Wheel leader Ray Benson recalled his brief encounter with Bob Wills, in an Austin American-Statesman story about the release of the band's first Bob Wills tribute album (jump page here).

RELATED: Joe Weed's essay tracing the deep musical roots of "Faded Love," back to "Darling Nellie Gray" and "Maggie May."